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> And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale well. This actually raises a core part of the problem: why does Amazon need literally dozens of se
by TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
> And there are so many sellers that solutions need to scale well.
This actually raises a core part of the problem: why does Amazon need literally dozens of sellers for every piece of junk on the site? For any sort of commodity on the site, there can be thousands of results. All the same. All within a few percent of the same price. All completely indistinguishable through any mechanism in the search facility. There have been so many times that I've been looking for something with a specific feature, and it's just page after page after page of stuff I don't want, that I finally give up and just buy the crap they're shoving at me. That brutally-carnal competition for every nickel and dime is a big part of the motivation to flood the platform with fake reviews.
What made Amazon great at the start was the fact that they DID NOT carry every conceivable item under the sun, from every single person who wants to spin up a mercantile account and give it a whirl. I've gone back to buying most things from brick-and-mortar stores because THEY are still doing the curation. They're not going to carry 17,000 different USB cables, and the ones they do are going to be high-enough quality that they don't have a high rate of return. I wish Amazon all the worst. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: No one shops at Amazon any more; it's too crowded.
- Traster 5y agoI think this actually works in Amazon's favour. It's a completely intractable problem to find the best widget from 17 pages of almost identical widgets with completely unstructured data to sift through. So what do customers do? They buy the Amazon recommended choice. It serves two purposes, it crowds out any competitive market place whilst capturing practically all of the value by determining what gets put in front of the customer first.
- CodeMage 5y agoI'm not sure it really works in Amazons favor. Sure, some customers might be more inclined to buy the Amazon recommended choice. But I wonder how many are frustrated like me. When I buy stuff on Amazon, it's not because I want Amazon to recommend their pick. I want to compare alternatives and make my own choice. That's getting harder and harder, because there's a gazillion identical results with spammy, polluted product names, sold by a bajillion different-yet-indistinguishable sellers. And each one of those results has a nice, fancy-looking template, but when you start reading, it's full of spelling and grammar errors. It's as frustrating as trying to have a "conversation" with a chat bot. What's the solution? Beats me. A naive part of my brain is suggesting some kind of vetting process for sellers, or maybe a trust rating, but I'm sure there are tons of horrible problems with those ideas.
- marmot777 5y agoTotally and you order something and it’s not like the reviews said it would be... because a ton of them are fake.
- omniscient_oce 5y agoI keep getting ads on Youtube from some Malaysian guys telling me how they bought cheap Chinese stuff on Alibaba and sold it for like 10x the price on Amazon and how I can really easily get $200,000 USD per month if I follow their 'easy' course. I really wish all these dropshipping "entrepreneurs" would run each other into the ground.