I even have seen items that were listed as “Amazon’s Choice” for “[specific brand name] [product type]”. I.E. this Acme brand widget is Amazon’s Choice in the category “Acme brand widgets”.
This part I absolutely agree with. (Not in the way you might think)
How Bezos spent billions of other peoples money building this little enterprise while keeping majorly control is absolutely beyond me. Kudos for that.
The actual running of the physical side of his company is beyond shortsighted. He is quickly running through every available worker like he doesn’t care if the company still exists in 10 years. (Most likely he doesn’t)
I personally prefer to order stuff directly from the manufacturer. Most of them have competitive pricing (duh!) and OK service. I hope more of them will cut out the middle man and build their own little webshop. Multinational box movers (like Amazon) offend me. They don’t make anything, They do not add any value (for me) beyond a box.
Storage, orderpicking and slapping a stamp on it is not “tech”: it is logistics and should be valued as such. Like the catalogs of old.
Other aspects of Amazon I find amazing (AWS) : that is something that could only have been built if you are spending stupid amounts of other peoples money.
I am very ambivalent about Amazon’s search. On the one hand, it drives me crazy when most of the items are different than what I asked for, even when using the filters. But there have also been times when some of those items happen to be exactly what I need, but under a different name.
It is astonishingly bad. Just unbelievable.
E.g., I search in books for “Sudoku” and a few of the first hits are crossword puzzle books. Then the next page is almost exclusively crossword books, and on and on.
I was trying to search for a regular old garden hose recently. Almost all the results are those crappy expandable hoses. There seemed no way to put in terms to avoid getting those results.
All too often I search using Google with site set as amazon.com.
And somehow they’ve made the side-bar search narrowing options even worse. And of course everytime I blink they reset. No, I still want Prime delivery only, etc.
I don’t know what’s going on with you, but as an experiment I went to Amazon (in incognito mode, so my own search history wouldn’t bias the results) and searched for sudoku. Looking at a few pages’ worth of results, all were sudoku books except for a few “sponsored” hits that were other kinds of puzzle books, and none were crossword puzzles.
I buy only 20" Schwalbe bicycle tires (exact search string) for my handcycle.
Yet on just the first page, first row was a 28" tire. Second row included a knobby motorcycle tire.
From the fourth row on was a mishmash of Schwalbes in different sizes, 2 Michelins, Finnci, Ritchey, Bell, Kujo and Kenda, some in other than 20" sizes. Yet the second page contained several Schwalbes in 20".
Okay, I’ll play.
I searched for “20” Schwalbe bicycle tires" (without the quotation marks).
The majority of the hits (at least on the first page) are for Schwalbe bicycle tires, but I don’t see a size in the product description. If I click through to the product page, there’s a pull-down menu to select a size, and one or two 20" tires are among the choices. (For some there are lots of size choices, for others only a few.)
The only one I see that says 28" is a " Schwalbe Big Ben Reflex 11100567 Bicycle Tyres 28 x 2.00 Black"; but on the product page for that one, the dimensions are listed as 20 x 2.5 x 20 inches, and the pull-down menu to select a size offers 20" x 2/3 or 28" x 2/3.
There are some “bad” hits too, though, like the “best seller” Schwinn Replacement Bike Tire, Cruiser Bike, 26 x 1.95-Inch , Black with Kevlar Bead, which seems only to be 26 inches.
Which proves there’s something wonky with the search engine. We should both get the same results.
Yeah, some tires do get one listing for multiple sizes, that’s not what I was griping about.
This hints at the answer and as alluded to by other replies the search works to Amazon’s benefit. Amazon have been accused of copying products that sell very well and then burying those original products so you are more likely to find and buy the Amazon copy.
It’s terrible behaviour and is letting down their vendors. But because Amazon has such a grip on the market the vendors have nowhere else to go.
One thing that bugs me is when a listing (for a CD, for example) says “See all 15 formats and editions”…and when I click on it there are only 4 listed.
One thing that often happens is that businesses are not set up to track lost sales. So if you go to Amazon, the search blows it, you give up and go elsewhere they might not be aware that they lost a sale due to a bad search engine. The “fact” that the are selling other stuff to other people can fool them into thinking they’re doing fine.
Gimme a break. Amazon knows every item you ever looked at or put in a cart. They are profitable because they take these things seriously. They invest resources in this. What is most profitable, in terms of design or search is not always what the consumer most prefers.
Amazon also prefers sellers that use Amazon’s own delivery service. Very rarely will a search suggest to you an item that doesn’t. But it will show you Amazon made products first.
This may not be totally on topic, but Amazon had a really great recommendation system back when it was still mostly just books. It would suggest books based on what you had bought, and you could ask it not to include certain purchases, and tell it if you already owned it’s suggestions, or exclude them because you weren’t interested, helping it further pinpoint your tastes. After training it a bit, it really became spot-on about what I liked. Somehow, as the selection increased, those actually helpful suggestions disappeared, and now most of the things I am recommended are random junk I already own… because I bought them from Amazon.
I remember those days. I also remember all the bookmarks and free post-its. No more…
Sort of off-topic, but I had a somewhat amusing experience recently, involving a third party listing on Amazon.
I wanted a new microwave rice cooker. I had bought one from Amazon a couple years back, really liked it, and wanted to get a replacement as someone in the household had dropped ours, and broke off one of the handles. There was one still listed on Amazon “Only Three Left!!!”.
I placed the order.
A few days later it arrived.
From WalMart.
I have also ordered from Amazon and received a box from Walmart. A little checking shows that the Walmart Online price is lower than the Amazon price. Somebody found some arbitrage there, and it makes me cranky.
Often they don’t even add a box. Just a shipping label.
But that’s not what draws me to Amazon. And it’s not just the convenience of shopping from my desk.
It’s the wide variety of being able to find exactly what you’re looking for, or something close to it, without going to a dozen different stores. Yesterday I decided that I’d like a shoehorn that’s 30 inches long, to help me with my slipons without even sitting down. Yes, the search was stupid and gave me lots of shoehorns of other lengths, but after a screen or two I found something that looks good at a reasonable price, and I can expect it to arrive on Sunday. In less time that it would take to drive to a store, let alone actually find such an item there.
That’s the problem. It’s like the bricks-and-mortar stores realized people are doing a lot of shopping online, so they don’t stock as much in the stores. So, when you go to a b-a-m store, they don’t have what you want, and you go back to looking for it online.
My brother was visiting from Costa Rica earlier this month, and the spent one entire morning trying to find a few things in stores. He had to give up and get them from Amazon (to guarentee they’d arrive before the left).
I don’t know why anyone would bother going to a bricks-and-mortar store unless it’s something you need to try on and you’re under a time crunch.