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Amazon Personalize: Real-Time Recommendation

199 points by davidjnelson 8y ago

steve19 8y ago
Literally handing over your most valuable customer data to a current or future competitor. Surely only small time ecommerce operations in niche industries would dare use this.
- pyromine 8y ago
  So I work for a distributor, and we've been discussing improving our up and cross sell abilities, due to the nature of our customer and product many of the products we distribute are deliberately not sold on Amazon, by and large I feel my company could use this without fear.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    Are the products immune to being cloned and white-labelled by Amazon?
    - pyromine 8y ago
      So our highest revenue product Amazon interestingly enough is already our biggest customer on, but the vendor refuses to go direct with Amazon and prefer we are the middle man. We have huge exposure here, but Amazon already has their recommenr dialed on this product so I wouldn't really care about them having a marginal amount of more info on it. The rest of the product is largely under MAP policies excluding Amazon, and the products take a level of care and branding a bit more than Amazon's typical white label products. So, could they, yes, but we have plenty of bigger operational risks
- Gaelan 8y ago
  Amazon: "All data analyzed by Amazon Personalize is kept private and secure, and only used for your customized recommendations." Anyone know if there's something in the AWS contracts about Amazon using your data?
  - dodobirdlord 8y ago
    The AI services have a clause allowing them to use your data for training their models unless you opt out.
sigstoat 8y ago
i'd find it more compelling if they'd base it on the tech they used circa 2004-2008. it's been years since their recommendations were valuable.
reitzensteinm 8y ago
The democratizing march of technology. Once the exclusive domain of tech giants, now even small businesses can integrate this service and attempt to sell fridges to customers who have recently bought a fridge.
- castlecrasher2 8y ago
  What? You don't want a baker's dozen more stud finders? I thought you loved them!
- telaport 8y ago
  What are you talking about? You just searched for an SNL skit. Are you telling me you don't want to now watch every single SNL episode ever made as well as join an improv troupe?!
  - mikehollinger 8y ago
    That was Interest-based advertising several years ago (or at least the last time I surged around without an ad blocker). I found it ham-fisted. However - the interesting thing that comes out of this is that if someone buys, say, chocolate and marshmallows, there’s a reasonable chance they want to buy graham crackers. So why not offer them graham crackers at checkout if it’s not in their cart? More insidiously - why not offer a higher price on graham crackers if they seek them out on their own? They’ve already made a decision.
    - tetrep 8y ago
      To take it a bit further, you'd probably want to mark down the checkout suggestion to not only make it look better, but also because you're only suggesting a very limited amount of options, once customers are used to trusting the checkout suggestions for a good deal, you introduce higher-margin and/or promoted products. More or less the same tactic Amazon used for search results: Return useful/functional results for a few years to train you users to trust what is near the top, then start putting promoted products at or near the top and generally ordering the search by what increases your revenue the most, rather than for any user-oriented goal, AKA "sort by relevance". Also the same thing Amazon did with prices in general, get people used to thinking you're the market with the best price/deal, etc.
erichocean 8y ago
I hope they're giving it away, because their recommendation system sucks.
- notyourwork 8y ago
  Is that based on data or your personal perception?
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    I don't know anyone who thinks Amazon recommendations are any good. They recommend the same product after I already have purchased it like 90% of the time. And I'm not talking about batteries or cosmetics that one might buy monthly.
    - cthalupa 8y ago
      Do we really think that Amazon doesn't have the talent and ability to tweak their models and do A/B testing to see what provides the highest return? Maybe enough people return their fridge right after and buy a new one, or are flipping houses and need to buy multiple washing machines, or are moving into a house with more rooms and new multiple TVs, or decide to buy a mattress as a gift for their parents after buying one for themselves, or any other of the hundreds of events that some exceptional to you or I but happen frequently enough in the aggregate to actually make it a normal enough occurrence to still recommend items that are usually one off purchases. Or maybe one of the most valuable companies in the world that has gotten to that point largely off of selling us crap is too stupid to realize that people don't usually buy 3 fridges or is unable to hire the talent to tweak the models to reflect this sort of behavior. I've got no firsthand knowledge, but I feel like the former is more likely than the latter.
      - erichocean 8y ago
