* 2010: this is amazing! You can get anything right away! And I don’t buy anything without checking Amazon reviews first
* 2015: it seems like Amazon is an unstoppable behemoth that might be doing harm in the world, but it’s just so easy to order stuff, so… sorry, world!
* today: the Amazon shopping experience is so filled with bullshit that it’s actually easier to buy from the producer’s website and pay shipping
I’m sure Amazon will be just fine but it seems like they’ll need to do something at some point.
Random example I bought a few weeks ago, a dive light:
Amazon, $80: https://smile.amazon.com/DL07-Flashlight-Underwater-Recharge...
Manufacturer, $55 (free shipping too): https://wurkkos.com/products/wurkkos-dl07-mulit-color-led-fl...
I still buy a lot of items from Amazon, but at this point I always check other sources for products >$50.
I have noticed a massive uptick in sponsored listings, which are rarely what I want. The utility of basic search is dramatically worse than it was a few years ago. Can anyone recommend an adblocking browser extension that kills off sponsored listings?
Amazon can DIAF as far as I'm concerned. I've made an "Anywhere but Amazon" pledge to myself, and order elsewhere even if it's somewhat more expensive.
From the manufacturer's standpoint, they pay 15% referal fee to Amazon for getting them the sale. They also have a 5% coupon. Taking both of those things into account, their revenue on the sale is ~$64 compared to the ~$54 on their site. But I'd wager they're not getting very many sales on their website.
[0] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/G5TUVJKZHU...
uBlock Origin works well.
Now it feels like wal-mart where price is all that matters and quality isn’t even a consideration.
So much stuff that is $2 cheaper but just garbage…
And the more expensive stuff just is priced more but still garbage.
Sometimes I feel like I have to buy two or three things from Amazon before I find one that isn’t terrible or counterfeit.
(Tries to think of an example...can't remember any because they don't stick in your memory, searches for Cellphone car holder in Amazon)
Like VICSEED, OQTIQ, HUMIXX, Loncaster, Lisen, Torras...They'll all be different after the first of the year.
Edited to add honorable mention: President Randy Handheld Mobile radio.
- bulk gum
- my favorite brand of cheese snack cracker
- bulk mints
- bar soap
- toilet paper
The other day I noticed that the search order wouldn't even change when I used the dropdown to change it from "featured" to "low to high". Someone actually broke the sort order of search results in a change, and didn't even notice it. Or maybe there's so many ads at the top of the result that the search order doesn't have an impact any more. But I literally could not find any instances of the item I was looking for that were purchasable at all.
It boggles my mind how short sighted the move to the cloud is. The outages are almost quarterly at this point, too!
This is where I'm at. I only order products from Amazon that are sold by Amazon. Pretty much any legit third party seller will have their own website I can order from.
I still read reviews on Amazon before ordering elsewhere, although they've banned me from leaving reviews and wiped all my past ones for no discernible reason. I guess I left a review on some product that had a lot of fake reviews and I got caught in the crossfire.
Why? I'm only adding more so it's not a one word response, but seriously, why are you still putting any credence whatsoever to Amazon reviews which is like scientifically proven to be gamed?
I hear this all the time but it’s rarely true for me.
I’ve always searched for alternate stores, promo codes, and other discounts before ordering from Amazon. Many manufacturers have their own web stores, but it’s really rare to find a total price (including shipping) that is actually cheaper than Amazon in my experience.
Many hot products have Minimum Advertised Pricing contracts that mean the sale price is identical across every website anyway, at which point it becomes a game of finding some place with a coupon code that is enough to offset the extra shipping costs of not using Amazon. Most of the time, it just doesn’t work out as cheaper than Amazon.
I think people underestimate just how expensive warehousing, handling orders, and shipping can be. Amazon has optimized logistics to the point that they can charge people a lot for it and still be cheaper than doing it yourself (up to a certain scale which few companies reach)
And it seems to be getting easier for companies to sell their own stuff. Most places seem to be using "Shopify" now? Fine with me. The integration is usually seamless and it has worked well every time I've used it.
I'm worried about Amazon over the next five years. Premium prices for counterfeit or subpar goods, and the data says Amazon is making more on sellers fees than AWS now, so it's going to be difficult for them to meaningfully fix it. Too many meetings like "we'll be ruined if we stop taking money from counterfeiters".
Now I search on amazon, then do my best to find it somewhere else for cheaper or about the same price - just the same way I do when I search for hotels on expedia or kayak, but always book direct.
