I see the exact same thing on Play Store, and I think Google is outright complicit in fraud. The top result when you search for an app, even if by exact name, is always, literally 100% of the time, not the app you are looking for, but some other ad-infested knockoff spyware shit whose developer paid Google to be placed before the real thing.

> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“

I think it would be interesting to see legal action here. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there should be at least three ways to go after this:

1. Trademark infringement. If Amazon is using someone’s search that is clearly searching for a specific product, possibly trademarked, it seems inappropriate for them to serve up an ad for a competitor at higher priority than the actual result.

2. Fraud. If I search for a product that Amazon sells and Amazon shows me an ad for a different product first and hides the product I searched for below the fold, they are effectively telling me that they don’t have the product I searched for and possibly that it doesn’t exist. It seems to me that this is deceiving me for commercial gain.

3. Fraud again. If I search for a specific book and Amazon shows me an ad for that book, I think they’re trying to trick me into clicking that ad so they get extra revenue even if I don’t intend to click an ad. (And they’ve defrauded the ad buyer too. Those clicks are bogus. Seth Godin should not be charged for a click when the clicker was searching for the book by a good approximation of its name!)

Someone should file the multi-hundred-billion-dollar class actions :)

This is a lot of words to describe rent seeking. Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to buy stock in the monopolists, their ability to extract these rents from an ever-growing proportion of the economy is only getting stronger.

When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.

It doesn't have to do with Amazon. It is just how ads work.

Of course when you buy a product that is heavily advertised you know that you are paying for it, Amazon or not. That's why, when I see an ad campaign for a product I may want, it is a signal for me to look elsewhere. Some competitor may use what would be ad budget towards offering lower prices or better quality.

As for Amazon, it is not cheap! It is convenient, fast delivery, easy returns and all that. But if you forego that convenience, there is usually a cheaper option: local shops, Chinese platforms, direct sales, etc...

>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?

Amazon is a net-negative overall but I don't think this understanding is correct:

> 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). The ads make the search worse.

This is only true in extremely simply scenarios. In reality, most of the time individual consumers may prefer something other than "the highest ranked item in this category." Maybe another company has a feature that increases cost but adds utility, maybe there's a brand you trust more that makes a slightly less popular version, etc.

The problems of parasitic advertising still exist. People still see ads for products they will like less than the top rated search, but it's wrong to imagine that Amazon actually knows what that person would like best. If matching people to products was that easy you'd have all kinds of 3rd party recommendation services making very specific recommendations to make money off affiliate links. Instead we have a million "top 10" sites that work about as well as picking the #1 seller in an amazon category: not that well.

I don't love (but use...) Amazon but I think if done properly, ads can be relevant even when searching for a specific thing.

Let's use a Google Example: I search for Toyota RAV4 and get an ad for Mazda cx-50. Obviously Toyota hates that but as a consumer it has a chance of making me aware of something I didn't know but would want to know, especially as a part of a purchase decision. That's why Mazda pays for that ad slot, and also why Toyota makes it expensive for them :)

Obviously google in this scenario comes out ahead and it is annoying for some users but can be highly valuable if done well.

It's not how I search or shop but plenty of people do.

> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.

There was study not too long ago that showed that 48% of Amazon's employees were paid so little that they were forced to depend on some form of public assistance to meet their basic needs. Not only would an extra 35k a year prevent amazon employees from needing foodstamps and housing assistance, but I'd be willing to bet that amazon would make back some of it in increased amazon purchases too. It'd be great if the government cracked down on corporations who use taxpayer money to subsidize their labor expenses

This has been true for years on Amazon and is true for most big services now.

Over time the concept of search has mutated from 'locate the exact item I'm looking for' to 'show me a list of semantic search results'. Somehow nobody noticed.

Oh and of course those are not random results - you can literally feel how the platform is trying to nudge you into buying what IT wants, not what you wanted. The search is just purchase intent, the platform will choose what you'll buy.

Powerful algorithms, subliminal design - I feel like a lamb in a dark forest full of wolves when I search on amazon, netflix, prime video ..

There are no '0 search results' anywhere.. each search yields thousands of results.

I remember what a revelation Google search was when it came out in 1999 - it would actually find the exact thing you were looking for ! You no longer had to sift through directories of links, you could just filter it..

We're back to pre-google, but it's a lot worse now, since this is by design, not by lack of technical knowledge of how to make search work.

The new (to me) Amazon Haul storefront is (to me) hilarious. I was stunned when I first saw it: https://www.amazon.com/haul/store

I didn't dig very deep to compare prices, but it appears to compete with Aliexpress/Taobao/Temu, with a larger marketplace fee (presumably justified by the "Amazon" brand recognition and customer capture?). Even after the absolute mess that Amazon made with their "Ships via Amazon" and "Ships from third party" schemes, this feels like a new low.

Paired with the article, it seems to me like the natural conclusion is that the company wants to move away from distribution and towards pure rent-seeking, in the most blatant ways possible, trying to squeeze as much cash as possible from their name while it has any value.

Imagine there's a best-selling toaster. Amazon can recommend it and many people will be happy buying it. Then, one day a new toaster comes out, and it might be even better than the old best-seller. How would it get sufficient traction to be recommended by the algorithm? To send a strong enough signal, it would probably need a level of sales that could only be achieved with some level of advertising.

Separately, I'd note that Amazon doesn't want high levels of returns (which it has to pay for in many cases), so they still try to herd people toward products that they will find acceptable. Might they not love them as much as some others? Perhaps, though this is a fine line to try to walk, and I'm not sure that Amazon is actually trying to walk it.

It's amazing how poor on-site search has gotten, while at the same time the capability to have better results and more relevancy has gone way up.

I normally use Google and/or DuckDuckGo to search YouTube and Amazon, because if I'm looking for a specific video/product, that one will be 3-4 pages in (maybe not even shown).

