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If it feels as though Amazon's site is increasingly stuffed with ads, that's because it is. And it looks like that's working — at least for brands that are willing to fork over ad dollars as part of their strategy to sell on Amazon.
Amazon-sponsored product ads have been around since 2012. But lately, as the company has invested in growing its advertising business, they've become more aggressive.
[...] "Nobody is scrolling beyond the first page when they do a search," Jason Goldberg, SVP of commerce at SapientRazorfish, a digital marketing agency, told Recode. "If you want to be discoverable, you have to find a way to show up in search results."
To get that prime visibility, brands are responding with more cash. Spending on sponsored products in Amazon's search increased 165 percent in the second quarter of 2018 compared with a year earlier, according to data from marketing agency Merkle.
The competition for brands to bid on their own or others' keywords is fierce, and is leading toward what Goldberg called a "perfectly escalating arms race where all the trends are to spend more money to buy more ads to have better visibility on Amazon."
Amazon makes money every time consumers click on an ad — and it still gets to sell whatever people end up buying.
[...] Amazon would not comment on the growth or placement of sponsored ads, but offered this statement: "At Amazon we work hard to continually invent new ways for customers to find the right products to meet their needs. We take the same approach with sponsored products and sponsored brands. We are focused on creating value for customers by helping them discover new brands and products."
Source: recode
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:58AM (11 children)
Amazon pages are pages for actually selling you something, which is even more commercial in nature than advertising. I'm failing to see the butthurt rationale.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @12:59PM (1 child)
I don't want search results sorted according to advertising budget, I want search results based on relevance and/or customer feedback.
For instance I noticed that product names are becoming longer and longer, just because sellers want to include as many keywords as possible (and they're not usually relevant).
Which is extremely counterproductive for me since I want accurate descriptions, not lists of keywords.
In any case, it's perfectly analogous to 20 years ago when I went to yahoo, typed "quark physics", hit search and then saw many pictures of naked ladies.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:30AM
It's not analogous at all. Amazon is a store not a search engine. Their entire reason for existing is to sell you things. Advertising is not really surprising or even distasteful in that context.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:58PM (3 children)
Whoa! Stop the presses!!! The Buzztard and I actually agree on something!
Why exactly should it be a surprise that a company whose sole purpose is to sell you stuff is actually advertising...wait for it...stuff for you to buy. Just the other day I was on the amazon site. My only real complaint is that their new layout made it difficult to actually get a decent preview of the book I was interested in. It used to be that they would let you see the table of contents and a sample of some other pages in the book. Now, I could only get a look at the front and back covers of the book. What gives, Amazon?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:02PM (2 children)
The problem is that the advertisements are starting to interfere with their core business.
For example...every single goddamn time I try to buy anything at Amazon, the very first thing I do is go through the filters clicking pretty much anything with "Amazon" in the filter name. Prime delivery, fulfillment by Amazon, all those options in an attempt to ensure that I'm actually getting products shipped from an Amazon warehouse instead of some small shop halfway around the world that's going to take two months to ship the damn thing. And every single time, I go to the checkout, and they show me one or two shipments. And every single time, when I get the email confirmation, those one or two shipments have suddenly become six or eight shipments, coming from all over the goddamn globe.
Then again, I've had cases where I ordered exactly two of the exact same product (a pack of ten bolts...would fit in a friggin' standard envelope) in the same order, they got sent out from the same Amazon warehouse in Texas...and they shipped in multiple packages that arrived several days apart. I even confirmed with support that I had, in fact, chosen to "group by order into as few shipments as possible". Support also didn't have a fucking clue why they shipped out separately.
Sure, a supermarket exists to sell me things. And I even appreciate the ads they mail out in the form of coupons for shit that I typically buy. But I'm not gonna shop there if every time I walk in there's a dozen loudspeakers blaring various advertisements at me the whole time I'm shopping. There's a limit, which Amazon is trying their hardest to blow right past. Unfortunately, it's a bit harder to hit that limit for an online store because it's easier to conceal the advertising and make it look like legitimate search results.
