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> Not to mention the ads keep following you after you buy the thing. There may be sense to this madness. I believe rate of returns is increasing as online sal

> Not to mention the ads keep following you after you buy the thing. There may be sense to this madness. I believe rate of returns is increasing as online sales takes over. The only way to actually see and touch many electrical devices is to buy and return them e.g. there is no store in my major UK city that has premium non-mac laptops on display. It means you might buy and return 3 devices to find the one you want to keep. If the return rate is 30%+ then a completed purchase really is a strong indicator that might purchase the same thing.

syllogism 8y ago
Scoff. 30%? There's no way a rate of returns is anything like that. Just think of the volume of post that would be going out of suburban post centres! The delivery network obviously doesn't look anything like that. I think it's much simpler. The chance that any person is say, buying a fridge at any point is very low. If you're 99% sure that person has already made their purchase, that means there's a 1% chance you're wrong, and they're still looking! That's a much better signal than any other signal you're going to get.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >Just think of the volume of post that would be going out of suburban post centres! The delivery network obviously doesn't look anything like that. According to this article in the Toronto Star, online return rates are around 20%, rising to 30% in the holiday period. https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/01/15/online-shopping-drives-surge-in-holiday-returns-and-what-happens-next-may-surprise-you.html https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/01/15/online-shopping-...
elorant 8y ago
30% is not sustainable for any business. You have to take into consideration that once a product is returned then the merchant has to sell it as a used one with a significant discount. Selling 30% of your inventory at discount means you're doomed.
- jtbayly 8y ago
  Amazon Warehouses is the official Amazon seller of used (returned) goods. However they also sell returned items to others. There are multiple huge warehouses where I live filled with (mostly) returned products being auctioned off to the public by a middleman. The volume is astounding.
clappski 8y ago
The only place I’ve seen powerful/prosumer non-Mac laptops that you can play with in store in the UK are big department stores - e.g. John Lewis. Actually, PC World had demo machines out to play with last time I was in there, but very few in comparison to the tech department of the department stores.
repsilat 8y ago
A simpler explanation might be "They don't know you bought the thing." Either because they're different retailers, or because the data are hard to put through from the checkout to the marketing department. Maybe it's hard to connect Google's idea of who a user is with the store's user accounts. Maybe the ad-buying algorithm is suuper simple, and getting a dev to "do it better" isn't worth the cost. If it's just "this person searched for car rentals two days ago, let's show them car rentals today," that seems simple enough to make money over "no targeting," with obvious and acceptable failure cases like "already booked a car" and "phone got stolen, should show ads for pawn shops instead."

syllogism 8y ago

Scoff. 30%? There's no way a rate of returns is anything like that. Just think of the volume of post that would be going out of suburban post centres! The delivery network obviously doesn't look anything like that. I think it's much simpler. The chance that any person is say, buying a fridge at any point is very low. If you're 99% sure that person has already made their purchase, that means there's a 1% chance you're wrong, and they're still looking! That's a much better signal than any other signal you're going to get.

jdietrich 8y ago
>Just think of the volume of post that would be going out of suburban post centres! The delivery network obviously doesn't look anything like that. According to this article in the Toronto Star, online return rates are around 20%, rising to 30% in the holiday period. https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/01/15/online-shopping-drives-surge-in-holiday-returns-and-what-happens-next-may-surprise-you.html https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/01/15/online-shopping-...

elorant 8y ago

30% is not sustainable for any business. You have to take into consideration that once a product is returned then the merchant has to sell it as a used one with a significant discount. Selling 30% of your inventory at discount means you're doomed.

jtbayly 8y ago
Amazon Warehouses is the official Amazon seller of used (returned) goods. However they also sell returned items to others. There are multiple huge warehouses where I live filled with (mostly) returned products being auctioned off to the public by a middleman. The volume is astounding.

clappski 8y ago

The only place I’ve seen powerful/prosumer non-Mac laptops that you can play with in store in the UK are big department stores - e.g. John Lewis. Actually, PC World had demo machines out to play with last time I was in there, but very few in comparison to the tech department of the department stores.

repsilat 8y ago

A simpler explanation might be "They don't know you bought the thing." Either because they're different retailers, or because the data are hard to put through from the checkout to the marketing department. Maybe it's hard to connect Google's idea of who a user is with the store's user accounts. Maybe the ad-buying algorithm is suuper simple, and getting a dev to "do it better" isn't worth the cost. If it's just "this person searched for car rentals two days ago, let's show them car rentals today," that seems simple enough to make money over "no targeting," with obvious and acceptable failure cases like "already booked a car" and "phone got stolen, should show ads for pawn shops instead."