Brand name products are buried 3+ pages deep on Amazon, while the first 2-3 pages are always drop-shipped Chinese knockoffs now. The onsite search is almost entirely useless.

This also happens in physical stores. In Walmart and others, good quality and good price items are at hard to find, let alone notice places. That happens because lower quality more expensive products pay Walmart for better placement.

I'm in the UK, and I've found that pretty much anything I can get on Amazon I can also get at John Lewis. It's probably more expensive - I'm in the lucky situation that I'm not particularly price-sensitive - but I much prefer the feeling of buying from JL. Very occasionally I'll buy something from Amazon like photo paper or some small gizmo that's difficult to find elsewhere. The one kind of physical shop I really miss is the kind of place where you can buy one screw, nail or picture hook etc. I hate the number of 10-packs of things I get where I only need one. (Luckily I live in a block of flats where there's a good community, so often I get those for free just by asking on our Signal group!)

> Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.

I am always surprised that people apparently think corporations want the best for their customers. They want the best for their shareholders. Sometimes the latter overlaps with the former, but mostly that's not the case.

> 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). The ads make the search worse.

"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. But there is value to show some noise in the search long term.

Another way to look at it is through the vail of ignorance. Suppose you're a manufacturer of air fryers, but don't know where you stand in terms of how competitive or popular your product is. Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Sure if you're the top 3 manufacturer, maybe you would prefer not to pay the tax. But if you're not, you'd much rather prefer the system in which you can.

> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model

That's assuming two things -- user desires and valuation models are identical (they're not, even within a single product view)

and that the state of products is static -- Once a product is best there cannot be a new best in the future. You have to have buyers try new products, some of them disappointed, to plot the shape of what is best or worst. Charging companies a fee means they have to be really sure/serious that what they have to offer is market satisfying (else they're wasting their money).

What we really need is for consumers to stop being so short term thinking and buying the cheapest item (on BNPL no less) and for Amazon to be held accountable for how they penalize people who legitimately compete with them (imo an anti-trust issue).

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxl_lO15Ocg

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5otF7Bj5LxI

> When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place.

They’re entitled? By whose standards are “best air fryer” to be determined? Do all buyers have the same criteria for what “best” means to them?

I've tried to replace Amazon with other vendors where possible. You can get partway there, but half the time, my orders get delivered from an Amazon warehouse anyway. Smaller vendors have basically surrendered logistics to Amazon entirely. At least I'm not giving Amazon ad revenue if I don't order directly through them!

> It’s not technically a tax. Taxes produce valuable public benefits, like medical research and parks. This is simply legal theft.

An economist would not read past this first sentence.

I live in Italy, Amazon opened its Italian branch about 15 years ago. Initially it had a smaller catalog of products, with products sold almost entirely by Amazon. They were delivering packages in 3 days and the price was almost always much better than any other online or physical shop.

Over the years they largely improved the delivery time. Now if I am ordering a package before 4PM there is a high chance I will get it the next day in the morning. Prices however became higher and higher, at the point that for many products Amazon is not that convenient anymore: if you need home appliance (TV, dishwasher etc) other online or physical shops are now significantly cheaper. If you look sport equipment (e.g. climbing, mountain bike, hiking) the specialized shops are usually cheaper as long as you are OK to wait for longer delivery time and maybe combine 2 or more products to reduce the shipping costs.

I still find Amazon convenient during prime days and black Friday, and because of the large catalog with many alternatives and sometimes useful reviews (need a new shower head, a new mouse, a hole puncher, a tire for the bicycle...) but prices are not as good as they used to be. But if you need something in a hurry, the fact that you can order today and get it tomorrow is a big plus.

Amazon search has been terrible for as long as I can remember. Not to disregard the scourge of ads that has infested the results but I've been frustrated with Amazon search for almost 2 decades.

Oh sure, their search gives you the impression you can filter/sort but due to zero policing anyone can say whatever they want about their product and I have the feeling Amazon just sucks at this on top of the seller malice.

Just try to filter down to the dimensions you need, the connector you are looking for, the material you'd prefer and you'll be inundated with tons of items that share not resemblance to the filters you entered.

I only want X brand, here I hope you want to see results from Z, W, Q brands as well!

I only want items under 2ft wide, here are 4ft, 1ft, 6ft options!

I want only <1' cables, here are 12ft cables.

It's all a miserable experience. Often I skip the filters because if they are so bad at keeping out the trash then I worry I'll also lose legit options because I have zero trust in Amazon's ability to accurately filter.

I won't pretend running Amazon is easy but I'm constantly in shock at how absolutely terrible Amazon's website is to use. The number of UIs that are clearly optimized around data retrieval optimization instead of serving the customer is insane.

This is the virtual equivalent of manufacturers paying for premium floor/shelf space in a brick and mortar store. The way to avoid it is to ignore the sponsored results and do some actual browsing - just like comparison shopping in a physical store.

Really Amazon just has to overhaul their ratings system.

That ads are fine, it's not difficult to see what is labeled "sponsored".

What isn't fine is the hardcore gamification of reviews.

If reviews are fixed and you want to pay to advertise your 2-star hand mixer? Sure, but you are probably just paying to show off that you suck.

I can see a simple solution to this problem. STOP BUYING FROM AMAZON!

I do, you can too.

Not identical problem, but similar. If I have just read "Dombey & Son" and want to read more Dickens, I search "Dickens" and get Monica Dickens? ok, more fool me. But if I search "Charles Dickens" and get "in the style of charles dickens" or "based on charles dickens" then I am very unhappy, especially if that "search" was actually clicking the blue highlight link under the specific volume of dickens I just read.

I asked an Amazonian about this once, and they said the algo worked for them in sales, because enough people go to the "in the style of" or actually want that and so I am SOL.

You would think there could be a search setting "specific author name == author, no extras" or something, if they wanted to maximise utility and choice.

As awful as Amazon has become, I still use it for the same reason I started using it many years ago: books.