Not helping AMZN either is the fact that it seems like they have pretty much given up on rapid shipping - especially where I live - two days (with prime) used to be standard - now It is more like 5-6 days for most things - even with prime. Seems a bit bait-and-switch on the supposed promise of two day shipping.
In the real-world, people love the product just as much. The only complaints I hear are about the working conditions.
Starting to see the sentiment seeping from the early adopters to the early majority
If you figure out what to buy somewhere else and then buy it on Amazon then the product is better than ever. If you vaguely search for what you want and buy the top few results you probably think the quality has gone downhill.
You shouldn't even have to do that and pay shipping. For the last 5 years at least I've had luck going to a more trusted vendor like Best Buy or Target which have comparable free shipping options. And a bonus is that I can go to the store and pick up the item same day if I want. Also Best Buy price matches Amazon, though it's rarely necessary because they all converge on the same prices now anyway.
Their e-commerce arm has a lot of competition on the horizon from Costco, Walmart, Bestbuy, Home Depot, and the 2 million shopify stores being run by mom and pops. All of those, aside from Walmart, you can mostly be sure you’re not getting ripped off and know what you’re buying up front.
Bezos based his business model on long term customer trust, and he’s not really there anymore. You see these magazine articles of him hanging out at pool parties with celebrities in his beach shorts and it makes you wonder where the priorities of the company are now.
For books I'll use bookshop.org, and for anything else I'll shop around for anywhere that isn't Amazon. I really don't care about next day or same day delivery; rarely do I require something so urgently that I can't wait a few days or a week or two.
Amazon itself is total trash these days, and it's getting steadily worse.
But every large business ultimately relies on cognitive dissonance and reality distortion fields to maintain their relevance. Amazon has been seemingly successful at keeping people buying into their sunk cost fallacy ("Prime"), so momentum wise I'm sure they'll be fine.
True - After Amazon search doesn't find what I want (it found it yesterday) I've recently taken to using DuckDuckGo site search to bypass Amazon's search issues. Then I bought the TV locally, not even in a big box store. Support your local electronics dealer.
A newcomer penetrates the market with a superior offer. Once it rises to power, it naturally must defend and fortify its position. No longer must the offer be superior, destroying and suffocating new newcomers is simply more effective and profitable.
I shop on NewEgg these days when I can because their power search is much better for the things it is actually implemented well for. For the things it isn't implemented well for you're not really any better off though.
P.S.: If anyone can direct me to a reliable brand for 3-6ft USB 3 A-to-A M-to-M and M-to-F cables that can actually handle SuperSpeed without dropping half the packets, I'd be obliged.
I'm not certain M-M is allowed under USB spec (someone else can chime in), which is why you might be having trouble finding that from reliable brands.
I also find B&H Photo surprisingly good for computer stuff.
I've stopped buying on Amazon for many things, using it mainly for repeat stuff I know that works, and I've been trying to find things at other big box stores like Best buy or Target, as you mention, or directly from the manufacturer. Amazon isn't really cheaper other than faster shipping for legitimate items from main brands anyway. In several cases, I've found Amazon to actually be more expensive for some items.
I'm usually good at finding the opt out link but had no luck with this. Surprised it's legal to be honest.
Actually whenever you go shopping know what you want before you go to Amazon. That helps.
Review-gaming will always be a problem for websites with high-enough traffic.
These days, Amazon is most useful to me just as a price ceiling. I go to brick-and-mortar stores and have them price-match Amazon if the online listing is cheaper.
I only look on Amazon when I'm purposefully looking for cheap Chinese merchandise. Like tea lights to put inside pumpkins or other holiday decorations. I shouldn't really be supporting junk products that won't last though.
The only trustworthy sites are those that don't accept advertiser money, like Consumer Reports.
I'd love to see this provision torpedo the "Amazon's Choice" labels.
According to Amazon, "Amazon's Choice highlights highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately".
I don't see anything that implies that this is coming from an independent or impartial source. It's right in the name itself that it is coming from Amazon.
It was the #1 rated product in its category, and that's when I stopped trusting anything about Amazon. I don't remember if it was also 'Amazon's Choice': seems to ring a bell, it may well have been: showing not that Amazon was intentionally pushing garbage, but that it was purely algorithmic. I don't think it's malice as much as wilful ignorance.
Let's say that I do an hour-long infomercial on a product and I try and make the infomercial look as much like content as I can. In fact, it's not just about the product. We talk about the news and weather as well. You watch 30 minutes of it and don't notice that at the end it says that it was sponsored. I clearly said it was sponsored. Just because you stopped watching before then isn't my fault, right?
