22 ms·

Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

308 points by solalf 4y ago

jesuspiece 4y ago
This is egregious imo. Amazon needs to be broken up
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bmitc 4y ago
  A deleted comment: > Is it? Newspapers aren’t exactly thriving and it’s not because of Amazon. Would you have a problem if a random local newspaper company had significant influence over what 50% of the U.S. bought, watched, read, listened to, ate, and needed for medical purposes in addition to market power that made it stay that way?
- montagg 4y ago
  Walmart too. And Target. And grocery stores. I am not sure people are really prepared to take the implication of how unfair Amazon seems to its logical conclusion, because it means undermining a lot of what makes us comfortable in modern life under capitalism. Regulation targeted at increasing competition (breakups, rather than regulation Amazon as a monopoly of a kind and entrenching them) might result in a better outcome, or it just might make things more expensive and then you have to repeat the same breakup and regulation process again every 15 years.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    Isn't that inevitably the result if you want the cheapest thing? I pay a little more and I never shop at amazon.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > undermining a lot of what makes us comfortable in modern life under capitalism I read Wealth of Nations, did I miss the part where it says: "you should have a single global company control most of the market"? Every economist writes about importance of competition. If you want to keep around giant monopolies, you are not capitalist.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      On a global scale, it helps if your country is where all the biggest companies are coming from, especially to compete with big companies from other countries.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        You could make the same argument fir trade barriers, protectionism, subsidies, etc. It also comes across as "two wrongs make a right"
- TheDong 4y ago
  The retail and ads portions here seem inextricably linked. It does not seem possible to treat those as separate things. What's more, if you tell amazon "no more retail ads", surely they can just do what normal stores do, and charge a slotting fee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee) instead. If right now the first 10 results on amazon.com for "mattress" are all ads because those companies paid $1000 to be advertised first, how is that meaningfully different from amazon only carrying 10 mattresses at all, and instead of charging ad fees, charging a $1000 slotting fee to the mattress companies? I am not particularly arguing for or against anything, just speculating that breaking it up would, in practice, be hard. Perhaps some other regulatory action would work better.
  - junofan 4y ago
    There’s a $40bn/yr business here. I’m sure somebody can figure out how to decouple. Also, many breakup scenarios for Amazon involve spinning out the fulfillment business. Who cares if Amazon.com stocks 10 mattresses if I can just build a competitor stocking 10,000 while using the same infrastructure.
- MangoCoffee 4y ago
  retail stores have been charging for shelf space for decades.
- dralley 4y ago
  Lots of these companies need to be broken up. Facebook in particular given that their erroneous metrics literally put several media companies out of business. Not only did they charge for nonexistent engagement, but the BS engagement numbers they were providing were so enticing that it created a huge push towards expensive-to-create video content. https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccurate-video-metrics-inflation-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    thats some proper good old fashioned fraud
- throwswaydollar 4y ago
  Google Should be broken up first
- Zetice 4y ago
  What? Why? Volume of revenue is not a reason to break up a company.
  - oblio 4y ago
    Conflict of interest. Making a platform and using it yourself naturally corrupts you, the incentives are too strong.
    - Zetice 4y ago
      What interest is conflicting, exactly? Seems like interests would be pretty perfectly aligned to maximize revenue.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        Yes, at the expwnse of their customers and the law. Thats what conflict of onterest means
        Zetice 4y ago
        That doesn’t make sense, because if their costumer isn’t satisfied, they can use another online store.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    It could be if it makes up the entire market...
    - Zetice 4y ago
      Except it doesn't, not even remotely; there are dozens of other ways of buying things online, people just choose not to.
      - freejazz 4y ago
        Except the issue isn't whether there are "dozens of other ways of buying things online, people just choose not to" but whether Amazon's market share is so large as to prohibit anyone from being able to compete with it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yla92 4y ago
Is it me or there is this weird double vertical scrollbars? https://i.imgur.com/Upjzoth.png https://i.imgur.com/Upjzoth.png
- yesenadam 4y ago
  Same for me. Yup, weird.
- your_challenger 4y ago
  Same for me. Annoying!
- berkle4455 4y ago
  It's the clear:after psuedo-element on <div class="Footer-inner clear">
  - benedictevans 4y ago
    It’s a bug somewhere in my custom layout code conflicting with a recent squarespace change and I’m not enough of a developer to fix it yet :(
cheeselip420 4y ago
So the companies that sell on Amazon pay money to Amazon (from the revenues they get from Amazon's customers) to have their products listed more favorably than competitors (one of which is actually Amazon). I can see how this seems advantageous and monopolistic for Amazon...
- scarface74 4y ago
  Or the same thing every company in retail has done forever
  - tyoma 4y ago
    Remember when Amazon listed private label brands, like every retailer has done for decades if not longer, and there was a collective freak out?
    - peanuty1 4y ago
      I think the freak-out was that Amazon was leveraging its data to create copycat products.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        I assume all businesses do this, before Amazon ever existed.
  - Regnore 4y ago
    How many options are there for retail?
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      In the US, each area usually has Costco/Walmart/Target, Best Buy/Apple, Home Depot/Lowes, Staples/OfficeDepot, Kroger/Albertsons/regional grocer, Nordstrom/Macys/Kohls/Old Navy/Gap.
  - 4y ago
irjustin 4y ago
Anecdotally, I was connected to a number of people on the Ads team and years ago, the upper ups in the G machine were already extremely nervous of Amazon's internal ads system. Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search.
- KVFinn 4y ago
  >Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search. Ironically Amazon has been so aggressive with the ads recently I've lost all trust in searching on Amazon itself. I'm back to using Google to find the Amazon product page. On Amazon I search for a specific brand and model and it's on page 4, buried until endless sponsored products. I have to go my order history to find the product page now. Sometimes the Amazon search is not just all endless products but literally incorrect products, stuff that I would have to return if I bought it by accident. Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size. Amazon product search feels not just bad but actively hostile, something I have to fight against to find the thing I actually want.