It's the one place I can find all the books my kids need for school. You search with an ISBN and always find exactly what you want.

Other things I buy elsewhere.

But this is how ads work? The entire concept of programtic ads is based on bidding for the highest leverage time and placement with $$.. So even you have the best product and your competitor outbids you, they get seen more and most likely get bought more?

And even if you go into a normal retail shop with a product in mind, all the available options showcased can "distort" your actual intent. Because that's what the shop is designed to do: to showcase, and even in that showcase, some products are placed/showcased so they catch your attention.

I doubt anyone chooses to create shoddy products just so they have more money to market them..

Don’t supermarkets allow companies to pay for shelf position? They also allow companies to do paid promotional sales activations renting floor space.

It doesn’t seem all that egregious to me.

Advertising may introduce a stranger. But charging a merchant to meet his own customer is highway robbery with a receipt.

I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.

I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while.

I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story.

Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.

Worth mentioning that Google has the same tax in Google Maps.

It is bad for the same reasons that the Amazon Tax mentioned in the post is bad…

Many times I search for a restaurant like McDonalds and the top result won’t be the one nearest to me…it will be a sponsored result for one that is farther away from me.

Pretty wild that Google does this. It’s bad for people. It’s bad because instead of picking the best choice to be the top, Google is showing a worser choice for money.

The same reason why this blog mentions that the Amazon Tax is bad.

This assumes that people only (or at least) mostly depend on Amazon's search results' ordering to decide which products to buy. This is not true, at least not for everyone. I, e.g., visit review websites like Wirecutter to decide. Something tells me I'm not the only one.

"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)"

I don't get this part. Aren't those things unrelated? The aim of ads is to convince to buy regardless of the quality and other data points.

Only very tangentially related of course, but for all of that money going into search/ads/targeting, etc., searching 'shirt without stripes' on amazon today still returns shirts with stripes.

Per the classic https://github.com/elsamuko/Shirt-without-Stripes

Paraphrasing:

> Advertisement serves to increase purchase of the inferior product.

> The best product, which previously didn't require ads [on Amazon] now must pay Amazon to compete for eyeballs.

Advertisement, when successful, increases the purchasing of any product, generally. That the best product is subject to this effect and competition has nothing to do with Amazon or technology.

I think the point of this piece is that advertising ruins platforms. Maybe so but Amazon is hardly the first platform to be ruined by it. The same logic applies to other platforms - like subway platforms or television or even restaurant menus.

Subway platforms are filled with ads and force us to think about upcoming sales and broadway shows.

Television is full of ads and makes us think about all kinds of things we don't care about.

Restaurant menus advertise the items at the top of the menu to the detriment of the items in small print down below.

Memes of all kinds live or die by their attention fitness. If a book, play, or video game fails to get enough attention it dies, goes out of print, never makes it to broadway, and never gets ported to the new system. So if there is a way to cheat the attention system by paying a little money to push the thing in front of a few more eyeballs, makers and publishers are gonna do it.

Advertising is fundamentally un democratic because it assumes an imbalance of power - the power of those who control the publishing, the power those who can pay more.

"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). The ads make the search worse."

This is it.

I moved from the US to Australia recently, and Amazon isn’t really a thing here. Yes, it exists, and it is heavily marketed, but the range available in the store is at a guess less than 1% of what’s available in the US store. I occasionally go to amazon.com.au to look for things, have the same issue having to wade through irrelevant slop in the search results, find nothing suitable, and leave.

And then I do what it seems most Australians still do — go to a mall, or visit a specialty retailer, or use a specialty retailer’s clunky website and find exactly the thing I need and order it there and get it a few days later.

It’s quite refreshing to go out on the shopping streets or to the malls, and see many people out and about shopping. Likewise, the staff in stores are well-informed and helpful, and make the shopping experience pleasant and efficient.

Amazon is why we can’t have nice shopping experiences in the US.

> 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

At least ads give the sellers a chance to compete for eyeballs 'legitimately'. The same marketing budget will not just vaporize if there is no ad space. It will be spent on fake reviews and even fake customers.

People who hate ads don't realize buying ads is the least evil way to compete for customers' attention.

First you create the value, then you capture it...

I can't comment on the economics of it but amazon search is awful, and I think it's by design, not just by design though.

I was recently searching for some draw runners of a certain fixed size. Just cheap ones for some drawers I'm making for a workbench.

Found some cheap ones but not the correct length, but it made me realise something; If I sorted by price low to high the cheap ones did not show on any of the results pages. Amazon was purposefully showing me more expensive products.

I took some info from the cheap ones, searched for that, and the ones I wanted showed up in the search.

I wonder if anyone has trawled all of Amazon, and made a better search tool that doesn't try to rip anyone off?

Anyway, I am starting to find products cheaper outside of Amazon, including p&p.

Isn't it funny that marketers are usually the first people to complain about paying for marketing?

FWIW - I agree with the premise of the article, but I have to say - the reason these types of practices are acceptable in American culture is exactly because of prominent "marketing gurus".

If you are living in Germany I can not recommend https://geizhals.de/ enough. It is "just" a price comparision website, but it features most relevant online stores for me, annd more importantly their filters are just amazing and allow you to find products extremly efficient.

I'm hoping AI will disintermediate most retail and we'll finally get an aggregator that isn't going to add a tax on both sides of the market.

"Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor

Always best to search across Amazon, Ebay and Walmart. Vendors sell the same stuff across all three channels.

Haha, that's the classic thing with platforms that have demand aggregation. They extract a lot of stuff. DTC, Telehealth, all these things end up paying Meta and Google a large fraction of their revenue. Same with Stripe et al. The idea is to take a rake on all spending. It puts you in an unfathomably strong position. It's why Visa and Mastercard are such good businesses.