        > Do we really think that Amazon doesn't have the talent and ability to tweak their models and do A/B testing to see what provides the highest return? A/B testing a bad model does nothing. I'm sure Amazon's recommendations are the "best they've got" given their tech. Which sucks. Google runs a massive recommendation system at scale: their ad placement product (in Search and elsewhere). Google's recommendation tech is astoundingly better than the equivalent at Amazon, rapidly putting the most profitable ads in front of the best potential customers. That said, Google will never release their ad tech recommendation system "as a service", since it would kill their golden goose. That whole part of their company is a black hole of information.
lbacaj 8y ago
Honestly using Amazon is like tip toeing around a lion to get something valuable. Knowing that at any moment they could wake up and and absolutely swallow you whole. If you use their cloud products, ala Netflix, they may decide to compete with you any moment. Netflix may have been too far along to be beat but the next product won’t be. If you sell products on their market place and if they do well you run the risk of them copying you. If you do anything in their ecosystem you are living with the fear that the lion may wake up and swallow you whole at any point and time. Edit: Maybe I’m a bit paranoid but this feels like a great way for them to get to know exactly who your customers are and what their behavior is. All the while training their own personalization to get much better.
- crb002 8y ago
  They also like to buy shares in smaller companies or outright acquire them. Not always competition.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    Candidate for business school case study, what factors influenced Amazon decisions to invest/acquire vs clone?
  - davidjnelson 8y ago
    Right, like with the YC startup Scaphold turning into aws appsync: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelparis1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelparis1/
- dominotw 8y ago
  sorry if this is a stupid question, why would amazon only copy things hosted/using aws?
  - foepys 8y ago
    AWS can see traffic and usage. They can predict the "next big thing". Facebook allegedly did the same with their VPN services that analyzed what apps people were using on their phones.
dimva 8y ago
I don't know about anyone else, but Amazon.com's recommendations for me are laughably bad. "You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!" I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them useful. Why would anyone want to use the same algorithms?
- sbr464 8y ago
  I tend to agree regarding the home page content, but I’ve found the “customers also bought” sections quite helpful lately, especially when looking at industrial/technical products.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    Unfortunately the customers also bought section is not really "recommendations" as much as a table join.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - cheeze 8y ago
      That is a rather simplistic view of it
      - goldenkey 8y ago
        Its not my view, that's what it is. No machine learning is necessary to generate that section. Just a lot of intersected purchases from a huge amount of customers, sorted by frequency.
0xADEADBEE 8y ago
I'll get right on using this the instant I want to bombard my users with 20 recommendations for a product they already own. Is there a bit of a lack of knowledge of how their recommendation system is perceived by the general public or is this something more interesting/explicable by corporate politics?
- camtarn 8y ago
  I haven't worked at Amazon for several years, but back when I was still there, there was a massive drive to find existing technologies which could be turned into AWS services - I guess part of trying to sell the AWS ecosystem as a uniquely full-featured package of services. I worked with Amazon recs on one of my teams. We all complained about how inane the recommendations could be on a regular basis. So I doubt it's a perception issue.
- Gaelan 8y ago
  I mean, I'd imagine that for some products (say, movies) more of the same might be a viable strategy.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  I have the same thing, but I rarely use these webshops; don't the recommendations diversify if your shopping behaviour diversifies? I mean if you only order a pack of AA batteries directly as mentioned in another thread, the system only has that to go on. Of course, they could opt to not show recommendations due to a lack of data or pad it with what's currently popular with other customers.
m0zg 8y ago
Heh. So Amazon gets to mine your product browsing event stream and conversion funnel, and use the insights to guide their own purchasing and manufacturing, and on top of that they'll charge you for giving them all your data. Brilliant!
shock 8y ago
Any idea why this page has a tracking pixel from Linkedin?
- mxuribe 8y ago
  Hidden amazon recruiting (tracking) effort maybe?
discordance 8y ago
This seems relevant for online retailers, although using a competing giants technology doesn't sound like it would be in their interest?
paulcarroty 8y ago
My recommendations was not so bad: after CPU purchase Amazon suggest me RAM, HDD or another PC stuff - not overpriced and not cheap Chinese noname brands.
- purity_resigns 8y ago
  Long ago, when I was at Amazon, we used Collaborative Filtering pretty heavily. It's great when there's a heavily sweetened path with lots of things ordered together or in a chain. It's horrible for moderately popular items though.
StreamBright 8y ago
It is amazing how Amazon search & recommendation works almost never for me. Not sure about other people.
NicoJuicy 8y ago