  - mrDmrTmrJ 4y ago
    Strongly agree. Dropped prime after I Amazon adds mean I couldn't find what I wanted. Now use google to find specific stuff on D2C websites (probably Shopify) and spend less. It's great!
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      I dropped prime after "two-day shipping on all orders" had degenerated into "we'll deliver it when we feel like it, and you can't get two-day shipping even if you're willing to pay extra for it".
      - flangola7 4y ago
        What even is Prime without faster shipping?
prawn 4y ago
I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. I assume that there's either an internal push to become more like Amazon, or consultants pitch this approach to them and it's hard to resist. I wonder what the numbers are for supermarkets and the way they prioritise shelf placements? A friend had a big contract recently going around and hi-res photographing shelf-positioning in a massive supermarket chain. Every aisle. And then eye-scanning tests and analysis on legibility meant it was all used to upsell brands fighting for premium positioning.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  > I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. Best Buy and Walmart do this too (allowing third-parties to list products on their website).
- jhhh 4y ago
  They did the same thing for Walmart+ and honestly it's pretty terrible. Every business is going to try to be amazon now and while it's probably going to make money in the short term it'll eventually poison their brand. I want to know the hot sauce I'm going to buy isn't sold by some random dude who will send me expired items. I want to know the hard drives I'm going to buy are actually new. Same thing with newegg.
- dazc 4y ago
  'I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website...' This is certainly a trend led, I am guessing, by troves of internal search data that suggests people are searching for things they don't have the capacity to stock themselves.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    In a way, it feels like lying to the customer. "Do you stock purple widgets?" "No, we're Red Widget Emporium" is not an inappropriate answer. If anything, it improves the trust angle-- you're the experts on Red Widgets rather than a mile-wide-six-inches-deep generalist. I generally don't want to buy sheet lumber and breakfast cereal at the same store. "We'll pretend we stock it but actually hand you to a second tier vendor who you'd never go to directly" is less compelling somehow.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Original HN title used the information in the second line from the blog post, something like: "In 2021 Amazon ad revenue [was] more than the entire global newspaper industry." Hence some of the comments focus on newspaper business.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  That's a weird comparison. IMO most newspapers fall under "ads" as well. Political ads.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Thats why quality of news coverage has gone to shit, and democracy is struggling. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
  - achenet 4y ago
    I blame television + social media favoring stupid, anger inducing soundbites over well thought out rhetoric. And Duverger's law [0] leading to a duopoly of two political parties who spend all their time bickering and scheming to get more power because they've decided politics is a football game where the goal is to score more than the other team and not a civic duty to run the country for the benefit of the people. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
Semaphor 4y ago
I went to Amazon without an ad blocker for the first time yesterday (wanted to try the fakespot service, but it requires an extension and "access all" so I created a clean profile for it). I was surprised how many ads there were on Amazon, I thought the situation was already bad with an ad blocker, considering they show a lot of hard-coded ads, but wow.
- mym1990 4y ago
  I am generally getting overwhelmed with ads coming from every nook and cranny of life to the point that I don't even want to buy stuff anymore, for a lot of it its like: whats the point?
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    Luckily, I mostly don’t see any ads. Only for work, and on Amazon pretty much. Some more as product placement and in the physical world, but not a ton.
    - Moru 4y ago
      I love the new ad displays in the local shopping mall. They use LCD screens rotated 90 degrees and my sunglases are just the wrong filter angle so they become nice black displays for me. Physical adblocker :-)
      - Ensorceled 4y ago
        My wife commented on how shitty some ambulance chaser ad was and all I could see was a black display. Now I want a law that requires all billboards and other such ads to be properly polarized so they can be blocked :-)
  - Anon4Now 4y ago
    If you use Chrome, then switch to another browser that allows full adblocker functionality. I use Firefox with UBlock Origin and hardly see any ads.
ankit219 4y ago
> the ‘retail media’ gold rush: the realisation that a high-traffic website or app could be ad inventory even if you’re not a media company, that you have very relevant ‘consented’ first party data (at the very least intent if not broader profiles) and probably purchase attribution too, that all of this now has more relative value given the push against cookies and third party data everywhere else - and that advertising margins are a lot higher than retail margins. I think it's not visitors, but repeat users which makes it possible and so valuable. This is going to be the next phase of Adtech. Uber has a $500M run rate from ads, Walmart has $2.7B (from the same article), and evidently more and more companies will discover, if you can aggregate traffic to some decent level, you can monetize it with first party data. This advantage is only going to increase once we see Android launch their own version of tracking consent, and Chrome gets rid of cookies. A good horizontal play here is to sell targeting, attribution, and profiling services to all these "aggregators of traffic". Not sure about the revenues per se, but I think Doordash, Expedia, Robinhood, Airbnb could also potentially generate ad revenue at low cost just based how much traffic (and repeat users) they get
- Scarblac 4y ago
  But it will come at least somewhat at the expense of their core business, surely? An Airbnb with ads looks a lot less trustworthy than one without, I think.
  - reinsdyr 4y ago
    I already don't trust airbnb because of their random fees they keep applying after actually putting in my information. And their general unreliability when it comes to supporting hosts and costumers.
    - TeamMCS 4y ago
      One tip you may appreciate is to use the Australian version of airbnb (.au), their regulators require them to show the true cost of the rental, including all fees in the headline price. It operates exactly the same as your regional airbnb once you switch the location and currency. For example, switching to USD and searching for apartments in California
Xelbair 4y ago
Could a web designers finally stop messing up with the scrolling? This one works fine when you scroll the wheel, but when you use middle click and drag to scroll i just moves one single step.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
Amazon is really shit now. You try to buy a product and instead of showing you the actual brands it just shows you alibaba scam products. I have to go to other sites and find the actual products and then search directly on amazon. It won’t be long before I just stop using amazon altogether.