To get something in front of someone you need to do some work. These guys have the people so they charge you to show it to them. I'm realistically not going off Amazon. If you want to list the ebook on your website maybe I'll buy it there, but if you do a physical copy your 'tax' is going to Shopify. That's how it is.

lots of people here defending amazon blindly seem to be unaware of the full picture of how amazon ads works in the context of the marketplace.

the point is that, if airfryer B is rival of A, and B buys ads (to let amazon show B ahead of A even if they searched for A), and A doesn't buy ads, then if B resorts to marketing to lower the quality just enough to compete, then all the quality focus of A will not end up increasing their sales.

more importantly, to have a good view on which products are good which one are the best is not available inside of amazon that easily. reusing sku, tricking people into buying inferior ones does not impact amazon in any way since return costs are paid by the fba vendor, or seller.

Amazon is almost completely unusable for search at this stage. I think perhaps 3/4 of the results are sponsored ads. Three in four. Trying to find a good deal on a product, even if you know precisely what you're looking for, is a real headache of trying to dodge the advertisement minefield.

This is simply, a monopoly. Whatever mechanism they came up with to squeeze the final dollars out of the system, such a system would exist because they can.

This reminds me of SABRE preferring American Airlines flights see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_syst.... Back in 1984 this "Preferential display" was considered illegal by the US government. How times have changed....

In Europe, it led to the creation of the competing Amadeus system which did not keep display preferences and now dominates the market.

Similarly, this is also why Google stopped enforcing trademarks years ago. It allows more people to bid on terms, increases competition, increases CPCs & of course pads their bottom line.

Same reason why the top ad on Google when you search for a brand is for the brand itself -- "brand bidding" is a thing, and if you don't bid on ads for your own brand, a competitor will. If Google can do it why not Amazon!

I do not understand why sellers accept this practice. I'd assume it would run afoul of some trademark law but the distinct lack of lawsuits indicates that either the legal grounds are shaky... or the sellers themselves find some advantage in it.

The income tax in UK has this quirk: once you fall near the top tax bracket, you retrospectively lose all tax-free allowances you could have availed, had you not fallen in the top tax bracket.

Likewise, once corporations blow past a revenue cap, they shouldn't be eligible for lower rate of corporate tax. If the US is any cautionary tale (it always is), it's a moral imperative not to let corporations get too big. Letting corporations grow big and still avail tax cuts, is like feeding your own cancer.

"Your margins are my opportunity"

The great Bezos said ones and people, companies, stock market loved it. Now new CEO is noticing Amazon customers also have some margin and hence more opportunity for Amazon.

if your highest performing ad is against searches for literally the title of your book, isn't that a signal that you don't need to buy ads? people are searching for your book. they will buy it whether you advertise or not. so why by the ad?

this is framed as amazon doing something wrong, but it sounds like what's actually happening is that his marketer is wasting money. of course amazon is going to accept money if you give it to them for the things they're already doing for free. why shouldn't they?

Lower and lower S/N on the internet.... and businesses adding to the N so they can charge for the S. If enough become aware of this, they will vote with their $$ and Amazon (et al) will lose market share. But sadly the TicToc generation doesn't seem to notice :-()

> paying Amazon a dollar to show you an ad for the book you searched in the first place.

This is the worst part.

Google Ads are the same. I pay about $2 per click for my EXACT PRODUCT NAME search, otherwise 6 other competitor ads are shown on top of google search before the actual results

> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.

Theoretically. Amazon doesn't give a shit about well being or enrichment of it's employees. Every single one of the them. They tried to squeeze the productivity and since the Stock has been doing well, many employees have made a reasonable money. But forget the well being or profit sharing aspects with the employees.

I'm having trouble understanding how this differs from traditional ads - even pre-Internet...? Didn't manufacturers pay to get premium shelf space in a store?

The article mentions that the "best" airfyer seller also has to place bids on their names / keywords, but I don't think there's a best, just like there's no best shoes. There are so many niches that exist in products — does it fit in a tight space, what's the shape, what's the air-frying technique, do the buttons work with oven mitts — so there are different bestsellers in each subcategory.

> This study argues that an ecommerce site with search ads actually sells fewer items than the same site without ads.

Shouldn't the very same marketing companies buying these ads know this? Why are they misleading their clients?

An idea I've played around with in the past is to have some sort of law that limits how much revenue a company can make from ads. For example, a law that says "A company cannot make more than 10% of its gross revenue from ads or selling customer data".

This kind of law would wreak havoc for certain companies (and content creators). However, just like prediction markets, ads distort and ruin the very thing they are trying to optimize.

It looks less like an advertising but more like a rent extraction with a casi toll on commerce that ultimately gets passed on to consumers

Imo it's all about all ads. And then it is about all middlemen.even real estate agents make ir more expensive for both - seller and buyer

That's one tax. The other tax is that companies raise their prices elsewhere so that they aren't lower than the list price on Amazon, because that would violate Amazon's policy.

"...the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place."

No company is "entitled" to any sales.

In the product search results game, I imagine Google and Amazon will soon have competition from AI chatbots linking to product pages in response to user queries. Also, OpenAI is getting into ad business. Seems like that will add a different place where book publishers could run ads? They will also need to optimize their web pages to be useful to bots looking for information.

For a while Amazon was good at discovering new books to read. Nowadays my ad-blocker blocks everything except for the book I am directly navigating to from the page. No discovery of new books is happening for me there anymore.

Another place to discover new books was Goodreads. Bought and left to rot by Amazon.

I don't buy many books anymore.

Respectfully, this is nonsense. The consumer experience I have is that Amazon sells products at lower prices with better quality, support, variety and transparency than pretty much every other store out there.

Sponsored products do not dampen my consumer experience of Amazon. Paying 2$ more for the exact same good at Target or some other online store does dampen my experience.

If I as a consumer am paying a tax for sponsored products, then when I go to Target why isn’t the price cheaper? Let me give you a hint: you wouldn’t even get a shelf at target. Let’s stop pretending that Amazon is the only evil storefront that market manipulates for profit at the expense of consumers. Which store doesn’t? Which marketplace doesn’t?

