Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Amazon ads stuffing and upcoming “China Crisis.”


This article on #amazon stuffing its search results with ads reminded me of the tipping point when I did the switch from #altavista to #google search.





When the results are optimised to sell you something vs tuned to answer your search, the user starts to lose confidence in the service.

As David J. Carr suggested:
This behaviour is probably rooted in the tension between Bezo’s “I’m sceptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centrepiece” and Olsavsky’s “Our strategy is to make the customer experience additive by the ad process”.

Moreover, it indicates a switch from quantity over quality as they are probably willingly accepting that they can’t guarantee the quality & the authenticity of the products sold by the swarm of third-party vendors under the Amazon brand ( as in via Amazon website).

Last but not least, Brands and Sellers are increasingly competing with 3-week product lifecycle of pseudo-brands. Chinese producer can get to market a smartwatch lookalike within five days and using these self-serve ad platforms can outspend x100 at the bottom of the funnel.

As it becomes hard to compete with those Amazon is naturally increasingly banking on its logistics and distribution platform advantage. When the pseudo-brand life-cycle shorten the only common part of the product experience that will remain constant will be the delivery experience.

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