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That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order
by dlcarrier 2y ago
That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order products chosen by Amazon, but they did not.
Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.
- crooked-v 2y agoI could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results. But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.
- CharlieDigital 2y agoThey probably understand, but the Alexa team are powerless to make the necessary changes without higher level executive initiative (as the way things go in big orgs like Amazon). Even something pragmatic like "why not restrict the available options to known brands" can have more nuance and can be far more complex than just coming up with a list of brands to whitelist.
- kstrauser 2y agoNailed it. If I could say "Alexa, order AAA batteries" and I'd get something generally recognizable as a legitimate brand at a reasonable price, I'd do it. If I were today to say "Alexa, buy milk", I'd fully expect to get a gallon of "Doctor Methy's Cow Juice" in a ziploc bag. There's no way I'd trust it to get me what I actually wanted.
- sixothree 2y agoA curated list of "household essentials" would go an extremely long way to making this useful. But as far as I know, they never really did anything of the sort.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoEven with that you have like 20 different configurations of the same toilet paper with various prices per foot and shipping speeds. I think that was what “amazons choice” was targeted at solving but I could be wrong.
- Marsymars 2y ago"Amazon's choice" is algorithmic. It's will often be two different products if you look at two different regional Amazon sites, even if both products are available on both sites at comparable pricing.
- FredPret 2y agoWhat are you talking about. KWYBLPOP makes the finest plastic knockoffs on the planet and has done so for the last five minutes straight.
- dlcarrier 2y agoThose weird brand names come from an odd method that Amazon uses to reduce counterfeit products. They require some sellers have a brand name filed with the US patent and trademark office. It can be difficult to get a trademark for something too generic or common, but if it's just a garbled string of characters, it's really easy to get approval. As far as those cheap imported products go, for any given type of product, they all come from the same handful of manufacturers, so which off brand doesn't really matter. Once I figure out which variation I want, I just want to be able to sort by price, and get the cheapest version. Amazon's maliciously broken sort-by-price feature already makes it difficult, but ordering through an Echo makes it impossible. I've ended up using eBay more than Amazon, as well as the occasional exporter like ALiexpress and TVCmall.
- rchaud 2y agoBack in 2019, every marketing conference was abuzz with hype for the latest in tech innovation: "voice as the primary interface for search". Hopefully those attendees diversified their plans with something timeless and battle-tested like "pivot to video".
- taeric 2y agoAmusingly, I hazard users probably were willing to forego comparison shopping for those little "refill buttons" that they made. Far more so than they do the ability to get frustrated with a talking assistant.