Comment by Brendinooo
15 hours ago
>If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place).
What if I made a new air fryer that hasn't received a lot of reviews and costs a little more because of its quality? How would I break through, if not ads?
There's also the fact that Amazon really doesn't know the best-reviewed item anyway, at least in any meaningful sense, since most reviews (including verified) are fake/inorganic.
Right. If the only metric was "best-reviewed" then more people would be faking reviews.
To be clear I'm not letting Amazon entirely off the hook here, but Seth's situation is somewhat unique in that "someone looking for a particular book" seems to me like a really different use case than "I want an air fryer".
And "Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive" falls a little flat when a main reason for shopping on Amazon is that their prices tend to be really good.
You pay Amazon $200 and give free product to Vine reviewers in exchange for a seed pool of "unbiased" reviews (see link below). If you're not worried about the risk of getting your seller account canceled, there are also other ways of manufacturing your initial sales and review volume.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...
> How would I break through, if not ads?
You wouldn't, your product would languish in obscurity and unless the searcher knew the exact actual product name forever be on page 200 of the search results (As a Sci-Fi book author I found this out the hard way). Influencers and having followers can also help your product break through, but that's about it. Self promotion of your product is usually actively discouraged or banned by many forums.
Perhaps you could title your next book "Seth Godin The Knot".
> How would I break through, if not ads?
Make YouTube videos. Food porn is a thing, and some subset of that crowd will want to watch you fry stuff with your "pro" fryer.
But you're in the air fryer production business, not in the food video production biz (which is really saturated). So you likely don't have the skills to launch a food porn channel organically, so you have to pay a youtuber, which is not the worst, but the yield would be unpredictable (and more costly to test). Sounds overall better than Amazon ads, though.
So, your alternative to ads is… Ads? If you’re making a YouTube channel to promote your product, that’s still an ad. It’s just taking you longer (and probably more money) to get it out.
This is up there with talk to your neighbors and put flyers on windshields.
It is a bandaid for a dysfunctional market with high transaction costs of trust(reputation) and triangulation(discovery).
Amazon only excells at low transfer cost - no negotiation and cheap delivery
I'm surprised there isn't a market for an amazon like competitor that is a mix of Amazon and Consumer Reports.
They do the reviews themselves, watch for returns and quality issues, and can actually provide consumers with the best products.
The point of this article is that, if Amazon doesnt want you do, then you wont.