- didntreadarticl 4y ago
  What Shopping On Amazon Feels Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
- muspimerol 4y ago
  I think (hope?) it's the beginning of a long, slow decline for Amazon as a marketplace, unless they fix this. This distrustful sentiment is something I hear from a lot of younger people (<40 year olds). I didn't even notice it myself until recently, but I am buying more and more stuff directly from other niche e-commerce websites, because I know half of the search results on Amazon are a scam.
  - SomeHacker44 4y ago
    In NYC, B&H has free next day delivery and many of the same tech products. Microcenter has nice stores and price matches.
    - sithadmin 4y ago
      B&H has great selection and prices, but man I don't like giving my money to a business that's strongly aligned to Satmar fundamentalism (which perpetrates all manner of social regressivism) and has a history of abusing workers that don't share the management's religion or skin color. I've demoted them to 'retailer of last resort' status for my personal shopping.
    - Loughla 4y ago
      In the middle of nowhere flyover, B&H has true 2 day delivery for no extra cost. Their prices are competitive with anywhere else as well. It's astounding. I also like that they close the purchase feature for Shabbat. That feels nice, like a personal touch to an anonymous website.
harriet1 4y ago
[dead]
oefrha 4y ago
Somewhat tangential, the second graph shows not just Amazon, but every big tech’s advertising revenue growing like crazy year over year from 2016 to 2021, particularly Google and Facebook. Growth slowed a bit in 2020 (still grew nonetheless) but rebounded hard in 2021. Excuse the question from someone who don’t pay attention to the ad industry at all: WTF happened to the popular narrative at the time that companies were cutting ad spend during covid?
- Macha 4y ago
  It was very short lived as an overall trend and while some big physical venue based advertising (e.g. for Disneyland) did stay low for years, online and digital products (like say Disney+) more than made up for it
juujian 4y ago
What's interesting is that in this model a lot of companies might be paying for ads without ever seeing a return, because they cannot outbid those at the top. In that case, Amazon would be sponging up money from a lot of players and returning it to a few. Which would be ok, but the problem is that you can either play the game or drop out. So it becomes a little bit of a gig economy thing where in theory you're free but in practice companies are squeezing you for everything.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  That's not how online ads work? You bid for ad space, but you pay only if you get clicks, and are booted out fast if you don't get any. If you're always outbid, or nobody clicks on your ads, your spend is zero.
  - juujian 4y ago
    You would be right about that. "Sellers only pay the ad fee when a potential customer clicks on their Amazon listing. If no one clicks then there's no cost. As your ad is representative of your product and your Amazon listing is professional, you should be able to get a sale out of a significant number of your clicks" (Sep 21, 2021). If it's still like that, yeah that's different.
DeathArrow 4y ago
I never encountered ads on Amazon, so out of curiosity I disabled uBlock Origin and visited Amazon. It seems that the ads are for products sold on Amazon. Clicking an ad redirects you to the product page. Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps? Ads on the revenue service website? I think ads play the biggest part in why the Internet is so fill with junk today, to the point you have to sift through mountains of trash to find something genuinely useful.
- wil421 4y ago
  You know you can pay eBay to promote your listing. That is pretty much what they mean by ads in this case. Someone is paying to be the top spot or be promoted on search results.
  - deepGem 4y ago
    I think Amazon has an ad network of sorts, so sellers bid for the sponsored search slot. In retailers who don't have such a platform, merchandisers take the call and boost/bury products in search results.
    - wil421 4y ago
      Ahh, that makes sense. It also explains why I see certain sellers ads everywhere from time to time.
- deepGem 4y ago
  Ads on Amazon are far more annoying than ads on other web properties, because I go to Amazon for a very specific need. I search for Tide washing liquid and I see these sponsored products on top, way above the Tide result. From a purist viewpoint, this is disgusting. I have to come to you Amazon, to just give me what I want, not what you think I want. That said, there isn't a better alternative so I just ignore the ads and go for the product no matter how far down the page that product appears.
DeathArrow 4y ago
It's that really hard to buy from other online stores? Sure, you won't have all things together and you might have to use a few stores to replace Amazon, but overall it might be a better experience.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Amazon does have some major advantages in the "free shipping" areas, but those are starting to be outclassed, especially as Prime becomes more and more shit. The "free delivery" minimums are pretty easy to hit at some place like Walmart or Target or Home Depot, and often it's just free shipping period. And since 2day shipping is dead at Amazon even with prime, you just start cart-collecting and ship when it hits the amount. Or you pay shipping to places like Monoprice, rather do that than pay amazon "more" for the "same thing (literally)" with free shipping.
sharemywin 4y ago
I think maybe Amazon's algo is wrong. I've seen alot of people comment that they search for a brand and get crap instead. I would think they need to take the fees they charge for a sale into account when serving ads. Also, people's previous history. If you don't buy crap don't show it high in the results. And, intent. are they really searching for a new product or just using search to find the product/brand they want
- jefftk 4y ago
  > I would think they need to take the fees they charge for a sale into account when serving ads. Why do you think they don't? This is exactly the sort of thing I would expect Amazon to get right.
  - sharemywin 4y ago
    feels like they are just maximizing ad revenue
softwaredoug 4y ago
From https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-... > Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. What do you do when a product serves two customers (shoppers and advertisers?)
- mlhpdx 4y ago
  Profit?
  - TheRealNGenius 4y ago
    [dead]
algoatecorn 4y ago
What I gather from the comments is that perhaps Amazon is facing a goodwill issue and their advertising budget is a function of that. What is the play here? Should Amazon focus on quality goods from quality suppliers in order to rebuild brand trust?
mabbo 4y ago
I keep trying to explain to people: they aren't "ads" they are "pay for customers to ever see your product". It's an extortion ring, basically. Just like nobody ever opens page 2 of Google search, people rarely scroll down very far on Amazon's product search page. These "ads" just put the highest bidders' products at the top-K spots (and K keeps increasing) so that customers aren't see the most relevant products, just the ones who paid the most money. Amazon spent 20+ years building customer trust. Now it's reaping its reward by selling it off wholesale.
- skizm 4y ago
  It is similar to all the subscriptions for social networks now (snap, meta, twitter) that will boost your posts if you're a subscriber. The top posts will have X% of sponsored or boosted content and X will grow over time (to increase revenue).
