Amazon is Piling Ads Into Search Results (cnbc.com) 80
An anonymous reader shares a report: Search for "toothpaste" on Amazon, and the top of the web page will show you a mix of popular brands like Colgate, Crest and Sensodyne. Try a separate search for "deodorant" and you'll first see products from Secret, Dove and Native. Look a little closer, though, and you'll notice that those listings are advertisements with the "sponsored" label affixed to them. Amazon is generating hefty revenue from the top consumer brands because getting valuable placement on the biggest e-commerce site comes with a rising price tag. "There's fewer organic search results on the page, so that increasingly means the only way to get on the page is to buy your way on there," said Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at advertising firm Publicis.
For consumers looking for toothpaste on Amazon, getting to unpaid results requires two full swipes up on the mobile app. ntil recently, Amazon put two or three sponsored products at the top of search results. Now, there may be as many as six sponsored products that appear ahead of any organic results, with more promotions elsewhere on the page, said Juozas Kaziukenas, who runs e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. The number of ads that appear differs depending on the exact search term and other factors such as whether users are shopping on desktop, mobile or in the Amazon app, Amazon says.
For consumers looking for toothpaste on Amazon, getting to unpaid results requires two full swipes up on the mobile app. ntil recently, Amazon put two or three sponsored products at the top of search results. Now, there may be as many as six sponsored products that appear ahead of any organic results, with more promotions elsewhere on the page, said Juozas Kaziukenas, who runs e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. The number of ads that appear differs depending on the exact search term and other factors such as whether users are shopping on desktop, mobile or in the Amazon app, Amazon says.
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If everyone is using an AI agent to do their shopping, do ads really matter anymore?
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What on earth are you talking about?
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The future of shopping. Much like ad-blockers were the future of browsing.
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as long as the product makes the rich guy happy, he won't care (or know) that he spent $1000 for a $500 product
So your point is that only people who are wasteful and mismanage their money become rich?
I live in SV and know many wealthy founders. They are the stingiest people you'll ever meet.
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I live in SV and know many wealthy founders. They are the stingiest people you'll ever meet
I said "rich and famous", meaning Kardashian types, Real Housewives of [city] - or royalty. You think the Queen heads down to Black Friday sales with her Barclaycard? It's a cliche that people of this type are defrauded by their staff. Heck, a scant hundred years ago, the servants were stealing candles and butter out of the larder and selling them out the back door to buy gin.
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Toothpaste on Amazon? (Score:2)
Why?
It is probably one of the more useless searches. Everyone have their own brand preferences already. So it's more a question of supplier.
However it's one of the things you just grab passing by the shelf on the supermarket.
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It's for the person looking for something TO prefer first; THEN they can start ignoring things.
Re: Toothpaste on Amazon? (Score:2)
So the idea is a person old enough to:
A) operate a computer/smartphone
B) have a valid credit card (or a password for someone else's Amazon account)
C) type in the word "toothpaste" or "deodorant"
D) have gotten this far, they had no brand-preference for these personal hygiene products?
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Or category of. e.g. from regular to extra sensitive.
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Or maybe the problem is the local store which is always out of stock when you want to buy something.
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Re:Toothpaste on AltaVista (Score:2)
Re:Toothpaste on Amazon? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't just (or even mainly) about toothpaste; it's about everything you go to Amazon for, which typically means things you buy rarely or only in specialty stores, because the mainstream markets won't stock them. That was, after all, Amazon's original business model, before they expanded to become the behemoth they are today: the "long tail" of stuff that people want to buy, but doesn't have enough demand in a single area to be worth stocking shelves.
For example, a month ago I needed to buy water socks: waterproof neoprene booties with a nylon coating for durability, which I needed for a snorkeling trip. Now, I could have driven to a specialty dive shop to get them, and probably got price-gouged because unless you're in an area with a large scuba community they're unlikely to be in stock anywhere, or I could go to Amazon to buy them. But, when I did try Amazon, the first entire page of results were all sponsored ads with markedly higher-priced options, and it was kind of hard to tell which ones were "sponsored" and which were the actual search results I was looking for.
In this way Amazon is extracting an additional fee for companies trying to post products on their "open marketplace": give us a bribe or your product will end up buried under pages of alternative products of people who did pay us that bribe.
