Comment by Analemma_
2 days ago
This was Amazon's huge bet on Alexa: that if you made a frictionless way to buy products by saying "computer, buy me [thing]", then people would use it and then you could sell favored placement on it.
It was a total failure. I know lots of people-- both technical and non-technical-- who have Alexa devices, and not one of them has ever bought anything with it. You can read various comments from Amazon insiders confirming that the rate of buying things with Alexa was close to zero. And why not? It's the shittiest possible way to shop, like buying a lottery ticket except where the RNG is knowingly gamed. This is why Amazon is writing off Alexa entirely.
I've commented to this effect before, but "what if people could shop sight unseen" is a PM fantasy, not a thing anybody actually wants. LLMs might be useful for helping with research and comparison shopping, but the "one-click [or one-prompt] buying" workflow is not gonna happen.
Favored placement is never going to work but I would use Alexa for repeat purchases: “hey Alexa I bought some Crocs shoes a year ago. Can you reorder it?”.
Or purchases where I know exactly what I want but don’t want to search and add to cart manually: “buy a new 3 foot USB-C braided cable from Anker”.
> “hey Alexa I bought some Crocs shoes a year ago. Can you reorder it?”
But this is exactly what Amazon can't do. Basically all Crocs (crocss, croks, crox) on Amazon are counterfeit, and they don't even have a record of which ones they pulled out of the bin last year to send to you so they can try to grab the same countefeits; and the company that listed them a year ago is probably on their fifty-second name change since then, and the "Satan's anus green" that you chose because it was half the price of the other colors is now "Satin Annux Green" at 2x the price of the other colors…
I have been ordering the same Crocs from Amazon for about 8 years now. I don’t think I have ever received counterfeit Crocs from Amazon. I basically go to “my orders” page in the app, search for the last order and then reorder. I do have to make sure they have not jacked up the price because the price fluctuates quite a bit for that shoe I buy. And I make sure the ratings for the third-party seller are very good before ordering. They can definitely have Alexa automate this entire workflow (“hey the shoes cost $20 more than last time. Do you still want them?” Or “the shoe is only available from a different third-party seller. Do you still want them? This third-party seller only has a 90% positive rating”).
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