Amazon gives you the option to sort and their sorts are actually useful. Ever use sort by best rating? It actually shows the best rated products. Sort by lowest price and prime? You can find good stuff down there.

Call a spade a spade, Amazon delivers on its price, availability and service. Just because the market is crowded and you need to spend money to get your stuff in front of people doesn’t mean you can make up ideological drivel.

Probably the most egregious human written article I’ve read in the ai era.

Some European countries, including UK, have enough of a strong network of local supermarkets and department stores that Amazon is simply not necessary. I have not used Amazon in the last five years. Most of my family and friends rarely use it either.

There is little reason to when you can walk into a supermarket or department store, often with three or five of them within 1000 feet, and buy what you need at the normal marked price. If you cannot go there yourself, most of them offer home delivery anyway. You also know who you are buying from, you do not have to worry about questionable third-party sellers, and if there is a problem you can telephone a human being or simply walk back into the shop. What is not to like?

But yeah, not every city or country is lucky enough to have such a strong retail network. Amazon makes sense in many parts of the world. But I also think its success in those places is a sad indicator of weak local infra and underinvestment in local retail.

The world would probably be an economically healthier place if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores, and indie shops. It keeps more money circulating locally, supports more local jobs and improves local economy instead of funnelling all the money through one gigantic company.

This is so true!

I rarely order anything from Amazon these days, maybe once or twice a year. Everything feels like a rip-off or fake. I don't trust the search function at all. Nor do I trust the customer ratings. The only exception is if I buy from a brand I already know that has its own brand-shop, owned directly by the manufacturer.

Amazon is nearly worthless to find anything anymore. Same items repeated dozens to hundreds of times, with minor changes, but all pointing to the same item.

It's like GOogle when ads outweighed your search results. Amazon has become a garbage pit.

I think Ads improves discovery as well as is the most profitable part of amazon - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/marketplaces-airbnb-future-foun...

The search ads ostensibly solve the cold start problem: If a seller introduces a new product, how is that to be ranked? Well, they can buy some ads, get some ratings, and boot up their sales & search ranking. Great.

It of course also creates essentially perfect competition. Amazon will even tell you the top selling products across categories, so that no seller can make excess profits for long - others will quickly jump into the fray to compete that away.

This is of course the market working as intended - the sellers compete away any and all surplus. Normally that would be a good thing for consumers! Unfortunately the search ad tax is very real, and siphons off a good chunk of the surplus as monopolist rent.

This is all structural. A marketplace like this is a natural monopoly with massive network effects. And the allure of the search ad is irresistible - they literally can't not do it, lest their shareholders rebel.

Google ads work exactly the same way.

As a seller your only options are to either have better conversion economics than the competition (so you can win the ads bidding war - guess why every successful site on the internet is gameified to all hell, and why the amazon listing titles & descriptions look like they do) or to not play.

If you can create a viral hit for a product you can probably eke out excess profits for a few months - people want precisely your branded product and not a cheap knockoff, at least for a while.

("Excess profits" = anything above what will literally make the marginal seller say "it's not worth it", which is a very low bar when competing with the entire world)

This is by far the most annoying thing about Amazon to me. They clearly are doing a disservice to their consumer with this. Many times I go straight to google to search for Amazon products, which leads to better results

I respect Seth quite a bit and have been an avid reader for two decades, but this post struck me as odd.

It reads as though he’s just discovering how the digital advertising industry works (and he's a marketer) ... not just Amazon, but also Google etc.

Amazon has many decisive conflicts of interest:

- improving search results vs less ad revenue

- promoting their own products vs merchants'

- streamlining the shopping vs trying to sell more stuff

As long as these fundamental conflicts aren't resolved, it's not going to improve.

I think Ad's may be the best and most profitable part of Amazon.

https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/marketplaces-airbnb-future-foun...

The real amazon tax is getting people to think shipping fees are part of the item, and causing one $5 cable+shipping to be $10. Three $5 cables and shipping is $30. tbh if amazon went up in smoke like wildberries I would not even flinch.

My current strategy is to skip ads and skip any name that is just a jumble of letters. But the garbage producers are getting so good with AI they can create entire websites with US addresses and pictures of buildings and employees and none of it is real.

Would love a similar post breaking down the rightmove (UK equivalent of zillow) tax. Fortunately there is currently a court case against them that might help. I am also starting a #RightmoveHygiene campaign to encourage people to spend less time on there.

One could argue that Google Ads are jacking up the prices of hotels.

To me, this is an equivalent of a platform fee. If you didn't have a search platform, you'd most likely go with the big players, overpay, have a bad experience & be worse off.

Sort by "Best Sellers" always on Amazon. "Featured" is driven by ads. Also? Firefox with Ublock Origin blocks ads (but it's an endless cat and mouse game).

Closed amazon account when Bz decided to get into politics. I realize I can buy everything I need “in the real world” and thru manufacture websites directly. I do not miss it.

I don't understand the "theft" or "stealing" angle here, other than as a clumsy rhetorical device. I can see an "unfair" angle, and the behavior is definitely bad for customers, but it's not theft. Theft and stealing are when someone unlawfully[1] takes something that belongs to you. But here, it's never established that whatever was taken ever belonged to either the consumer or the maker in the first place.

[1] The author tries to escape this requirement by calling it "legal theft" but that's an oxymoron.

I would have thought the Amazon tax is “free shipping” that has altered the pricing of every item, and now B&M retail is picking up the same pricing despite a much lower shipping overhead

Ads too, I guess

The only reason I have Prime these days is for the unlimited photo storage and then some extra storage for video. It’s hard to find a convenient and cost effective way to free my data.

I can recommend looking up Yanis Varoufakis and his Technofeudalism.

Amazon has no mercy, so neither do I.