Christ, you can't even sort by price anymore. I did a search just a few minutes ago, sorted lowest to highest price. And the results I got back were all over the place in pricing -- first item was around $200, then it dropped down to $99, then around $150, then down again to $120...the whole goddamn site is broken, the only thing that works anymore are the advertisements...
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:48PM
The problem with physical stores is you can only buy what companies can afford to list in the stores inventory: companies have to purchase space on the stores shelf.
Sometimes the brand/product you want to buy will only be available online because of it.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:32AM
Now that's a fair argument that may have some amount of truth to it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:30PM (2 children)
The rational is one of efficiency, annoyance, and irritation. It's very similar to how supermarkets put all the things people commonly want at the far ends of the store, forcing customers to walk through all the aisles of very-profitable junk food in the middle. Amazon is making users wade through numerous inferior or non-relevant choices in order to find what they want. Or how that discounted loss-leader advertised product is always in the very back of the bookstore.
Moreover, Amazon is also trying and succeeding on utilizing their strong position as the platform and distribution channel of choice to extract a bit more "advertising tax" from sellers.
It's legal, and one may even say morally acceptable. However, it is very annoying. As such, it is also legal and morally acceptable to complain about it.
This is also one more tiny straw of annoyance to place on the back of the camel. Will it break the back of Amazon? No. But if enough of these stack up, eventually somebody will show up and provide enough of a better customer experience to suddenly grab market share. It's what happened with Yahoo vs Google, among other historical examples, and it could happen again. If the Amazon experience becomes bad enough, and another online vendor doesn't have these bad experiences, then Amazon will suddenly have a problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:15PM
Amazon will most likely be pecked to death. Lately I have been trying to get some new clothing from Amazon and nearly all the brands are low to middle in term of quality. So I turned to shopping at the web fronts for actual brands I like. Almost all of them have some sort of complimentary shipping these days even if it is $75-200 to get it. I keep using Amazon less and less choosing to shop at specialty online stores instead. Amazon will just become the online walmart in the next few years.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:36AM
Another valid argument. I don't even disagree. My point was primarily that it's not surprising, out of place, immoral, etc... like some people are winding themselves up and saying.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:19PM
Concrete example, which may not be paid for, may be just overstock, but is still annoying:
I was comparing phones, trying to figure out where I might spend my money in a few months (or tomorrow if I break it). Every single "compare to similar products" matrix had the Essential phone. It didn't matter if I was curious about the specs of a phablet, or looking at the Sony compact, high end, middle or low end. Every one of those tables, which has four slots including the phone you're looking at, had the Essential phone in it.
I do not want the Essential phone. It doesn't fit my wish list. Done.
It really got irritating that it kept showing up, where I was expecting to see suggestion of products which related to the product I was looking at, and potentially teaching me that someone else had a product that might fit my needs.
Nope. Have you seen that there is an Essential phone ?
(Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Thursday September 13 2018, @07:43AM
you don't get the difference between buying something and seeing ads? let me askplain in a language you get. you are going fishing wednesday morning because you don't have a real job. you need one of those sharp curvy things that looks like a bug with hooks - a lure or whatever people too dumb for a real job call them. you wake up, jack off to the masturbator's magazine, because no attractive woman will even talk to you, then walk into a master baiter's fishing store (where you work on tuesdays as a linux cash register maintainer). you ask the 18 year old intern who is doing your job on your day off for a bug with hooks. for the next half hour, he tries to sell you worms, line, and condoms - all things useless to you, but all related to being a complete loser. in that half hour your boat sinks due to rain, and you want to kill yourself since you can't afford another one for like a decade. you go to the gun store where on mondays you work as a linux cash register maintainer. you ask for a glock with some 9mm shells. the 18 year old intern doing your job that day takes a full half hour of trying to sell you hollow points and hunting bows.
come on now. did you really not understand the annoyance and problem here, or are you being purposefully dense so people on da interwebs will talk to you? fish don't talk.