- Drblessing 4y ago
  You don't like it? Don't shop at Amazon!
  - stephenitis 4y ago
    oddly defensive of Amazon here. I think the criticism is warranted given that Amazon's core ecommerce product is a shadow of it's former self.
    - Drblessing 4y ago
      "It's an extortion ring... Now it's reaping its reward by selling [customer trust] off wholesale." I think this is hyperbolic. In my experience, they continue to deliver great products at reasonable prices, especially given inflation. I can regularly find the same products cheaper on Amazon than local brick and mortar retailers, as well as online Walmart and other online venues. If this is selling off my trust, they can keep selling it.
      - stephenitis 4y ago
skizm 4y ago
Buying things these days: Go to amazon search for product. Find something that looks reasonable. Confirm review section has a reasonable distribution of stars and check out a few 1 and 3/4 star reviews (hope they're written by a human) and see if there are any deal breakers. Go to google and enter "<amazon product I'm interested in> reddit reviews". Go to reddit read reviews and hope they're not written by astroturf accounts, bots, or chatgpt (have to manually review accounts). If reddit confirms the product is okay, then I check if I can find it directly on a company site to order direct. If yes, have to confirm with reddit again to make sure the site is reliable and does returns / replacements, etc. If yes, buy direct. If no, go back to amazon to buy product there.
- animal_spirits 4y ago
  Something I heard recently on the cortex podcast is that Amazon is changing customer's understanding of how shipping works. While it is easy to set up a direct to consumer platform for a shop to sell their own goods, the shipping costs surprise the users because they are used to free shipping through Amazon.
  - nickff 4y ago
    Amazon is extremely organized (in terms of stock and shipping) and quite good at logistics, so it's very difficult to compete against them on that basis.
  - jimt1234 4y ago
    Unfortunately, I can confirm this. When I purchase something like a t-shirt outside of Amazon, it feels weird to pay $8 for shipping, but it feels like forever waiting 10 days to actually receive it. It's not the end of the world, but yeah, Amazon has conditioned me.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  What’s the slowest part of this process?
qizzy 4y ago
I bought an echo dot on a whim. I was going to post in the thread about Alexa's 'failure' about how miserable the experience was, how demanding of access it was, how little function it delivered in return. But the second half of that story - the reason it led to me blacklisting Amazon belongs here: A day or two after installing the Echo Dot, I wrote a very personal and long postponed email to my sister. We haven't communicated much in years. But COVID ended our mother's life, and ultimately lead to me having a heart attack and being diagnosed with a genetic condition. I wanted to pick up on something she said about memories of the house we shared growing up. I mentioned, in brief, the table tennis set up, and the bright red, multi-layered, over engineered table tennis bat I was bought as a youngster. I wanted to note that it was more expensive than those of my two elder siblings - and I didn't really know why that was the case. I was gently making a concession about the dynamics of our family and how maybe they said something about us as people - fourty years later. - as sensitively as I could, in the face of estrangement, mental health issues for both of us, family tragedy, the march of time on our bodies. The next time I logged into Amazon - I was confronted by page after page of adverts for over engineered bright red table tennis bats. End of relationship with Amazon. I rarely use hotmail for personal emails, so maybe that was how the information leaked. But I doubt that. I think it was about that Echo dot sitting their verifying my identity as an amazon customer. Amazon getting 'people' so wrong is - for me - just one of many signs that the FAANG's business model of the last 15, 20 years - is utterly doomed. Anyone thinking that opportunities to do better aren't staring the rest of us in the face, needs to wake up, and realise they maybe insects, in economic terms, but they're living on dinosaurs. Don't allow yourself to be decieved into thinking your current "host" is the only one that could ever provide you with an environment to survive, or thrive. The West seemingly will not allow anything resembling a meteor strike. Rather it would delay and absorp any change over as long a period as possible. I tend to believe that we're actually doing what people in history have always done, when they end up looking very silly and naive: succumbing heavily to recency bias. Evolution and History will eventually have it's way. Human identities and the makings of relationships are not the shallow constructs we have learned to consider them as. A flag and a brand do not show you what is inside. Convenience is forgettable if there is something more personal at stake, any half-decent alternative will do. It's the organisations who know what that means who will come good. I can't help but think, in a quasi-manic hyperconnected way, that this ties in very neatly with what "AI" is going to give us, how it is best considered. And also the need for verified identities. From the moment the web arrived, I prized anonymity, and never paid a subscription. Twenty years later - I see the limits of that approach as fundamental to why the web has turned out to be such a terrible, traumatic, unsatisfying experience. In that one instance, it was clear to me, that they'll steal your identity and tell you what it means to be you. What you can have, as well as what turns you on. Hence I am actually excited about a future where I can demonstrate my identity as my "property", harness that in ways that will satisfy me. And that will include paying for services that work better for me.
geodel 4y ago
Ads are to Amazon now what finance was to GE. Suddenly there are ways to make infinite money without continuous huge expense on physical infrastructure. Slowly other divisions will look like too much hassle for little gain when ads can generate 10s of billion dollars without millions of sq. ft warehouses which are anyway hell-holes as per media.
tracerbulletx 4y ago
When you walk in your local grocery store and see a Pepsi display with a football player or something and a big stack of Pepsi products right there how do you all think that happens?
- fuzzylightbulb 4y ago
  When you ask the shopkeeper where the Pepsi is, and he insists on showing you a Coke knockoff while actively hiding the Pepsi from sight, that is when you stop patronizing the store. This is what people in this thread are fired up about.
- Loughla 4y ago
  This thread is showing me that a shocking number of people have never considered that the layout of the stores they shop in are not either arbitrary or necessarily based on what's best for the customer.
  - oblio 4y ago
    Loss leaders are the epitome of user hostile. Bread, milk, butter, etc the farthest away from the entrance so you can't just go in and out.
anonymous344 4y ago
what this slotting fee does, is the same as one induvidual would own all the city buildings in a small city - price of rent goes up up up, price of products go up up up, and then its just empty, everyb goes shopping somewhere else. i never buy these products because u know its a scam of 800% margin. there are no products anymore that are decent priced. it all like thai taxi mafia
kadder 4y ago
[dead]