Wait, someone would use this? :P
aboutruby 8y ago
I remember having to build one with solr, that was a mess.
72usty 8y ago
I'm curious to know how their algorithm works when a site offers truly unique items? In other words, if I was buying a custom hand-crafted ring what would it recommend? Going a step further, if I was buying the Mona Lisa, would it know to recommend me other Da Vinci items, or other renaissance items, or would it fail to make that inference due to there being no co-occurrences in purchasing behaviour.
rswail 8y ago
If AWS was ever found to be "leaking" information to Amazon the retailer/logistics company from the services that it sells, it would be the end of AWS. They are certified under HIPAA and PCI/DSS in terms of their isolation of customers data from other customers and their infrastructure management. Anyone who thinks they would deliberately attempt to steal customer data is beyond paranoia.
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  I think it's fine to be paranoid about such things, I personally wouldn't give all my data to Amazon in this way and the services terms and conditions can easily change.
- ignoramous 8y ago
  What might happen is AWS might reveal "insights" or KPIs that might help its parent company Amazon, though I think it is highly unlikely since Amazon and AWS are in different businesses (as of now at least... as they converge around AI for Alexa/Robotics/Logistics, things might get interesting). It happened to 3p sellers on Amazon whose sales performance were indicators for Amazon to start AmazonBasics and other private-label offerings specifically targeted toward regions, market segments, and products with none of the downsides (survey the market, popularity index, demand forecasting, demographics) and all of the upsides (like getting preferential treatment in search result, upselling via various Amazon channels, homepage placement etc).
  - stef25 8y ago
    Haven't supermarkets been doing this for ages? For example noticing that more people are buying gluten free pasta that costs 3x the price of normal pasta and then deciding putting out their own brand GF pasta that's just 2x the price. With a bit of effort anyone can find products on Amazon that sell well (there's services that will do this) and then try to compete with those products. Amazon undoubtedly has more insights than those services provide, but that's probably not what makes or breaks their Basics products. Their strength is probably their manufacturing costs being much lower than the average 3p startup seller and the brand itself. I don't know why by I love these Basics lines that are being produced by Amazon, Zalando etc. They're positioned perfectly between "brands that are overpriced" and "Chinese brands selling probably crap products with probably fake reviews". I have Amazon basics towels, camera tripod, water filter, toiletry bag and more.
stef25 8y ago
If one uses this product do users have to be notified of this, in light of privacy / GDPR and all? I built a very basic recommendation engine myself but would love to try out something with actual brains behind it, just being curious about the results.
- darrenkopp 8y ago
  Unlikely because you aren't going to share personal, identifiable information with this service; you would just send the primary key of the user in your database (usually an integer, guid, etc, as long as you aren't using some string that includes personal information like email or possibly username where they user picks their own name). You can share all the information you want with other entities under GDPR as long as the information you are sending as long as you can't uniquely identify someone from that data _without_ additional information.
agentofoblivion 8y ago
Many of these commentors have it backwards. I know this because I’m actively working on a similar project at AWS. It isn’t that Amazon wants your data to help it make decisions, so it builds a clever product to get all your data. On the contrary, Amazon has so much damned data and years of experience turning that into a valuable asset, that it has started experimenting with ways to sell that value to other customers. The idea that it wants some mom and pops retail data is just silly. Our biggest problems are scaling the internal services we built 5 years ago to handle all the growth. SageMaker was a ground floor service and you should expect to see many more services built atop it.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  Amazon’s years of experience usually end up recommending you the same thing you just bought or just glanced at and never came back to the same category
  - jbrooksuk 8y ago
    This is very true. I'm forever being recommended things I searched for once for a parent or a friend that I have no other interest in.
    - hopler 8y ago
      If you were CEO of Amazon, what would you do? As much h as Amazon would love to have you but something you don't really need/want every day, it's not going to happen in substantial numbers. But they need something to keep brand awareness so you remember Amazon is the place to go for everything. Even complaining about the ads is still word of mouth for the store. Even of you don't like the recommendations, talking about Amazon is t bad PR for shoppers.
  - agentofoblivion 8y ago
    If you could solve the problem better, at scale, I’m sure they would pay you a lot of money to come solve it. Along with Netflix, Google, and all the other places that use standard algorithms designed to solve these sorts of problems.