I make it a point to never pick these (Score:4, Interesting)
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Similarly for me, though I hate the visual clutter as well and decided to do a little something about it. These two rules don't take care of everything, but they do knock out maybe half the ads on Amazon's pages today if you add them to your uBlock Origin's (or similar, such as ABP) filters:
! Sponsored ads in search results
amazon.com##AdHolder
! Sponsored ads on product pages (close to reviews)
#sponsoredProducts2_feature_div
Except prepend a "amazon.com##" to that second one, because the ASCII filter didn't l
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I make it a point to never pick these sponsored products. Most of the time it isn't an issue as I get to the product page another way.
Same here. I *hate* those ads.
Carrots-and-Sticks 101 (Score:2)
Amazon can be a dick because they have insufficient competition. Insufficient competition turns every company into a dick eventually. I know of no exceptions. If you can screw over customers AND make a profit, you will.
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Which eventually leads to competition from smaller better more nimble companies. It is a corporate lifecycle.
Monopolies eventually lose unless protected by governments.
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Monopolies eventually lose unless protected by governments.
I thought it was "monopolies eventually win unless prevented by governments". Especially where network effects are concerned.
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History shows that near monopolies have roughly a 2 to 3 decade run as the top dog before market changes and/or sloth catch up to them. This means we may have to put up with Amazon's shenanigans for roughly 15 more years.
Re: Carrots-and-Sticks 101 (Score:2)
Paid advertisements are a 'shenanigan'?
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Gradually increasing them up to an obnoxious quantity is.
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This is a mostly imaginary history of monopolies. The large monopolies that dominated the U.S. in the 20th Century were broken or restrained by government action not "the market". This was not only just true in the early 20th century, it was true of AT&T in the 1980s - the market did not kill it. Microsoft was inhibited from monopolistic practices by government action, but not broken up, and its dominance of the desktop has.. remained intact. Similarly IBM's dominance in mainframes never changed, and it
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Which eventually leads to competition from smaller better more nimble companies.
OMG, this is right up there with "trickle down" in terms of humor.
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Ohhh, you got me good!
yawn.
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Eventually everything fails, society will fall, however monopolies have a long run of screwing customers over.
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Monopolies use Governments to build in extensions to their power.
Licensing, regulations that smaller companies cannot possibly comply with, and more.
The only way to compete is to become niche, like Linux during the days of Microsoft Dominance.
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In a natural, fairly regulated (or unregulated) market that may be the case. But we're at a point now where the biggest gorilla in the given market can toss lobbying money at congress critters until they regulate the smaller guys out of growth, and eventually, out of business. They just keep adding hurdles that are less than a penny per dollar to them, but massive undertakings for the little guy until they're the only player left standing.
Capitalism can't fix corruption of that magnitude. This is part of
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You were warned about giving to much power to the government. But nooo..
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You know what would fix that?
More Government !
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History repeats itself right up until it doesn't.
Yes, monopolists tend to die after a few painful decades, but take to mind the case of Ma Bell, who had the entire telecommunications market in the US in its grip for nearly 100 years; the US government had to step in to kill that monopoly, and if it hadn't we'd probably still have only one choice for telephone service in the US (and might not have cell phones at all).
Amazon in particular is doing a terrifyingly good job at buying smaller, potentially-disrupt
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Which eventually leads to competition from smaller better more nimble companies.
That is explicitly not how internet sales works, nor even how catalog sales worked. The bigger company gets better shipping prices and has lower costs overall per dollar made.
Re: Sponsored = ignored (Score:3)
Click, then review with something outrageous.
Look at the Haribo sugar-free gummy bears for ideas.
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I've always noticed the "sponsored" and "Amazon's choice" results and just take that as a cue to skip to the next result. I just don't click on anything with those words.
My adblocker doesn't let me click on them (well, I can click, and it throws a warning)
Re: Sponsored = ignored (Score:2)
I too skip the sponsored or recommended links, but a lot of times after reviewing the other items in the category I wind up buying the sponsored or recommended product.
Don't care (Score:5, Informative)
I care about the 5000 female blouses when I search specifically for SHIRTS FOR MEN.
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It mixed it up with your porn searches.
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Oh that's probably predictive advertising, kind of like this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/k... [forbes.com]
Basically they think you're going to be transgender in this case.
It's a browser (Score:2)
If it bothers you, create a plugin that filters the ads.
