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Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate. The more you buy, the better it gets at anticipating what you want to buy. ... but the larger

Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate. The more you buy, the better it gets at anticipating what you want to buy. ... but the larger wins they've had are behind the scenes, in the predictive modeling that helps them get product into warehouses in front of demand spikes (and into geographically-relevant warehouses to satisfy the spikes).

Analemma_ 8y ago
> Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate. Amazon's system for finding related products fucking sucks. After I buy an X, I see ads for more X for months, which is completely useless. Sometimes I'll see ads for the exact thing I bought... what?!
- cryptoz 8y ago
  Yep, I see this all the time too. Buy a printer? Amazon thinks you want to buy a new printer every day for months. Google too. I bought a Pixel 2 online, from Google, signed in to Google. Now I see ads on Google ad networks all day long to buy a Pixel 2. It has been 5 months of daily ads from Google to buy the phone I just bought. Ridiculous. Ad networks are a clear financial win for AI - but they also show the ridiculousness and are clear windows into the failures so far.
  - ModernMech 8y ago
    This. For all the talk about how Facebook is mining data to hyper-target customers, it still seems like they're still trying to throw stuff at the wall to see if it sticks.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  That is amazing too me. When I did inside sales for a VAR in college in the 90s, we wrote a little app that would note the customer's account notes a few months after a printer installation to ask about toner. It had a high conversion rate and better still got us referrals to the head executive assistant (who was usually the boss's assistant).
- kawera 8y ago
  If you think their system sucks you may like this twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/GirlFromBlupo/status/982156453396996096 https://twitter.com/GirlFromBlupo/status/982156453396996096 :)))
- fixermark 8y ago
  I find that particular, oft-repeated bug fascinating. It's a known issue, but one that seems to spread across many vendors and ad networks. I have to assume there's something very stubborn about the system design that makes it harder to fix than it feels like it should be. (One hypothesis: Perhaps for privacy reasons or Amazon-not-wanting-to-give-away-the-whole-farm-on-sale-conversion reasons, ad networks only have visibility onto what you've seen, not whether you actually closed the purchase).
- jaclaz 8y ago
  What I normally do is searching on Google on monday morning a "cool" thing, like "drone" or "camera" and then I enjoy all the week these "targeted" ads, thus avoiding quite a few about "random" things I am not interested in like toasters, diapers, and similar. Not that I am actually interested in drones or cameras.
southern_cross 8y ago
I'm not sure that things like Amazon's "Customers who bought this also bought that" is particularly amazing or clever; that ain't rocket surgery, you know! Sure, every once in a while I'll go "Yep, I probably need me some of that, too", but mostly it's "Nope - I've already got plenty of that, thank you. Moving on ..." And like everybody else, I too get sick of being pitched even more of this, or different variations of this, after I've already made my purchase. I'm sure that all of it does lead to at least an incremental increase in sales, though, so it serves its purpose. A while back I saw an article on the success of an "A.I." that was being used for marketing purposes. And as I read through all of its supposed "breakthrough suggestions" I thought to myself "You know, you could have saved yourself an awful lot of time and trouble and money if you'd just read pretty much any sales and marketing book from, say, the last 100 years or so." Because there was really nothing there that wasn't already pretty much common knowledge within that realm.

Analemma_ 8y ago

> Amazon's system for finding related products is eerily accurate. Amazon's system for finding related products fucking sucks. After I buy an X, I see ads for more X for months, which is completely useless. Sometimes I'll see ads for the exact thing I bought... what?!

cryptoz 8y ago
Yep, I see this all the time too. Buy a printer? Amazon thinks you want to buy a new printer every day for months. Google too. I bought a Pixel 2 online, from Google, signed in to Google. Now I see ads on Google ad networks all day long to buy a Pixel 2. It has been 5 months of daily ads from Google to buy the phone I just bought. Ridiculous. Ad networks are a clear financial win for AI - but they also show the ridiculousness and are clear windows into the failures so far.
- ModernMech 8y ago
  This. For all the talk about how Facebook is mining data to hyper-target customers, it still seems like they're still trying to throw stuff at the wall to see if it sticks.
Spooky23 8y ago
That is amazing too me. When I did inside sales for a VAR in college in the 90s, we wrote a little app that would note the customer's account notes a few months after a printer installation to ask about toner. It had a high conversion rate and better still got us referrals to the head executive assistant (who was usually the boss's assistant).
kawera 8y ago
If you think their system sucks you may like this twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/GirlFromBlupo/status/982156453396996096 https://twitter.com/GirlFromBlupo/status/982156453396996096 :)))
fixermark 8y ago
I find that particular, oft-repeated bug fascinating. It's a known issue, but one that seems to spread across many vendors and ad networks. I have to assume there's something very stubborn about the system design that makes it harder to fix than it feels like it should be. (One hypothesis: Perhaps for privacy reasons or Amazon-not-wanting-to-give-away-the-whole-farm-on-sale-conversion reasons, ad networks only have visibility onto what you've seen, not whether you actually closed the purchase).
jaclaz 8y ago
What I normally do is searching on Google on monday morning a "cool" thing, like "drone" or "camera" and then I enjoy all the week these "targeted" ads, thus avoiding quite a few about "random" things I am not interested in like toasters, diapers, and similar. Not that I am actually interested in drones or cameras.

southern_cross 8y ago

I'm not sure that things like Amazon's "Customers who bought this also bought that" is particularly amazing or clever; that ain't rocket surgery, you know! Sure, every once in a while I'll go "Yep, I probably need me some of that, too", but mostly it's "Nope - I've already got plenty of that, thank you. Moving on ..." And like everybody else, I too get sick of being pitched even more of this, or different variations of this, after I've already made my purchase. I'm sure that all of it does lead to at least an incremental increase in sales, though, so it serves its purpose. A while back I saw an article on the success of an "A.I." that was being used for marketing purposes. And as I read through all of its supposed "breakthrough suggestions" I thought to myself "You know, you could have saved yourself an awful lot of time and trouble and money if you'd just read pretty much any sales and marketing book from, say, the last 100 years or so." Because there was really nothing there that wasn't already pretty much common knowledge within that realm.