John Oliver did a great segment on this on sponsored content on local news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIi_QS1tdFM
Google's search results used to use a different background color and borders to distinguish ads from organic results. Now they simply put "Ad" near the paid result. That makes it harder to detect what is an ad and what isn't an ad. I'm not saying that Google is being deceitful. However, they're certainly trying to make the fact that it's an ad less noticeable.
If I put photoshopped mockups of a product on a page and then note in the description that they're not actually photos of the product, is that deceitful? That's certainly getting closer to the line (and I'd say crossing it) given extra distance.
Amazon has made choices to make the "sponsored" tag less noticeable. It's a light gray and not bold so that it blends in against the background while your eye is drawn to the much larger 45% larger font-size and bold text next to it. Amazon could have chosen to make the "sponsored" tag larger, with better contrast, and bold. They made choices to make it less noticeable.
The FTC's guidelines are vague because "clear" is a vague term. If you're looking for it, it's definitely there. If you're just browsing products, do you miss it? In fact, if I search for "waffle iron", I see one large result at the top where the content stops half way through the page. My eyes then go down to the next result. The "sponsored" tag is way off on the right, half a page away from the result I was looking at. Frankly, if I weren't looking for it, I'd probably miss it.
Commercials are something that consumers instantly notice as a paid format and they discount the message to an extent. As the John Oliver segment points out, when sponsored content looks nearly identical to regular content, it carries a lot of weight. It's harder for you to filter it out. Amazon doesn't want you to look at sponsored results and think "ugh, an ad. Clearly this company isn't good enough on its own." They want it to seem like an organic result - even if you end up seeing the sponsored tag.
I actually think that Google Shopping is very different. Google Shopping presents me with a carousel of ads at the top. They're smaller and scroll to the right. It's a different format than the organic results. Once I've identified that, every time I use Google Shopping I can just skip those if I want. I might need to learn that format for Google Shopping, but they are clearly identifiable even without looking for the "Ads" text. Google Shopping even sets the ads apart from organic results with a horizontal line that clearly separates ad space from organic space. Amazon's sponsored results often have the same size/shape/format as their organic results with nothing distinguishing them beyond the "sponsored" label. Again, I'm not saying it's deceitful, but they certainly want it to be harder to distinguish their advertisements from organic content.
As I've pointed out, it's not just Amazon and even local news is falling prey to this. "Clearly" marking something as an ad leaves a lot of room for interpretation. When Terry Crews hawks Old Spice in a commercial, I know what's going on. It's an ad. When a local news show talks about a product, it's easy for it to feel genuine. When Google put ads in different colored boxes, it was easy to see that they were ads. They're still labeled as ads, but it's a lot more subtle and a lot easier to mistake for an organic result if you're just trying to do something quickly.
Is it deceitful? I don't think so. Is it less clear than Google Shopping? Yes. Are they hoping that it won't be as clear to people as it could be? Yes. They could make it more clear which results were sponsored by taking steps like giving them a different background color, by having the sponsored text as large as the neighboring text, bolded, and black rather than gray.
There are legitimate reasons to do this. My old employer used to produce non-misleading mockups in Photoshop to advertise their products, partly because they looked more appealing but also because some things (cables, screens) don't look right when you photograph them.
I don't think it is an Amazon quality thing. Just that Amazon can sell its ads more if they funnel more people into buying from ads than organic results.
Maybe the EU will do something about it, but of course, those changes will not make it to US consumers.
In fact, US companies are constantly mishandling our data with little to no repercussions.
I've started to just browse big box retailers now. They at least have a merchandising team dedicated to sourcing quality products.
Amazon always seem to have stock of the same thing in addition to multiple knock-offs and me-too versions. No surprises they get most of the business.
I don't want to know how many people accidentally under time pressure ended up buying the wrong thing, or parents not very familiar with a product accidentally buying the wrong present etc.
Generally, stores will offer a low priced option that they are willing to sell by keeping large quantities in stock, but on which their margin is very small. They'll make money by selling those in volume, and you won't get the hard sell for that. If they sense you walking away, they'll make the low-cost argument to at least get a product in your hands.
There will be the God-level products with enormous markups that only fools will buy. Nobody really tries to sell those, but they'll happily ring you up for the commission.
Then there is the sweet spot in the middle; the products that are moderately high priced that take a value-proposition to sell. You can rest assured these are the money-makers for salespeople.