199 points by davidjnelson 8y ago

Literally handing over your most valuable customer data to a current or future competitor. Surely only small time ecommerce operations in niche industries would dare use this.

pyromine 8y ago
So I work for a distributor, and we've been discussing improving our up and cross sell abilities, due to the nature of our customer and product many of the products we distribute are deliberately not sold on Amazon, by and large I feel my company could use this without fear.
- walterbell 8y ago
  Are the products immune to being cloned and white-labelled by Amazon?
  - pyromine 8y ago
    So our highest revenue product Amazon interestingly enough is already our biggest customer on, but the vendor refuses to go direct with Amazon and prefer we are the middle man. We have huge exposure here, but Amazon already has their recommenr dialed on this product so I wouldn't really care about them having a marginal amount of more info on it. The rest of the product is largely under MAP policies excluding Amazon, and the products take a level of care and branding a bit more than Amazon's typical white label products. So, could they, yes, but we have plenty of bigger operational risks
Gaelan 8y ago
Amazon: "All data analyzed by Amazon Personalize is kept private and secure, and only used for your customized recommendations." Anyone know if there's something in the AWS contracts about Amazon using your data?
- dodobirdlord 8y ago
  The AI services have a clause allowing them to use your data for training their models unless you opt out.

sigstoat 8y ago

i'd find it more compelling if they'd base it on the tech they used circa 2004-2008. it's been years since their recommendations were valuable.

reitzensteinm 8y ago

The democratizing march of technology. Once the exclusive domain of tech giants, now even small businesses can integrate this service and attempt to sell fridges to customers who have recently bought a fridge.

castlecrasher2 8y ago
What? You don't want a baker's dozen more stud finders? I thought you loved them!
telaport 8y ago
What are you talking about? You just searched for an SNL skit. Are you telling me you don't want to now watch every single SNL episode ever made as well as join an improv troupe?!
- mikehollinger 8y ago
  That was Interest-based advertising several years ago (or at least the last time I surged around without an ad blocker). I found it ham-fisted. However - the interesting thing that comes out of this is that if someone buys, say, chocolate and marshmallows, there’s a reasonable chance they want to buy graham crackers. So why not offer them graham crackers at checkout if it’s not in their cart? More insidiously - why not offer a higher price on graham crackers if they seek them out on their own? They’ve already made a decision.
  - tetrep 8y ago
    To take it a bit further, you'd probably want to mark down the checkout suggestion to not only make it look better, but also because you're only suggesting a very limited amount of options, once customers are used to trusting the checkout suggestions for a good deal, you introduce higher-margin and/or promoted products. More or less the same tactic Amazon used for search results: Return useful/functional results for a few years to train you users to trust what is near the top, then start putting promoted products at or near the top and generally ordering the search by what increases your revenue the most, rather than for any user-oriented goal, AKA "sort by relevance". Also the same thing Amazon did with prices in general, get people used to thinking you're the market with the best price/deal, etc.

erichocean 8y ago

I hope they're giving it away, because their recommendation system sucks.

notyourwork 8y ago
Is that based on data or your personal perception?
- goldenkey 8y ago
  I don't know anyone who thinks Amazon recommendations are any good. They recommend the same product after I already have purchased it like 90% of the time. And I'm not talking about batteries or cosmetics that one might buy monthly.
  - cthalupa 8y ago
    Do we really think that Amazon doesn't have the talent and ability to tweak their models and do A/B testing to see what provides the highest return? Maybe enough people return their fridge right after and buy a new one, or are flipping houses and need to buy multiple washing machines, or are moving into a house with more rooms and new multiple TVs, or decide to buy a mattress as a gift for their parents after buying one for themselves, or any other of the hundreds of events that some exceptional to you or I but happen frequently enough in the aggregate to actually make it a normal enough occurrence to still recommend items that are usually one off purchases. Or maybe one of the most valuable companies in the world that has gotten to that point largely off of selling us crap is too stupid to realize that people don't usually buy 3 fridges or is unable to hire the talent to tweak the models to reflect this sort of behavior. I've got no firsthand knowledge, but I feel like the former is more likely than the latter.
    - erichocean 8y ago
      > Do we really think that Amazon doesn't have the talent and ability to tweak their models and do A/B testing to see what provides the highest return? A/B testing a bad model does nothing. I'm sure Amazon's recommendations are the "best they've got" given their tech. Which sucks. Google runs a massive recommendation system at scale: their ad placement product (in Search and elsewhere). Google's recommendation tech is astoundingly better than the equivalent at Amazon, rapidly putting the most profitable ads in front of the best potential customers. That said, Google will never release their ad tech recommendation system "as a service", since it would kill their golden goose. That whole part of their company is a black hole of information.

