Comment by Solvency
2 years ago
While it's obvious that this is somehow commercially/financially advantageous to Amazon, I'd love to know more about why. What are the economics behind the shovelware merchandise Amazon upranks to users?
2 years ago
While it's obvious that this is somehow commercially/financially advantageous to Amazon, I'd love to know more about why. What are the economics behind the shovelware merchandise Amazon upranks to users?
It's very simple. Amazon makes a lot of money on advertising and pay-for-placement within their store listings. So when you run a search, Amazon can easily make more money by showing items that they're paid the most to show, vs what you were actually looking for.
Yeah it's almost a double-dip in some ways because they are taking money from a product's competitor to show you their alternative when you search for what you actually want, and then when you still/eventually end up going to the product page for the thing you want and you buy that, and Amazon takes a cut of that sale too..
If it wasn't a super shitty user experience, it would be genius!
It looks like Amazon created the same thing Google did. Paying keywords for ranking and if you don’t they decide what comes up organically. They crawl and decide which goes into what order.
Right. Amazon profits, at least in the near-term, from the enshittification of Amazon. Results are obvious: it's a shitty experience.
Because just like Walmart, they're trying to get a price as low as possible to kill off competition. Amazon isn't "flooded" by these brands, they are purposefully seeking these sellers out and helping them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
> A seller in America might start with a brand idea and need to figure out how to get it manufactured; a seller connected to a factory in China’s manufacturing capital needs to figure out how to sell to Americans, which Amazon has been working hard to facilitate.
> “If a Chinese factory is able to give a better price than a seller in America, Amazon is happy with that,” said Kian Golzari, who works with marketplace sellers and corporate clients to source products from China.
If amazon sells a push broom for $10, why would would someone buy a push-broom from the local hardware store for $20?
Local hardware store struggles, eventually goes out of business...now everyone has no choice except to buy online, and guess who dominates that?
And now you're reliant on Amazon for everything.
Same thing Walmart did to endless communities across America. Dump stuff cheap in an area to starve all the local businesses to death, and then everyone had no choice but to buy everything from, and work at, walmart. And if anyone gets uppity about unions, close the store and now everyone within an hour has to drive even further to get anything...so everyone is terrified of any sort of workplace organization.