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New Parents Complain Amazon Baby-Registry Ads Are Deceptive
- neonate 8y agohttps://outline.com/8NvRtf https://outline.com/8NvRtf
- myroon5 8y agoEven after reading the article and specifically searching for the "sponsored" text, it took me minutes to find it in the screenshot. Extremely deceptive
- 0x00000000 8y agoThat's pretty egregious. The fact that is says "0 of 1 purchased" implies that the person making the list asked for it which is a lie no matter how you spin it. Sounds like fraud to me.
- sct202 8y agoYeah if I saw that I would have just thought that it was sponsored to show up first in the list of items or something minor like that, and not that it wasn't part of the original list at all.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI could spin it as well-intentioned. Regardless of whether the list-maker requested the item, you don't want to buy something that's already been purchased by someone else. I'm not willing to give Amazon that benefit of the doubt, however.
- creato 8y agoIf that was the intention, then there could just be a counter indicating how many had been purchased by others, but it only needs to appear if that is non-zero. That seems like the far more obvious way to do it. I don't know how you get to the "0 of 1" strategy without trying to trick people. The 1 is completely made up.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- carbocation 8y agoWell intentioned would be to indicate that the product is not requested. Maybe writing 0 of 0 could be acceptable. 0 of 1 is a lie.
- deogeo 8y agoUnless consumers/people get organized, and get laws passed (and enforced) to force companies to some minimal ethical standards, things will only get worse. "Voting with your dollars" is just another way of saying to stay divided and alone, while companies unite and get ever more organized. How well has it worked so far?
- petermcneeley 8y agoHere is a good little video by an evolutionary biologist detailing your point https://youtu.be/EsBvI9oSD1g https://youtu.be/EsBvI9oSD1g
- encoderer 8y agoI suggest using BabyList, which was launched by a friend on HN 7 years ago and is now one of the top baby retailers in the country. https://babylist.com https://babylist.com
- markfive 8y agoI thought "Customer Obsession" was their first core value?
- datguacdoh 8y agoHappened to us a few months ago. We got a pair of baby bath kits we didn't ask for. We looked afterward, and saw the ads mixed into our list with no way to remove them. Incredibly slimy practice.
- hbosch 8y agoSame with my wife and I. We have already been hemming and hawing with our parents about buying high quality products as a general rule – nothing against Fisher Price or Greco, but we have just decided on nicer things – and in this spirit have intentionally selected a diaper subscription service rather than buying certain other brands via Walmart/Target/Amazon/etc. (In fact, we originally rejected the idea of a baby shower or registry so that we could just buy everything ourselves). Anyways, we were surprised to see packages of Huggies showing up on our doorstep. Not only did we never add Huggies to the registry, we never added any diapers period. When we checked the registry again, we saw some Huggies ads spliced in discretely and almost imperceptibly. It speaks to our modern day lives that we simply said "wow, they put an ad in our registry... guess that's what Amazon does now" and just kicked off the return process. We've probably wound up with >$100 in Amazon credits based on returned Huggies at this point.
- wnevets 8y agoAmazon keeps making it harder and harder for me to justify having a prime account and buying things from them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- SkyPuncher 8y agoMy wife and I are having the same discussion. We had a stretch where 8 of 10 orders were late, damaged, or clearly repackaged. Buying from Amazon use to mean getting a legit product, quickly, and in new condition. Now it's a complete crap shoot what fake junk we're going to get.
- CobrastanJorji 8y agoCouldn't agree more. A decade ago, you'd always be 100% sure with Amazon. There was no need to be cautious. If the product was fake, broken, or you just didn't like it, Amazon would fix it. Support was both rarely needed and amazing. Their default answer before they were even sure what the issue was would be to overnight more things to you. But these days, you've gotta keep your guard up at all times. Whoops, this isn't for sale from "Amazon," it's some rando on their marketplace. Hrm, do they have lots of reviews? Okay, let's check a few and see if they look real or fake. Is this the sort of product that might be faked or be a weird, cheap knockoff? Is this the right product page for this product or a weird clone of the real one? I can still get my business done with a minimum of being taken advantage of, but it's a lot harder to do now.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoI bought a phone recently and specifically didn't go to Amazon for this reason. After searching for the kind of Samsung phone I wanted, I would find several slight variations, all with slightly different prices. It looked really sketchy to me.