308 points by solalf 4y ago

jesuspiece 4y ago

This is egregious imo. Amazon needs to be broken up

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bmitc 4y ago
A deleted comment: > Is it? Newspapers aren’t exactly thriving and it’s not because of Amazon. Would you have a problem if a random local newspaper company had significant influence over what 50% of the U.S. bought, watched, read, listened to, ate, and needed for medical purposes in addition to market power that made it stay that way?
montagg 4y ago
Walmart too. And Target. And grocery stores. I am not sure people are really prepared to take the implication of how unfair Amazon seems to its logical conclusion, because it means undermining a lot of what makes us comfortable in modern life under capitalism. Regulation targeted at increasing competition (breakups, rather than regulation Amazon as a monopoly of a kind and entrenching them) might result in a better outcome, or it just might make things more expensive and then you have to repeat the same breakup and regulation process again every 15 years.
- freejazz 4y ago
  Isn't that inevitably the result if you want the cheapest thing? I pay a little more and I never shop at amazon.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > undermining a lot of what makes us comfortable in modern life under capitalism I read Wealth of Nations, did I miss the part where it says: "you should have a single global company control most of the market"? Every economist writes about importance of competition. If you want to keep around giant monopolies, you are not capitalist.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    On a global scale, it helps if your country is where all the biggest companies are coming from, especially to compete with big companies from other countries.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      You could make the same argument fir trade barriers, protectionism, subsidies, etc. It also comes across as "two wrongs make a right"
TheDong 4y ago
The retail and ads portions here seem inextricably linked. It does not seem possible to treat those as separate things. What's more, if you tell amazon "no more retail ads", surely they can just do what normal stores do, and charge a slotting fee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee) instead. If right now the first 10 results on amazon.com for "mattress" are all ads because those companies paid $1000 to be advertised first, how is that meaningfully different from amazon only carrying 10 mattresses at all, and instead of charging ad fees, charging a $1000 slotting fee to the mattress companies? I am not particularly arguing for or against anything, just speculating that breaking it up would, in practice, be hard. Perhaps some other regulatory action would work better.
- junofan 4y ago
  There’s a $40bn/yr business here. I’m sure somebody can figure out how to decouple. Also, many breakup scenarios for Amazon involve spinning out the fulfillment business. Who cares if Amazon.com stocks 10 mattresses if I can just build a competitor stocking 10,000 while using the same infrastructure.
MangoCoffee 4y ago
retail stores have been charging for shelf space for decades.
dralley 4y ago
Lots of these companies need to be broken up. Facebook in particular given that their erroneous metrics literally put several media companies out of business. Not only did they charge for nonexistent engagement, but the BS engagement numbers they were providing were so enticing that it created a huge push towards expensive-to-create video content. https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccurate-video-metrics-inflation-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccu...
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  thats some proper good old fashioned fraud
throwswaydollar 4y ago
Google Should be broken up first
Zetice 4y ago
What? Why? Volume of revenue is not a reason to break up a company.
- oblio 4y ago
  Conflict of interest. Making a platform and using it yourself naturally corrupts you, the incentives are too strong.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    What interest is conflicting, exactly? Seems like interests would be pretty perfectly aligned to maximize revenue.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      Yes, at the expwnse of their customers and the law. Thats what conflict of onterest means
      - Zetice 4y ago
        That doesn’t make sense, because if their costumer isn’t satisfied, they can use another online store.
- freejazz 4y ago
  It could be if it makes up the entire market...
  - Zetice 4y ago
    Except it doesn't, not even remotely; there are dozens of other ways of buying things online, people just choose not to.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      Except the issue isn't whether there are "dozens of other ways of buying things online, people just choose not to" but whether Amazon's market share is so large as to prohibit anyone from being able to compete with it.

deleted 4y ago

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yla92 4y ago

Is it me or there is this weird double vertical scrollbars? https://i.imgur.com/Upjzoth.png https://i.imgur.com/Upjzoth.png

yesenadam 4y ago
Same for me. Yup, weird.
your_challenger 4y ago
Same for me. Annoying!
berkle4455 4y ago
It's the clear:after psuedo-element on <div class="Footer-inner clear">
- benedictevans 4y ago
  It’s a bug somewhere in my custom layout code conflicting with a recent squarespace change and I’m not enough of a developer to fix it yet :(

cheeselip420 4y ago

So the companies that sell on Amazon pay money to Amazon (from the revenues they get from Amazon's customers) to have their products listed more favorably than competitors (one of which is actually Amazon). I can see how this seems advantageous and monopolistic for Amazon...

scarface74 4y ago
Or the same thing every company in retail has done forever
- tyoma 4y ago
  Remember when Amazon listed private label brands, like every retailer has done for decades if not longer, and there was a collective freak out?
  - peanuty1 4y ago
    I think the freak-out was that Amazon was leveraging its data to create copycat products.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      I assume all businesses do this, before Amazon ever existed.
- Regnore 4y ago
  How many options are there for retail?
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    In the US, each area usually has Costco/Walmart/Target, Best Buy/Apple, Home Depot/Lowes, Staples/OfficeDepot, Kroger/Albertsons/regional grocer, Nordstrom/Macys/Kohls/Old Navy/Gap.
- 4y ago

irjustin 4y ago

Anecdotally, I was connected to a number of people on the Ads team and years ago, the upper ups in the G machine were already extremely nervous of Amazon's internal ads system. Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search.