In my defense, they started it. (I had purchased a stainless steel muffler with a lifetime warranty off of Amazon Auto, the thing was counterfeit, completely rusted through in less than a year, and Amazon would not honor their written warranty and I didn't care to fight it legally...)

So the next time they dropped my package off in my lobby when I have specific instructions to bring it to my front door? I never got it.

And unfortunately for them... it keeps happening now?

Like every other package that gets delivered?!

(They always believe this, apparently... either that, or their agreement with their delivery insurance services must eat the cost).

I've more than gotten my muffler refunded now and they're none the wiser, so win win really!

This is why we must kill ads. Ads fund evil - be it Google, Amazon, you name it.

I'm curious how similar/different this is to buying shelf space or aisle placement in physical stores.

Offtopic: Amazon has removed the option to not store your credit card details when checking out items. There used to be a checkbox that allowed you to choose not to save your credit card details for future purchases.

It's gone and confirmed and acknowledged by their support which made me take a screenshot of the popup where the card details are entered to confirm it. They in turned wanted to give me a 15€ gift card for the inconvenience and told them that I wasn't there asking for a gift card or discount and refused it.

So every single time you purchase with your credit card if you do not want your details to be saved, you have to MANUALLY go to your personal settings and remove the added card from your last purchase. Fucking amazing.

On top of that listings are overflowed with chinese brands and/or items that have no correlation to what I'm looking for.

Can someone suggest better alternatives here in Europe?

> The ad system they built isn’t illegal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for.

"If you're not the customer, you're the product".

Well, Amazon actually did it. They made us the customer _AND_ the product. Hooray.

Like LOTS of other people, I, of course, use Amazon. But, more and more often... if I can find a product somewhere else within, say, 5-6%... I'll buy it that someplace else. Especially if that someplace else is actually a building I can walk into and inspect the thing I'm buying before I pay for it.

Shopping on Amazon is getting worse every day. How can it be good for Amazon in the long run that every time I buy something from their site, I actually have to spend time convincing myself that I'm not getting a knock-off product?

In the modern world, every single time money leaves my bank account I feel like I'm potentially being scammed. I hate it.

The solution could be common evolving public protocols to create large alternative non-profit marketplaces.

You have to pay me to engage with Amazon.

They have become so big that they harm the buying power of the consumer and the selling power of the producer.

I know this first hand. Company had to give away 1-2 million in free engineering labor for the opportunity to obtain their business.

Have not bought anything from them in over 10 years and never will again.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. This is no different than grocery stores selling shelf space. It is not at all like theft (morally wrong) or taxes (infamously inefficient). And if you don't do it, you go out of business since you aren't competitive with someone that does. It's sad that such obvious rage bait makes it to the top of hacker news.

At least they are labeled as “Sponsored”. There’s probably a browser extension to remove them.

Has anyone found a useable fake review detector since Fakespot and Review Meta went down?

I'm sympathetic to the points he makes. But it's hard to take it seriously when he makes his money selling marketing and he's complaining about cpc advertising. It's like if a horse breeder were complaining about cars

Principal agent problem combined with a monopoly, what could go wrong?

In the end, we as a society value convenience more than global optima. So we will always land in some local optima. We deserve it.

Amazon is more powerful than most countries.

I think AWS still cares about customer trust, but Amazon retail abandoned that at least a decade ago. The ads are so high-margin compared to retail though (biggest profit center after AWS) that I don't expect them to change anything.

Amazon’s decision making is beholden to growing its share price and the trite careerist ambitions of (8 reports per manager) ^ (5 layers of management) = ~32768 middle managers. It’s destined to become a cesspool for consumers. The only question is whether there will be any other options left by the time most people realize.

I'm sorry, but how does a business writer lead an article with garbage like this:

Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell merchants and publishers enough search-distorting ads to capture a billion dollars in revenue.

Is it revenue or profit? They are not the same thing.

No wonder Amazon sued Perplexity to forbid agents on their site, agents could cut through the crap and find what users wanted instead of what Amazon peddles. They even won the suit.

I think our only hope against platform enshitification is using agents that optimize our interests not theirs. They don't deserve human eyes on those SERPs.

Regulation, antitrust, regulation, antitrust.

Not using Amazon (in light of geopolitical events and quite frankly, just not liking the way they do business or Jeff Bezos (as he presents himself to the world)) has been a net positive.

There was a time it was good and convenient and the worst of what they are wasn't quite so obvious but that time has passed.

IIRC this was talked about in Cory Doctorow's Enshittification book. Here's my bookmarklet to get rid of sponsored results, it's survived a couple years:

    javascript:document.querySelectorAll(".s-result-item:has(.puis-sponsored-label-text)").forEach(function(e){ e.remove()})

Insinuating that there is one "best product" that Amazon magically knows is the best is quite an assumption. The best product might be completely different for different people and different depending on the time for the same person. Plus there are always new products being introduced and products being discontinued. I think we are mis assuming ill intent a little. Second issue is the assumption that there is always a fixed pie of demand for a product, when a new great product comes out more people will purchase from a category, its never fixed completely. This sounds like cope for book sales being lower than expected if we are being honest.

Maybe instead of being an author your should have had the foresight to be Jeff Bezos.

I'm honestly at the stage where I'm finding the same product but cheaper in the local retailer. I don't mean a dollar here or there, I mean a full 30% cheaper. Particularly most things food related. I used to be putting in an order weekly, I now haven't in almost three months.

Grocery stores and department stores have played games with what items they stock and where they stock it (location on the shelf is hugely important in a grocery store) for decades, it's just better hidden than the 'sponsored' text next to Amazon paid ads. It's infinitely easier to make a product and get it available on Amazon.com than it ever was to get your product into a grocery store.

>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

As others have pointed out, without ads, even if you make the best air fryer on the planet tomorrow, good luck getting people to realize that.

Maybe we need ad blockers for Amazon ads.

The market will fix this right? RIGHT?