- cobookman 8y agoSame goes for me. I stopped being an Amazon customer after I was able to find better quality or cheaper prices elsewhere. Looking forwards to honey sciences New app for search aggregation
- DanBC 8y agoThese ads are probably not compliant with UK regulation, so if you see one in the UK please do contact ASA.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoSo the ASA can say, "we told them they'd been naughty, job done". Aside: do people in the UK do "baby registries"? I've only ever seen it on USA media. Mind you we do seem to get USA culture eventually. My kid said he had "math" the other day ...
- TACIXAT 8y agoI've gotten this from ads in their normal search. I've been conditioned for years to trust that the search returns what I expect. Now when I instinctually click the first link, I end up with the wrong brand. My fault for not paying attention, but me being more careful means they've lost my trust.
- danielskogly 8y agoI run exactly 0 analytics and ads on Wishy.gift, nor do I plan to ever do so. Almost 300 users are using the service so far, and I have no idea who most of them are, where they come from, or how they found the service. There's a huge uptick in the number of registrations now before Christmas, but I'm really hoping that people might find it useful for birthdays, weddings and baby registries as well. All feedback is very welcome :)
- arkades 8y agoThis sounded perfect until I went to your site and found the one and only way to sign in was via fb. I mean, it’s nice that -you’re- not tracking me, but you’re still requiring I invite fb to track what I’m doing. So... for those of us for whom “I absolutely don’t track you” actually matters, I don’t know if this is usable.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y agoI get why it’s easier from the developer perspective, but I don’t have a Facebook account and certainly won’t create one for any reason, let alone such a service. Hopefully the developers/owners of the service recognize this and allow more because not doing so eliminates potential customers.
- danielskogly 8y agoI definitively recognize this, which is the reason for the "Why Facebook?"-explainer on the site. It alienates a lot of users, especially in the HN-crowd, and I'm hoping to do something with it at some point.
- drewmate 8y agoAnother consideration: it looks like those of us without fb accounts probably can't even look at lists or buy for friends / family. This is a bummer on a personal level, but also limits usefulness in cases where anyone who would see the list doesn't use fb or feel comfortable using it to log in. To the developer: please consider adding email-based login, or maybe just unique links sent by email for viewers without fb.
- Topgamer7 8y agoI've grown annoyed with Amazon's ad practices. I filter by for example price, and there is something like 4 ads per page, nearly identical to the properly search results. Makes scanning a page a much more cumbersome so that you don't click on the garbage products they advertise.
- techsupporter 8y ago> Makes scanning a page a much more cumbersome so that you don't click on the garbage products they advertise. Which, I imagine, is the entire point. The ideal outcome, from Amazon's perspective, is that you can't simply scan a page and tune out the ads. As long as people are just "annoyed" and not "leaving the platform in droves," the ad creep will continue.
- daodedickinson 8y agoPathetic
- Symbiote 8y agoThere are quotes from people interviewed who removed the sponsored ads from their own listings. Did no-one think Amazon's behaviour was so unacceptable that they abandoned it, and used a different service? Or is Amazon such a monopoly that this wasn't even considered?
- benologist 8y agoNothing deceptive about pushing your own brands over third parties then letting third parties buy back those sales with advertising then deceiving the users to click on those ads...
- ajb 8y agoHow is this not literally fraud?
- Spooky23 8y agoJust use Target. Amazon is more expensive, abusive with this kind of behavior and it’s core differentiator (speed) is irrelevant to a registry.
- gwillen 8y agoI see this as a control group in the great Internet advertising experiment. It answers the question: "How often will someone click an ad, given that the advertised product is certain to be unwanted?" That is, how often will someone mistake an ad for a real result?
- ummonk 8y agoI hope we see legal action over this. Incredibly deceptive.
- gwbas1c 8y agoJust return it
- fipple 8y ago“Customer-obsessed”
- voldacar 8y agoIs there a non-paywalled version of this article somewhere?
- idDriven 8y agoI use the 'bypass paywalls' extension for Firefox. You can download from Github.