KVFinn 4y ago
>Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search. Ironically Amazon has been so aggressive with the ads recently I've lost all trust in searching on Amazon itself. I'm back to using Google to find the Amazon product page. On Amazon I search for a specific brand and model and it's on page 4, buried until endless sponsored products. I have to go my order history to find the product page now. Sometimes the Amazon search is not just all endless products but literally incorrect products, stuff that I would have to return if I bought it by accident. Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size. Amazon product search feels not just bad but actively hostile, something I have to fight against to find the thing I actually want.
- mrDmrTmrJ 4y ago
  Strongly agree. Dropped prime after I Amazon adds mean I couldn't find what I wanted. Now use google to find specific stuff on D2C websites (probably Shopify) and spend less. It's great!
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    I dropped prime after "two-day shipping on all orders" had degenerated into "we'll deliver it when we feel like it, and you can't get two-day shipping even if you're willing to pay extra for it".
    - flangola7 4y ago
      What even is Prime without faster shipping?

prawn 4y ago

I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. I assume that there's either an internal push to become more like Amazon, or consultants pitch this approach to them and it's hard to resist. I wonder what the numbers are for supermarkets and the way they prioritise shelf placements? A friend had a big contract recently going around and hi-res photographing shelf-positioning in a massive supermarket chain. Every aisle. And then eye-scanning tests and analysis on legibility meant it was all used to upsell brands fighting for premium positioning.

peanuty1 4y ago
> I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. Best Buy and Walmart do this too (allowing third-parties to list products on their website).
jhhh 4y ago
They did the same thing for Walmart+ and honestly it's pretty terrible. Every business is going to try to be amazon now and while it's probably going to make money in the short term it'll eventually poison their brand. I want to know the hot sauce I'm going to buy isn't sold by some random dude who will send me expired items. I want to know the hard drives I'm going to buy are actually new. Same thing with newegg.
dazc 4y ago
'I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website...' This is certainly a trend led, I am guessing, by troves of internal search data that suggests people are searching for things they don't have the capacity to stock themselves.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  In a way, it feels like lying to the customer. "Do you stock purple widgets?" "No, we're Red Widget Emporium" is not an inappropriate answer. If anything, it improves the trust angle-- you're the experts on Red Widgets rather than a mile-wide-six-inches-deep generalist. I generally don't want to buy sheet lumber and breakfast cereal at the same store. "We'll pretend we stock it but actually hand you to a second tier vendor who you'd never go to directly" is less compelling somehow.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Original HN title used the information in the second line from the blog post, something like: "In 2021 Amazon ad revenue [was] more than the entire global newspaper industry." Hence some of the comments focus on newspaper business.

bboygravity 4y ago
That's a weird comparison. IMO most newspapers fall under "ads" as well. Political ads.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
Thats why quality of news coverage has gone to shit, and democracy is struggling. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
- achenet 4y ago
  I blame television + social media favoring stupid, anger inducing soundbites over well thought out rhetoric. And Duverger's law [0] leading to a duopoly of two political parties who spend all their time bickering and scheming to get more power because they've decided politics is a football game where the goal is to score more than the other team and not a civic duty to run the country for the benefit of the people. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

Semaphor 4y ago

I went to Amazon without an ad blocker for the first time yesterday (wanted to try the fakespot service, but it requires an extension and "access all" so I created a clean profile for it). I was surprised how many ads there were on Amazon, I thought the situation was already bad with an ad blocker, considering they show a lot of hard-coded ads, but wow.

mym1990 4y ago
I am generally getting overwhelmed with ads coming from every nook and cranny of life to the point that I don't even want to buy stuff anymore, for a lot of it its like: whats the point?
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Luckily, I mostly don’t see any ads. Only for work, and on Amazon pretty much. Some more as product placement and in the physical world, but not a ton.
  - Moru 4y ago
    I love the new ad displays in the local shopping mall. They use LCD screens rotated 90 degrees and my sunglases are just the wrong filter angle so they become nice black displays for me. Physical adblocker :-)
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      My wife commented on how shitty some ambulance chaser ad was and all I could see was a black display. Now I want a law that requires all billboards and other such ads to be properly polarized so they can be blocked :-)
- Anon4Now 4y ago
  If you use Chrome, then switch to another browser that allows full adblocker functionality. I use Firefox with UBlock Origin and hardly see any ads.

ankit219 4y ago

> the ‘retail media’ gold rush: the realisation that a high-traffic website or app could be ad inventory even if you’re not a media company, that you have very relevant ‘consented’ first party data (at the very least intent if not broader profiles) and probably purchase attribution too, that all of this now has more relative value given the push against cookies and third party data everywhere else - and that advertising margins are a lot higher than retail margins. I think it's not visitors, but repeat users which makes it possible and so valuable. This is going to be the next phase of Adtech. Uber has a $500M run rate from ads, Walmart has $2.7B (from the same article), and evidently more and more companies will discover, if you can aggregate traffic to some decent level, you can monetize it with first party data. This advantage is only going to increase once we see Android launch their own version of tracking consent, and Chrome gets rid of cookies. A good horizontal play here is to sell targeting, attribution, and profiling services to all these "aggregators of traffic". Not sure about the revenues per se, but I think Doordash, Expedia, Robinhood, Airbnb could also potentially generate ad revenue at low cost just based how much traffic (and repeat users) they get

Scarblac 4y ago
But it will come at least somewhat at the expense of their core business, surely? An Airbnb with ads looks a lot less trustworthy than one without, I think.
- reinsdyr 4y ago
  I already don't trust airbnb because of their random fees they keep applying after actually putting in my information. And their general unreliability when it comes to supporting hosts and costumers.
  - TeamMCS 4y ago
    One tip you may appreciate is to use the Australian version of airbnb (.au), their regulators require them to show the true cost of the rental, including all fees in the headline price. It operates exactly the same as your regional airbnb once you switch the location and currency. For example, switching to USD and searching for apartments in California

Xelbair 4y ago

Could a web designers finally stop messing up with the scrolling? This one works fine when you scroll the wheel, but when you use middle click and drag to scroll i just moves one single step.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

Amazon is really shit now. You try to buy a product and instead of showing you the actual brands it just shows you alibaba scam products. I have to go to other sites and find the actual products and then search directly on amazon. It won’t be long before I just stop using amazon altogether.