Prime is a waste of money. I find most stuff arrives in 2-3 days and its easy to spend the minimum to get free shipping.

Last week I searched for a "Eufy S350" security camera on Amazon. Instead of search results, Alexa for Shopping took over the entire screen, proceeded to tell me that the Eufy S350 doesn't exist, and then recommended a Eufy vacuum cleaner.

This feels comical to me today, but I can imagine a near future where paid AI ads gaslit you into believing that the product you searched for is vastly inferior to the product AI "recommends".

Long time Amazon seller/brand here (and ex-academic/game theorist) -- it's a little more complicated if you think about the various parties' incentives, but yeah we have a half-assed market equilibrium that sucks for everyone.

Amazon as the marketplace facilitator has an interesting job to run:

1) It wants customers to get exactly what they want (as measured by the minimal amount of clicking/scrolling/time it takes for a customer to hit the landing page -> complete shopping). This is mostly customer-centric.

2) It wants to promote as much competition as it can between products and brands so that no seller dominates the market. This is... mildly customer-centric so big sellers can't rest on their laurels, and mostly self-serving (so no single seller/brand can gain enough power to threaten Amazon).

3) Amazon has to strike a balance of #1 and #2 so that there's some opportunity for new entrants to enter any product space. Back in the days they structured search so that some percentage of results would be new sellers and products, and new products would get some amount of sessions to prove they convert within a certain statistical distribution to land a certain rank (BSR). Note the rise of alphabet soup Amazon brands is partially because they allowed for disposable brands that could be black-hatted, and partially because for a few years these sellers were just generating tons of new brands to share new SKU real estate on search results (so when you searched for "small kitchen colander" or what not, you'd find the same product being sold by 10 sockpuppet sellers occupying 10 search spaces, taking result space away from the other sellers).

But what if they can get everyone to partially pay for #3? Enter ads, where basically new and old brands pay to play for eyeballs on Amazon.

So if you think about it, Amazon is a search problem where you wanna push results such that the expected value of the results pushed yield the highest expected value, something along the lines of: Expected Value (EV) of your product = [your sales price] x [your product's conversion rate in the past X days] x [some confidence level of said conversion rate] - [returns] + [whatever other Amz secret sauce] + [Amazon PPC]

Amazon can get people to pay for their eyeballs, swap some seller blackhat tactics for others, and more or less keep OK results. So that's Amazon's end.

As an established seller -- I know my product converts at X%, so as long as the math works out where I spend $Y/click, expect it to convert at X%, and my profit Z > Y * X it's what I do (and the tax I pay), and I move that up and down depending on my inventory situation. If possible, yes, I would pass some of that down to price raises as long as the market's willing to bear it, so I can make a minimum margin requirement off my Amazon channel (which is the lowest, compared to my D2C website or through offline B&M channels, but I do so because my biggest volume is on-Amazon).

As a customer... yeah the default search results are "good enough" for the 80-20 crowd; the convenience, ease-to-checkout, and 1-2 day shipping wins them over. As a "nerdy" customer who likes researching products to get the best one, I used to research via online reviews and reddit (most of which are gamified in their own ways)... but now I use AI (ChatGPT, *not* Amazon's Alexa Shopping because it's not great) and mostly call it a day.

This seems generally like the US corporate playbook. Create a product, monopolize it and milk the monopoly. SpaceX, Uber, Amazon, Stripe, Facebook, Google…

Whats going to be hilarious is if brick and mortar companies become popular again because of the painful U.I., scammy companies, and broken search of Amazon.

Ads are tax on the market, that costs everyone and wastes most of it.

Ad industry is an example that markets don't correctly solve everything.

This is sad, but true. And true for other giant companies, not just for Amazon - Meta/Facebook is another good example.

What can we do about it? Not much. This is something that happens when in a "free" market you have a near monopoly, and the antitrust is too weak to even try to fine these companies.

One might think that there's a "conspiracy" of a few powerful people / billionaires, but I don't believe it it the case. Individuals are driven by results, profits, targets, metrics, etc... The company as a whole responds to shareholders, not the small retail one but large funds and such that own a significant stake in these companies. They want to make money. They lobby the government to make sure that quasi-monopolies like this one can go on undisturbed.

I don't blame Amazon. I think this is a limitation of the (supposedly) free-market society in which we live. By the way, it is not a free market when antitrust does not work, or when you need to bail-out banks, etc.

I admire and respect Seth Godin (I even met him once, years ago), and I would love to see if he had any idea of how to solve this.

Enshittification for everyone that comes into contact with a corporation run with only profit (and profit growth) in mind.

One would be tempted to think that doing things different and actually providing a good service for consumers, sellers, etc would be a multibillion dollar business, but somehow it seems like it isn't.

I like the stock

> When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. Businesses continue to buy the ads—not because they’re dumb, but because the system has created a situation with few options.

Sure, this is probably accurate in many situations.

> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far [for Seth Godin's new book, The Knot] is the search "Seth Godin The Knot".

But not that one. If you cut spending on that ad to zero, you would lose an immeasurably small number of sales. The ad is high yield because people who search for "Seth Godin The Knot" are already planning to buy Seth Godin's The Knot. Letting other people display ads on top of that search won't dissuade them.

Turns out we ended up with paid search, but paid for by who? :D

Seems bad.

Large enough companies always set up rent mechanisms.

> Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.

The stealing is, of course, much more fundamental than the search tax.

I am reminded of the saying by 19th-century French social thinker Proudhon, who said: "La propriete? C'est le vol!" ("Property? Why, that's theft!") - he was describing interactions which, at that time, it was conceivably possible to manage collectively for the public benefit - taken over by individuals, institutions and mechanisms economically benefits a small few to the detriment of the majority (farmers and laborers). The Amazon product search example is different, but then, also not so different. I mean, it's just search - and the blog post author knows it could just be implemented reasonably so that people who want to find his book find his book. Then suddenly, Amazon put a fence around that field and demands you pay a part of your annual yield for it to allow you to farm that field, and not drive you off by force. And that metaphor is probably quite clear to you even though there are no farmers, fields or fences in the blog post.