lbacaj 8y ago

Honestly using Amazon is like tip toeing around a lion to get something valuable. Knowing that at any moment they could wake up and and absolutely swallow you whole. If you use their cloud products, ala Netflix, they may decide to compete with you any moment. Netflix may have been too far along to be beat but the next product won’t be. If you sell products on their market place and if they do well you run the risk of them copying you. If you do anything in their ecosystem you are living with the fear that the lion may wake up and swallow you whole at any point and time. Edit: Maybe I’m a bit paranoid but this feels like a great way for them to get to know exactly who your customers are and what their behavior is. All the while training their own personalization to get much better.

crb002 8y ago
They also like to buy shares in smaller companies or outright acquire them. Not always competition.
- walterbell 8y ago
  Candidate for business school case study, what factors influenced Amazon decisions to invest/acquire vs clone?
- davidjnelson 8y ago
  Right, like with the YC startup Scaphold turning into aws appsync: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelparis1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelparis1/
dominotw 8y ago
sorry if this is a stupid question, why would amazon only copy things hosted/using aws?
- foepys 8y ago
  AWS can see traffic and usage. They can predict the "next big thing". Facebook allegedly did the same with their VPN services that analyzed what apps people were using on their phones.

dimva 8y ago

I don't know about anyone else, but Amazon.com's recommendations for me are laughably bad. "You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!" I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them useful. Why would anyone want to use the same algorithms?

sbr464 8y ago
I tend to agree regarding the home page content, but I’ve found the “customers also bought” sections quite helpful lately, especially when looking at industrial/technical products.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- goldenkey 8y ago
  Unfortunately the customers also bought section is not really "recommendations" as much as a table join.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - cheeze 8y ago
    That is a rather simplistic view of it
    - goldenkey 8y ago
      Its not my view, that's what it is. No machine learning is necessary to generate that section. Just a lot of intersected purchases from a huge amount of customers, sorted by frequency.

0xADEADBEE 8y ago

I'll get right on using this the instant I want to bombard my users with 20 recommendations for a product they already own. Is there a bit of a lack of knowledge of how their recommendation system is perceived by the general public or is this something more interesting/explicable by corporate politics?

camtarn 8y ago
I haven't worked at Amazon for several years, but back when I was still there, there was a massive drive to find existing technologies which could be turned into AWS services - I guess part of trying to sell the AWS ecosystem as a uniquely full-featured package of services. I worked with Amazon recs on one of my teams. We all complained about how inane the recommendations could be on a regular basis. So I doubt it's a perception issue.
Gaelan 8y ago
I mean, I'd imagine that for some products (say, movies) more of the same might be a viable strategy.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
I have the same thing, but I rarely use these webshops; don't the recommendations diversify if your shopping behaviour diversifies? I mean if you only order a pack of AA batteries directly as mentioned in another thread, the system only has that to go on. Of course, they could opt to not show recommendations due to a lack of data or pad it with what's currently popular with other customers.

m0zg 8y ago

Heh. So Amazon gets to mine your product browsing event stream and conversion funnel, and use the insights to guide their own purchasing and manufacturing, and on top of that they'll charge you for giving them all your data. Brilliant!

shock 8y ago

Any idea why this page has a tracking pixel from Linkedin?

mxuribe 8y ago
Hidden amazon recruiting (tracking) effort maybe?

discordance 8y ago

This seems relevant for online retailers, although using a competing giants technology doesn't sound like it would be in their interest?

paulcarroty 8y ago

My recommendations was not so bad: after CPU purchase Amazon suggest me RAM, HDD or another PC stuff - not overpriced and not cheap Chinese noname brands.

purity_resigns 8y ago
Long ago, when I was at Amazon, we used Collaborative Filtering pretty heavily. It's great when there's a heavily sweetened path with lots of things ordered together or in a chain. It's horrible for moderately popular items though.

StreamBright 8y ago

It is amazing how Amazon search & recommendation works almost never for me. Not sure about other people.