Sadly, Amazon has found out that the three-fold approach is no longer worth it. They already deal in massive volumes, so there is no need to carry the name brands and make advertising pushes to sell those products. Instead, they focus on the low-end garbage and let the third party sellers go to war each with other for your purchase. The odd God-level-priced product still exists and they'll happily sell it to you, but you'd be a schmuck to buy it from Amazon.
From what I can see, the search page has the "Sponsored" note in the response (it isn't loaded via JS). Amazon's search page seems to be mostly server-side rendered. Even if I disable my cache and set my browser to throttle to "Slow 3G", the "Sponsored" renders immediately (the "i" image next to it takes a second to load, but loads well before the product images).
It's interesting looking at the HTML because the alt tags on the product image use the phrase "Sponsored Ad" while the visual presented is just "Sponsored".
I certainly understand the criticism that the "Sponsored" text is small (11px regular vs 16px bold) and a light gray rather than black, but it doesn't seem like they're being lazy loaded in a way that would make them appear after the user had already seen the content.
The FTC's guidance says:
> We understand that there is not any one specific method for clearly and prominently distinguishing advertising from natural search results, and that search engines may develop new methods for distinguishing advertising results. Any method may be used, so long as it is noticeable and understandable to consumers.
Honestly, I think this is mostly wrong. Maybe there isn't one way, but surely one could say that 3-4 very specific ways could be codified. Just saying "clearly and prominently" leaves so much room for companies to test which ways will hold up in court, but that consumers won't notice. For example, Amazon can say "it clearly says sponsored" while potentially knowing that putting small grey text next to large bold black text makes the mind ignore the small gray text. Likewise, the "sponsored" note comes after the picture - after the user has already developed an attachment to the product.
To use Twitter as an example, "Promoted" appears below the tweet so that when scrolling, I see the tweet, my mind starts engaging with the tweet, and by the time I continue scrolling to see the "Promoted" notation, it's already done. Even the words "promoted" or "sponsored" don't have the same connotation as "advertisement".
The FTC could easily codify things. 1) Creating a logo and specific text for advertisements - "$$ Advertisement $$". 2) Requiring it to be in the same upper-left placement for all ad blocks. 3) Requiring it to have the same size, contrast, and weight against the background as the most noticeable text in the ad. 4) Mandating a different background color from non-ads by 20% (for example, if the background is black rbg(0,0,0) then a background color of rbg(51,51,51) would work. Likewise, if the background were white rbg(255,255,255), an ad background of rbg(204,204,204) would work. (Someone with a better artistic background could certainly refine that rough guideline - to my eyes, even altering one of the three colors by 20% seems to create significant contrast so you might not need to move all three to still maintain a clearly demarcated background).
That would make it really easy for consumers to distinguish an ad. The problem is that while the FTC's guidance suggests using backgrounds and borders, they only require that it be "clear". That's nonsense. Maybe keep the requirement at "clear" for small companies, but make the requirement the codified version from anyone making over $X in revenue (if you're worried about stifling small companies).
If you don't specify how, companies will make it "clear" while making it as easy to ignore and hard to find as possible - so long as they can stand up in a courtroom and say "c'mon, it says "Ad" right there." If we mandated a specific logo/language, top-left placement, and background color distinction, we'd easily be able to distinguish ads from regular content. But that's the problem. They don't want that.
I remember when Google results looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/KAROEnQ.jpg. The yellow and pink background meant an ad. The right side has ads that are clearly ads since they have a blue background. They're all clearly distinct. Another example: https://i.imgur.com/1iO5wuv.png. All the ads are yellow. It's easy to skip over them and start looking at the first organic result. When ads have the same background color and no border, it's hard to know when the ad ends.
If the goal of the FTC is that ads should be easily noticeable (and skip-able) by consumers, there are extremely clear and easy things to mandate. Instead, the FTC simply says it must be "clear".
Heck, even if you don't want to mandate how, I think the FTC should come up with examples. For example, take the two Google search images I posted. Let's say the FTC said "you must distinguish your ads as clearly as those two images. Any ad that is not as clearly distinguished as the ads in the examples is illegal." While Amazon/Google/Twitter/Facebook might argue that their labeling is "clear" they couldn't argue it is "as clear as the examples." The FTC should set a standard and then go after companies that don't meet the standard. Just telling someone it must be "clear" means that they only have to make it clear if you're actually examining the content in a courtroom, not if you're scanning/reading like a normal user.
So many sticker brands, ads and house brands..
.... Amazon’s search results are full of ads ‘unlawfully deceiving’ consumers, new complaint to FTC claims....
I don't see this in practice. Does this actually happen?