Amazon's not stealing that money from its stockholders, which is who

See also: ads for apps in app stores.

These companies effectively monopolize app distribution on their platforms and then make discovery so poor that developers who try to sell apps in their stores must pay for ads in those same stores.

The amazon tax holds nothing to the credit card tax. Credit cards have been driving prices up for decades with their behind the scenes fees that are passed onto the customer. All for "convenience" of the right to buy something because now they have created a near mandatory purchasing system duopoly.

Bravo!

If you know the exact product you want, Amazon is great.

If you don't, it's absolutely horrible.

Is this different than the decades-only practice of grocery stores auctioning off all the eye-level shelf space to brands willing to pay for it?

Google has entered the chat, and also eBay and every aggregator site on the web.

> It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks.

This assertion lacks evidence. An alternate hypothesis: if you tried to sell literal garbage on Amazon, poor reviews and a high return rate will be visible in the product itself. The ad will earn you a click-through to the product, but buyers will begin to back out instead of following through with a purchase. Ad purchases cannot overcome insufficient revenue - it won't be profitable long-term.

Yes, Amazon has a problem with vendors buying good reviews as well. It doesn't overcome a high number of poor reviews, or a high number of returns.

> And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.

Reeks of a conspiracy theory. Most customers simply don't have the time or energy to research any more than the top handful of results. Only a rare person goes 10 pages deep into the search results. Organic search results will produce less traffic when people don't even look at them. But that's not evidence in and of itself that the organic search results were nerfed in some way.

I hate to remind people of the basic truth about modern Amazon, but here goes: the vast majority of the inventory is made in China and the exact same product can be found at a tiny, tiny fraction of the Amazon price on AliExpress and similar sites. The value that Amazon adds is their logistic network that can deliver to domestic US addresses in a day or two, compared to weeks. The difference in price between Amazon and AliExpress justifies sellers spending enormous sums on ads and review purchases, because even if they do sell garbage on Amazon, enough people bought it at such ridiculous margins that the seller can tear down the product with the bad reviews and high return rate and re-offer it under a new brand with the same ad and review purchase strategy and still make a profit. But the person to blame for that is not Amazon, and it's not the seller, it's the fool who decides to pay the ridiculous price compared to the AliExpress price.

Books are one of the categories where they aren't printed in China, they're not sold on AliExpress, and searching for "seth godin the knot" returns the actual correct listing as the first organic search result. So I'm not sure why the author brings his book up as evidence. He might do better by reminding his publisher that "selling on Amazon" is not a homogenous experience and they ought to reconsider flushing money down the drain on advertisements they don't need.

Amazon has the most useless search I know. Also, idk who clicks those 'Sponsored' results, but for me they are an automatic pass. But then again Amazon is such a scumbag company that uses its own brands as a weapon to make sellers pay to be visible.

cancelled our Prime membership a year ago (after nearly 10 years) and went from buying most non-food things on Amazon to occasionally buying small random items. We broke our addiction to 1 or 2-day shipping, and we're just fine.

It's gotten ridiculous in the last month with behavior I've never seen before. If I want to buy a specific book I type <author name> <title> into the search bar. The search bar even helps me complete the entry, and then a page shows with a choice of several books with my chosen book at the top.

Fine. Except now after one second, the whole page changes and then there's only one book on the page and it has nothing to do with the book I actually searched for.

So obviously they know about the book I want because they just showed it to me but then they make it disappear in favor of one I don't want but which I presume is one the publisher paid them to show me.

My workaround is to search on Amazon in a private tab so they don't know who I am. In that case the book I want shows up and I can click on it and get its URL and then paste it into the original Amazon window where I'm already logged in, and I can order it. Except I don't, because I'm so disgusted by this I go directly to the publisher's website and order it there.

This is ridiculous.

Amazon is throwing money on the floor with this behavior and they're probably just begging for a restraint of trade class-action lawsuit.

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

> 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

Thoughtless take. Say you've just invented a better looking, better functioning, cheaper air fryer. How do you expect to reach your first customers if not through ads? Sell it to your friends? That's even more invasive and annoying.

People's urge to rid the world of ads is similar to our urge to rid the world of "middlemen".

It's natural, and I get it (ads are annoying), but this is a forum where I expect people to think a little more deeply about the economics and second order effects of things.

Counterpoint: Amazon among the most favorable institutions in the US

https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/HHP...

Is this not the direct result of consumers being too lazy to price match and price discover? Amazon still has the ability to sort price: low to high. You also still have the ability to ask your friends and family what air fryer they purchased. If the average consumer just implicitly trusts Amazon such that they buy whatever shows up first, that’s not Amazon’s fault, that’s the consumer’s fault.

I am worried that we have become so bubble wrapped that even our shopping will need to be done by regulators.

Having small mini-pcs in my basement and a couple of Cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale has been awesome. Made me realize that I've gotten used to paying for software that is free because someone else was hosting. But now I host it and it's a way better experience. I'm not crazy about using Cloudflare, but so far it's been great. Having Postgres, rabbitMQ and Redis all running locally (and then realizing my traffic doesn't need a cache or a queue and just doing it all in Postgres) has been awesome.

> Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over.

As much as I'd like to agree with the article's point and am critical of Amazon etc etc, you lost me here. $35k cash bonus for every employee does not pass the smell test. I'm sure the delivery driver who famously needs to pee into a bottle because they can't afford a toilet break would love such a bonus, but they don't get one.

This makes me doubt everything in the article. Which is really a shame because such articles are necessary. But you need to keep your facts straight, otherwise you are completely disqualifying yourself from any serious discourse. At least for me.

There is enough to criticise with Amazon. Just keep to the things that are true.