didntreadarticl 4y ago
What Shopping On Amazon Feels Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30
muspimerol 4y ago
I think (hope?) it's the beginning of a long, slow decline for Amazon as a marketplace, unless they fix this. This distrustful sentiment is something I hear from a lot of younger people (<40 year olds). I didn't even notice it myself until recently, but I am buying more and more stuff directly from other niche e-commerce websites, because I know half of the search results on Amazon are a scam.
- SomeHacker44 4y ago
  In NYC, B&H has free next day delivery and many of the same tech products. Microcenter has nice stores and price matches.
  - sithadmin 4y ago
    B&H has great selection and prices, but man I don't like giving my money to a business that's strongly aligned to Satmar fundamentalism (which perpetrates all manner of social regressivism) and has a history of abusing workers that don't share the management's religion or skin color. I've demoted them to 'retailer of last resort' status for my personal shopping.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    In the middle of nowhere flyover, B&H has true 2 day delivery for no extra cost. Their prices are competitive with anywhere else as well. It's astounding. I also like that they close the purchase feature for Shabbat. That feels nice, like a personal touch to an anonymous website.

harriet1 4y ago

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oefrha 4y ago

Somewhat tangential, the second graph shows not just Amazon, but every big tech’s advertising revenue growing like crazy year over year from 2016 to 2021, particularly Google and Facebook. Growth slowed a bit in 2020 (still grew nonetheless) but rebounded hard in 2021. Excuse the question from someone who don’t pay attention to the ad industry at all: WTF happened to the popular narrative at the time that companies were cutting ad spend during covid?

Macha 4y ago
It was very short lived as an overall trend and while some big physical venue based advertising (e.g. for Disneyland) did stay low for years, online and digital products (like say Disney+) more than made up for it

juujian 4y ago

What's interesting is that in this model a lot of companies might be paying for ads without ever seeing a return, because they cannot outbid those at the top. In that case, Amazon would be sponging up money from a lot of players and returning it to a few. Which would be ok, but the problem is that you can either play the game or drop out. So it becomes a little bit of a gig economy thing where in theory you're free but in practice companies are squeezing you for everything.

rippercushions 4y ago
That's not how online ads work? You bid for ad space, but you pay only if you get clicks, and are booted out fast if you don't get any. If you're always outbid, or nobody clicks on your ads, your spend is zero.
- juujian 4y ago
  You would be right about that. "Sellers only pay the ad fee when a potential customer clicks on their Amazon listing. If no one clicks then there's no cost. As your ad is representative of your product and your Amazon listing is professional, you should be able to get a sale out of a significant number of your clicks" (Sep 21, 2021). If it's still like that, yeah that's different.

DeathArrow 4y ago

I never encountered ads on Amazon, so out of curiosity I disabled uBlock Origin and visited Amazon. It seems that the ads are for products sold on Amazon. Clicking an ad redirects you to the product page. Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps? Ads on the revenue service website? I think ads play the biggest part in why the Internet is so fill with junk today, to the point you have to sift through mountains of trash to find something genuinely useful.

wil421 4y ago
You know you can pay eBay to promote your listing. That is pretty much what they mean by ads in this case. Someone is paying to be the top spot or be promoted on search results.
- deepGem 4y ago
  I think Amazon has an ad network of sorts, so sellers bid for the sponsored search slot. In retailers who don't have such a platform, merchandisers take the call and boost/bury products in search results.
  - wil421 4y ago
    Ahh, that makes sense. It also explains why I see certain sellers ads everywhere from time to time.
deepGem 4y ago
Ads on Amazon are far more annoying than ads on other web properties, because I go to Amazon for a very specific need. I search for Tide washing liquid and I see these sponsored products on top, way above the Tide result. From a purist viewpoint, this is disgusting. I have to come to you Amazon, to just give me what I want, not what you think I want. That said, there isn't a better alternative so I just ignore the ads and go for the product no matter how far down the page that product appears.

DeathArrow 4y ago

It's that really hard to buy from other online stores? Sure, you won't have all things together and you might have to use a few stores to replace Amazon, but overall it might be a better experience.

bombcar 4y ago
Amazon does have some major advantages in the "free shipping" areas, but those are starting to be outclassed, especially as Prime becomes more and more shit. The "free delivery" minimums are pretty easy to hit at some place like Walmart or Target or Home Depot, and often it's just free shipping period. And since 2day shipping is dead at Amazon even with prime, you just start cart-collecting and ship when it hits the amount. Or you pay shipping to places like Monoprice, rather do that than pay amazon "more" for the "same thing (literally)" with free shipping.

sharemywin 4y ago

I think maybe Amazon's algo is wrong. I've seen alot of people comment that they search for a brand and get crap instead. I would think they need to take the fees they charge for a sale into account when serving ads. Also, people's previous history. If you don't buy crap don't show it high in the results. And, intent. are they really searching for a new product or just using search to find the product/brand they want

jefftk 4y ago
> I would think they need to take the fees they charge for a sale into account when serving ads. Why do you think they don't? This is exactly the sort of thing I would expect Amazon to get right.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  feels like they are just maximizing ad revenue

softwaredoug 4y ago

From https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-... > Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. What do you do when a product serves two customers (shoppers and advertisers?)

mlhpdx 4y ago
Profit?
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago
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algoatecorn 4y ago

What I gather from the comments is that perhaps Amazon is facing a goodwill issue and their advertising budget is a function of that. What is the play here? Should Amazon focus on quality goods from quality suppliers in order to rebuild brand trust?

mabbo 4y ago

I keep trying to explain to people: they aren't "ads" they are "pay for customers to ever see your product". It's an extortion ring, basically. Just like nobody ever opens page 2 of Google search, people rarely scroll down very far on Amazon's product search page. These "ads" just put the highest bidders' products at the top-K spots (and K keeps increasing) so that customers aren't see the most relevant products, just the ones who paid the most money. Amazon spent 20+ years building customer trust. Now it's reaping its reward by selling it off wholesale.