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They tend to change such every year such that you'll again be fiddling and debugging in another year. The aggregate time to scroll beyond ads may be less than the total script-fiddling time. Some are really fast at such scripts, granted.
Queue Leia to Tarken Quote (Score:3, Funny)
"The more you spam our searches, Amazon, the more customers will slip through your fingers."
Amazon search has been a joke for a long time (Score:4, Informative)
If you enter "wood screw #4 1/2" you'll get all sorts of totally irrelevant results. It seems that Amazon has a strong aversion against returning "we don't stock that," along with a need to push 'sponsored' and 'just plain irrelevant' results.
Amazon search is basically -useless-. Better to use DuckDuckGo or Google to find something on Amazon.
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It seems that Amazon has a strong aversion against returning "we don't stock that,"
Not to be seen as a defense of Amazon, but what I think is more likely is that Amazon's search facility works by ranking "relevance" (weighted by "did anyone pay to sponsor this keyword"), which means guessing what you meant if your search was either ambiguous or misspelled. If you type in "hard disk", the most relevant umpteen results are going to be hard disks, hard disk boxes, etc - so you simply won't see the irrelevant stuff unless you start getting to the billionth page of results. On the other hand i
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On the other hand if you enter "Teddy Ruxpin quadrophonic 8-track hentai edition party pack" there will be literally nothing that's actually relevant, nobody will have paid to promote a specific item for those specific search terms, and your search results are therefore all going to be a long tail of noise results.
Well until now. That phrase now exists on the Internet, therefore some algorithm somewhere will incorporate it.
Thanks, ya jerk.
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If you type in "hard disk", the most relevant umpteen results are going to be hard disks, hard disk boxes, etc - so you simply won't see the irrelevant stuff unless you start getting to the billionth page of results.
Not true (at least in my experience). All you have to do to get the irrelevent results is to change the sort from "Featured" to "Price: Low to High". Doing so will give you anything hard drive related (that is cheaper than an actual hard drive) before an actual hard drive. Even tossing in a size of hard drive in the search field won't change this annoying behaviour.
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Well I have also searched for "1TB hard drive" before and within the first page of results there are listings for 512GB drives and 2TB drives and .... If I'm lucky there will be a few 1TB drives included.
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Amazon's search is basically useless. If you want to find something on Amazon, you're way better off googling it and adding site:amazon.com.
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If you enter "wood screw #4 1/2" you'll get all sorts of totally irrelevant results.
I used to go to smallparts.com to buy components like tiny 000-120 screws. They had a wonderful search engine that allowed customers to drill down on every feature.
Then Amazon acquired smallparts.com and dumped their products into the standard Amazon search engine, making it nearly impossible to find any specific item.
Amazon has a strong aversion against returning "we don't stock that,"
I don't think so. Many times, after enough searching effort, it turns out that they DO stock a hard-to-find item. Amazon's crippled search is due to incompetence as much as to malice.
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If you enter "wood screw #4 1/2" you'll get all sorts of totally irrelevant results.
I searched for 1/2 inch wood screw #4 and the first result is: https://www.amazon.ca/Hard-Fin... [amazon.ca]
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First page of results:
1. Sponsored #4 x 1"
2. #8 x 2"
3. #4 x 1/2" stainless steel (Amazon's choice)
4. #4 x 1/2" black
5. #14 1/4x 4 1/2" deck screws
6. screw assortment (sponsored)
7. #4 x 1/2" stainless
8. #8 1 1 1/4 (sponsored)
9. #4 x 1/2 brass
10. #10 x 4" deck screws (NOT a sponsored link)
11. #8 x 1/2 truss head
12. #4 x 1/2 brass
13. #4 x 1/2 stainless truss head (sponsored)
14. #4 x 1/2 stainless
15. #4 x 1/2 stainless
16. #4 x 1/2" sheet metal
17. #4 x 1/2" sheet metal
18. #8 x 1 1/4 (sponsored)
19. stai
They've been doing this for awhile now (Score:2)
Yes, this is real. But they haven't been disguising what they were doing. I don't remember how long they've been doing it, I think over a year. It does seem to be getting more prevalent, but that may be biased memory.
I've got to admit I find it less of a problem than pop-up ads. At least they're trying to show me things I might be interested in. It's not as bad as advertising the things I bought last week. (They do that too, but lower down on the page.)
