4 ms·
> Amazon, in contrast, has played on a much higher difficulty setting from the beginning, selling and shipping physical items, with all of the marginal costs th
by arbuge 6y ago
> Amazon, in contrast, has played on a much higher difficulty setting from the beginning, selling and shipping physical items, with all of the marginal costs that entails. If anything the company has doubled down on the physical world, investing billions to deliver items in one day; I don’t think it is a coincidence it is Amazon that is Google’s true competitor.
I have believed that about Amazon being Google's true competitor for many years now, ever since it became clear that many people were starting their online shopping trips. Those shopping trips are far easier to monetize via search than search queries unrelated to items which can be purchased, which meant Google was being increasingly left with traffic that was hard to monetize.
I interviewed at Google for a PM job a few years ago and tried making this point to several of the interviewers when the conversation wandered towards dealing with potential Google competitors. All of them without exception looked at me as though as I was crazy. And I didn't get the job :-)
- hammock 6y agoOutside of Google's walls (which can be full of navel-gazing or worse, competitive copycat-ism), your idea is something that's been talked about for a decade. Amazon today is the #1 search engine for product searches, not Google. And excluding YouTube, Amazon is the second largest search engine (all searches). Worldwide.
- ansible 6y agoSo, on the one hand, just about any common product that can be bought online, can be bought on Amazon. So, good for them. However, given the horrendous search UX with Amazon, you'd think there would be more competition in this space. I'm always leery of buying big ticket items through them, for fear of counterfeits, or restocked items, and such. Not that Google is any better. I occasionally do product search with Google, but it ends up showing me all kinds of crap only vaguely related to my search terms, apparently in an effort to be "helpful". For anything computer related, I'm still using Newegg or Microcenter, just because I can filter results much more easily. Though even there, there is much that could be improved. Just like with price, I'd like to be able to set a specific range for weight, when searching for a laptop, for example.
- hammock 6y agoIt's not an easy problem for retailers and just about every issue you raised stems from the fact that these retailers (Amazon and you might as well include Best Buy, Instacart, Overstock, etc) are relying on data provided by the suppliers. That data is often not accurate and is definitely not standardized. It's a million times easier for, say, Patagonia or another single-brand retailer to accurately and robustly catalog their own merchandise. The multi-brand retailers that do it well invest huge amounts in their buying and merchandising teams, which allows them to do independent ratings of, e.g. the clothing fit, etc. I'm thinking of Nordstrom. When you are an Amazon or a Walmart, not only is the number of SKUs you are dealing with magnitudes larger, but often you are a few degrees separated from what those SKUs even are, when you open up your platform to third-party sellers.
- arbuge 6y agoFor sure. I definitely make no claim to originality here - indeed the disagreement I encountered about something I assumed was common knowledge was what left an impression on me.
- sjg007 6y agoThe other company that hasn't capitalized on search is Facebook.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago> And I didn't get the job :-) Unfortunately for them.