skizm 4y ago
It is similar to all the subscriptions for social networks now (snap, meta, twitter) that will boost your posts if you're a subscriber. The top posts will have X% of sponsored or boosted content and X will grow over time (to increase revenue).
Drblessing 4y ago
You don't like it? Don't shop at Amazon!
- stephenitis 4y ago
  oddly defensive of Amazon here. I think the criticism is warranted given that Amazon's core ecommerce product is a shadow of it's former self.
  - Drblessing 4y ago
    "It's an extortion ring... Now it's reaping its reward by selling [customer trust] off wholesale." I think this is hyperbolic. In my experience, they continue to deliver great products at reasonable prices, especially given inflation. I can regularly find the same products cheaper on Amazon than local brick and mortar retailers, as well as online Walmart and other online venues. If this is selling off my trust, they can keep selling it.
    - stephenitis 4y ago

skizm 4y ago

Buying things these days: Go to amazon search for product. Find something that looks reasonable. Confirm review section has a reasonable distribution of stars and check out a few 1 and 3/4 star reviews (hope they're written by a human) and see if there are any deal breakers. Go to google and enter "<amazon product I'm interested in> reddit reviews". Go to reddit read reviews and hope they're not written by astroturf accounts, bots, or chatgpt (have to manually review accounts). If reddit confirms the product is okay, then I check if I can find it directly on a company site to order direct. If yes, have to confirm with reddit again to make sure the site is reliable and does returns / replacements, etc. If yes, buy direct. If no, go back to amazon to buy product there.

animal_spirits 4y ago
Something I heard recently on the cortex podcast is that Amazon is changing customer's understanding of how shipping works. While it is easy to set up a direct to consumer platform for a shop to sell their own goods, the shipping costs surprise the users because they are used to free shipping through Amazon.
- nickff 4y ago
  Amazon is extremely organized (in terms of stock and shipping) and quite good at logistics, so it's very difficult to compete against them on that basis.
- jimt1234 4y ago
  Unfortunately, I can confirm this. When I purchase something like a t-shirt outside of Amazon, it feels weird to pay $8 for shipping, but it feels like forever waiting 10 days to actually receive it. It's not the end of the world, but yeah, Amazon has conditioned me.
moneywoes 4y ago
What’s the slowest part of this process?

qizzy 4y ago

I bought an echo dot on a whim. I was going to post in the thread about Alexa's 'failure' about how miserable the experience was, how demanding of access it was, how little function it delivered in return. But the second half of that story - the reason it led to me blacklisting Amazon belongs here: A day or two after installing the Echo Dot, I wrote a very personal and long postponed email to my sister. We haven't communicated much in years. But COVID ended our mother's life, and ultimately lead to me having a heart attack and being diagnosed with a genetic condition. I wanted to pick up on something she said about memories of the house we shared growing up. I mentioned, in brief, the table tennis set up, and the bright red, multi-layered, over engineered table tennis bat I was bought as a youngster. I wanted to note that it was more expensive than those of my two elder siblings - and I didn't really know why that was the case. I was gently making a concession about the dynamics of our family and how maybe they said something about us as people - fourty years later. - as sensitively as I could, in the face of estrangement, mental health issues for both of us, family tragedy, the march of time on our bodies. The next time I logged into Amazon - I was confronted by page after page of adverts for over engineered bright red table tennis bats. End of relationship with Amazon. I rarely use hotmail for personal emails, so maybe that was how the information leaked. But I doubt that. I think it was about that Echo dot sitting their verifying my identity as an amazon customer. Amazon getting 'people' so wrong is - for me - just one of many signs that the FAANG's business model of the last 15, 20 years - is utterly doomed. Anyone thinking that opportunities to do better aren't staring the rest of us in the face, needs to wake up, and realise they maybe insects, in economic terms, but they're living on dinosaurs. Don't allow yourself to be decieved into thinking your current "host" is the only one that could ever provide you with an environment to survive, or thrive. The West seemingly will not allow anything resembling a meteor strike. Rather it would delay and absorp any change over as long a period as possible. I tend to believe that we're actually doing what people in history have always done, when they end up looking very silly and naive: succumbing heavily to recency bias. Evolution and History will eventually have it's way. Human identities and the makings of relationships are not the shallow constructs we have learned to consider them as. A flag and a brand do not show you what is inside. Convenience is forgettable if there is something more personal at stake, any half-decent alternative will do. It's the organisations who know what that means who will come good. I can't help but think, in a quasi-manic hyperconnected way, that this ties in very neatly with what "AI" is going to give us, how it is best considered. And also the need for verified identities. From the moment the web arrived, I prized anonymity, and never paid a subscription. Twenty years later - I see the limits of that approach as fundamental to why the web has turned out to be such a terrible, traumatic, unsatisfying experience. In that one instance, it was clear to me, that they'll steal your identity and tell you what it means to be you. What you can have, as well as what turns you on. Hence I am actually excited about a future where I can demonstrate my identity as my "property", harness that in ways that will satisfy me. And that will include paying for services that work better for me.

geodel 4y ago

Ads are to Amazon now what finance was to GE. Suddenly there are ways to make infinite money without continuous huge expense on physical infrastructure. Slowly other divisions will look like too much hassle for little gain when ads can generate 10s of billion dollars without millions of sq. ft warehouses which are anyway hell-holes as per media.

tracerbulletx 4y ago

When you walk in your local grocery store and see a Pepsi display with a football player or something and a big stack of Pepsi products right there how do you all think that happens?

fuzzylightbulb 4y ago
When you ask the shopkeeper where the Pepsi is, and he insists on showing you a Coke knockoff while actively hiding the Pepsi from sight, that is when you stop patronizing the store. This is what people in this thread are fired up about.
Loughla 4y ago
This thread is showing me that a shocking number of people have never considered that the layout of the stores they shop in are not either arbitrary or necessarily based on what's best for the customer.
- oblio 4y ago
  Loss leaders are the epitome of user hostile. Bread, milk, butter, etc the farthest away from the entrance so you can't just go in and out.

anonymous344 4y ago

what this slotting fee does, is the same as one induvidual would own all the city buildings in a small city - price of rent goes up up up, price of products go up up up, and then its just empty, everyb goes shopping somewhere else. i never buy these products because u know its a scam of 800% margin. there are no products anymore that are decent priced. it all like thai taxi mafia

kadder 4y ago

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