Amazon search is stuck in the 90s (Score:3)
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At least you get to the point where you can buy something and return it I can’t even buy something because of the reduced functionality.
Clearly labeled (Score:2)
The sponsored products are clearly labeled as such, so what's the problem?
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Their search for ad money binders the ability to purchase something. Amazon now has an incentive for you to search a second time to be more specific, so they can display even more ads. At the same time, they have reduced their filtering options to get to something useful.
This is ok if their product is eyeballs, but most of us go to Amazon to actually purchase something, and they are making that hard to do.
I'd say "Just use Adblock" but... (Score:2)
What indeed (Score:2)
Just what the hell do you think you're searching for? Toothpaste and where to buy it.
You want some fun with oddball brands, oil your thumb!
OMG! (Score:1)
Search for "toothpaste" on Amazon, and the top of the web page will show you a mix of popular brands like Colgate, Crest and Sensodyne. Try a separate search for "deodorant" and you'll first see products from Secret, Dove and Native. Look a little closer, though, and you'll notice that those listings are advertisements with the "sponsored" label affixed to them.
Really? We expect a retail website to be devoid of paid-advertisements?
Ever search for "deodorant" on Google? I'm pretty sure Google placed paid/sponsored ads related to your search term, how is this any different?
As research, I went out to my local grocery store and I saw paid advertisements and product placements all around the store. Then I went to a baseball game and would you believe it, I even saw advertisements on countless surfaces around the stadium. To unwind, I went to a NASCAR event, snd the car
There's a Chrome extension for this. (Score:1)
At least it's within the site (Score:2)
What? I am shocked! (Score:2)
Whatever Amazon doing... Is it consiste
Never use the "APP" for anything (Score:2)
Just use a damn web browser. Screw the app nonsense, it's all about tracking and ads.
This is the leas of Amazon's search problems!!! (Score:3)
Maybe Amazon should use some of this advertising money to make an actual working search engine.
Currently Amazon search is totally useless. Do a search for toothpaste and it will return a result with several toothpaste options. Now refine your search to list the results in order of price. For some reason now the top results are for a toothbrush, or a toothpaste roller, or just about anything other than toothpaste that has tooth in the description somewhere (and sometimes not even that much connection to your actual search) that happens to be less expensive than the first toothpaste result.
If I am searching for toothpaste show me toothpaste results no matter how I want to sort the results.
No different to retail (Score:2)
Does the author realize this is basically no different to retail stores? Big Box retail stores charge a fee for the best shelf placements - effectively forcing manufacturers to buy advertising space inside the store. At least Amazon states the item is a paid promotion - there's no such notification on the shelf at a retail store.
Noticed it the other day (Score:3)
I was trying to buy a couple things on Amazon this weekend, and the lack of any useful results made me just give up and buy local. I would tend to say Amazon should be careful with this approach as it really makes it harder to convert their ecosystem into sales.
Likewise, for the Home Depot and other brick and mortar retailers, you really need to step up your filtering algorithms to make online shopping work better. Not having any useful filters for narrowing down 200 items is a big hindrance to a sale.
Only Part of The Problem (Score:2)
After a pandemic-driven surge in my use of Amazon, I am now using it less, and have stopped using it entirely for some classes of products like consumer electronics (I use NewEgg as my Amazon for the stuff that they carry).
Since hardware chains have excellent search systems now, I find I usually just look for the products there and (shockers) go to the store now for stuff I once would have ordered through Amazon.
Not only is Amazon piling ads instead of search results on me, but the searches themselves are b
Broken (Score:2)
Amazon search is broken, and has been for years. Sort by price does not work, and searching with terms to exclude does not work. Using google to search amazon actually works better.
Amazon (et al.) are continuing bait+switch (Score:2)
Amazon is the worst at this.
Try searching for Soy Dream Vanilla Enriched 64oz.
You will find:
Rice Dream Vanilla
Soy Dream Original
and nothing in 64oz.
Others have complain their products were switched from
Vanilla Enriched Soy, to Rice or Original as well -- I DID notice
the switch on my order, but got a 50% deal due to taking
boxes with best date only 5 months away, so I went with
original Soy anyway, BUT darned if they didn't pull the order
switch on me as I went to the checkout page.
Another time, I typed in the