- glbrew 8y agoJesus our west coast techno saviors are turning on us.
- floatingatoll 8y agoIt seems like Amazon may have violated California law, and under CACI 1903 the buyers of items on the baby-registry list could have standing to sue Amazon for negligent misrepresentation: Fact: "the item was added to the list by the list's creator" 1. Amazon represented to the buyer that the Fact was true. 2. Amazon's representation was not true. 3. Amazon had no reasonable grounds for believing the Fact was true. 4. Amazon intended the Buyer to rely on this representation. 5. The Buyer reasonably relied on this representation. 6. The Buyer was harmed. 7. The Buyer's reliance on Amazon's representation was a substantial factor in causing the harm. The core of the issue to puzzle over: How was the buyer of the gift harmed? https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1900/1903/ https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1900/1903...
- goodcanadian 8y agoThe core of the issue to puzzle over: How was the buyer of the gift harmed? One might be able to argue that the buyer was reputationally harmed by being tricked into buying a gift that was neither asked for nor wanted.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- marchenko 8y agoThe core of the issue to puzzle over: How was the buyer of the gift harmed? The buyer demonstrated intent to purchase an item desired by the list owner, but was deceived into purchasing an article that did not meet that criterion. The buyer expended resources on this purchase that could have gone toward an actually-desired item, delivered at a socially-appropriate time (ie in time for a baby shower).
- dzink 8y agoI created DreamList https://www.dreamlist.com https://www.dreamlist.com as a parent because I was appalled by the practices of baby registries and wish lists out there. Without naming competitors we saw: - A major retailer hid the actual wishlist behind an "idea list" page that visitors saw first when they clicked on someone's wishlist link. The "Idea list" was full of high margin items that had nothing to do with the wisher (sometimes even targeted to the wrong gender). - Multiple major registries indexed your name for SEO and thus a baby registry still showed as top result on google for female founders and executives who had babies in recent years. - Multiple wikipedia and gossip press links boosting SEO of several universal registries by showcasing the wedding or baby lists of famous people (the SEO boost was substantial too). Privacy was non-existent at that point. - Popular new baby or wedding specialized registries that are also retailers and would push gift cards for their own stores to registry guests where you'd often find 30%+ markup on common items. Etc... So, as I was literally nursing a baby in one arm, I wrote code for DreamList with the other. It was architected to be actually private (no lists get SEO, unless users explicitly ask for it; no ads or promotional emails; etc.). It is not tied to a retailer, so you can add the lowest price items from anywhere (and link your other wish lists and registries). It lets you manage wish lists together with your spouse or team (we've served charity and disaster recovery teams in every disaster since Hurricane Harvey). More importantly, you can add large items and dreams you are saving towards such as a big trip to Disney, or 529 plans, so on special occasions family can contribute small amounts to help little ones get there sooner. It starts with little architectural decisions, but every detail matters in a family product, as it sets a tone for interactions and thus relationships of millions of families that live apart geographically. We've reached a time when we have to take online privacy and quality in our own hands, for the sake of our kids.
- bmsleight_ 8y agoWow inspiring - How can HN help promote ?
- mysterypie 8y agoIs there no way out of the antiquated gift registry idea? Could we have baby showers and weddings in which everyone contributes cash (and absolutely no gifts) to offset the event costs? Any excess cash becomes a gift to the parents or couple. Gifts served a purpose in the distant past because people needed "things" to start their life, but that's no longer the case. Most people have way too many things, and most of their expenses are operating costs anyway (like mortgage, rent, education, health care, and transportation).
- prepend 8y agoBaby showers were extremely helpful to me because experiences friends and family with babies shared items I didn’t even know about, but were useful. Personally, I don’t like to give cash because it’s impersonal and doesn’t allow me to express creativity of something relevant to my friendship or affection. I rarely get it perfect, but a gift let’s me interact with the recipient to find out how they are doing, what they need, what I think will help best. If I don’t know someone well enough that I can’t help with an item and would only send cash, I use that as a filter for whether to send a gift. I also don’t like receiving cash from friends, but appreciate gifts.
- milankragujevic 8y agoIt's paywalled, and even Googling the link still gets me paywall version.