NicoJuicy 8y ago

Wait, someone would use this? :P

aboutruby 8y ago

I remember having to build one with solr, that was a mess.

72usty 8y ago

I'm curious to know how their algorithm works when a site offers truly unique items? In other words, if I was buying a custom hand-crafted ring what would it recommend? Going a step further, if I was buying the Mona Lisa, would it know to recommend me other Da Vinci items, or other renaissance items, or would it fail to make that inference due to there being no co-occurrences in purchasing behaviour.

rswail 8y ago

If AWS was ever found to be "leaking" information to Amazon the retailer/logistics company from the services that it sells, it would be the end of AWS. They are certified under HIPAA and PCI/DSS in terms of their isolation of customers data from other customers and their infrastructure management. Anyone who thinks they would deliberately attempt to steal customer data is beyond paranoia.

andy_ppp 8y ago
I think it's fine to be paranoid about such things, I personally wouldn't give all my data to Amazon in this way and the services terms and conditions can easily change.
ignoramous 8y ago
What might happen is AWS might reveal "insights" or KPIs that might help its parent company Amazon, though I think it is highly unlikely since Amazon and AWS are in different businesses (as of now at least... as they converge around AI for Alexa/Robotics/Logistics, things might get interesting). It happened to 3p sellers on Amazon whose sales performance were indicators for Amazon to start AmazonBasics and other private-label offerings specifically targeted toward regions, market segments, and products with none of the downsides (survey the market, popularity index, demand forecasting, demographics) and all of the upsides (like getting preferential treatment in search result, upselling via various Amazon channels, homepage placement etc).
- stef25 8y ago
  Haven't supermarkets been doing this for ages? For example noticing that more people are buying gluten free pasta that costs 3x the price of normal pasta and then deciding putting out their own brand GF pasta that's just 2x the price. With a bit of effort anyone can find products on Amazon that sell well (there's services that will do this) and then try to compete with those products. Amazon undoubtedly has more insights than those services provide, but that's probably not what makes or breaks their Basics products. Their strength is probably their manufacturing costs being much lower than the average 3p startup seller and the brand itself. I don't know why by I love these Basics lines that are being produced by Amazon, Zalando etc. They're positioned perfectly between "brands that are overpriced" and "Chinese brands selling probably crap products with probably fake reviews". I have Amazon basics towels, camera tripod, water filter, toiletry bag and more.

stef25 8y ago

If one uses this product do users have to be notified of this, in light of privacy / GDPR and all? I built a very basic recommendation engine myself but would love to try out something with actual brains behind it, just being curious about the results.

darrenkopp 8y ago
Unlikely because you aren't going to share personal, identifiable information with this service; you would just send the primary key of the user in your database (usually an integer, guid, etc, as long as you aren't using some string that includes personal information like email or possibly username where they user picks their own name). You can share all the information you want with other entities under GDPR as long as the information you are sending as long as you can't uniquely identify someone from that data _without_ additional information.

agentofoblivion 8y ago

Many of these commentors have it backwards. I know this because I’m actively working on a similar project at AWS. It isn’t that Amazon wants your data to help it make decisions, so it builds a clever product to get all your data. On the contrary, Amazon has so much damned data and years of experience turning that into a valuable asset, that it has started experimenting with ways to sell that value to other customers. The idea that it wants some mom and pops retail data is just silly. Our biggest problems are scaling the internal services we built 5 years ago to handle all the growth. SageMaker was a ground floor service and you should expect to see many more services built atop it.

dmitriid 8y ago
Amazon’s years of experience usually end up recommending you the same thing you just bought or just glanced at and never came back to the same category
- jbrooksuk 8y ago
  This is very true. I'm forever being recommended things I searched for once for a parent or a friend that I have no other interest in.
  - hopler 8y ago
    If you were CEO of Amazon, what would you do? As much h as Amazon would love to have you but something you don't really need/want every day, it's not going to happen in substantial numbers. But they need something to keep brand awareness so you remember Amazon is the place to go for everything. Even complaining about the ads is still word of mouth for the store. Even of you don't like the recommendations, talking about Amazon is t bad PR for shoppers.
- agentofoblivion 8y ago
  If you could solve the problem better, at scale, I’m sure they would pay you a lot of money to come solve it. Along with Netflix, Google, and all the other places that use standard algorithms designed to solve these sorts of problems.