It feels like the only rational explanation is "Bezos wants it like this."

I know the folks at Amazon are talented, but the abject failure to optimize for quality over quantity is pretty much only explainable as intentional.

I guess a second runner up would be that they're so organizationally KPI-focused, and their KPIs are so myopic, that no one actually realizes how much they're screwing up customer experience. But that seems a stretch.

Or perhaps they’re so KPI-focused that they do know they’re screwing up the customer experience, but they don’t care, because customer experience isn’t a KPI and so won’t get them promoted?

Interesting factoid: I’ve never seen Amazon attempt to take any net-promoter-score-like “Would you recommend Amazon to your friends” measure. Google does these (I just had one pushed on me while using the GCP console.) Apple probably does them somewhere, even if I haven’t noticed it. Facebook definitely does them. But Amazon seems to be actively resistant to collecting this information. They seem to not want to quantize customer-experience into a KPI.

> because customer experience isn’t a KPI and so won’t get them promoted?

In a way, I think you may be on to something. At least indirectly.

Amazon are constantly pushing the narrative that they are obsessively customer-focused and constantly thinking about long term. I have my reasons to believe this might have been true at one time, but now is mostly about optics.

Having interviewed at the company a few years back, there sure was no long-term thinking about anything they internally advocate for potential new hires.[ß] To be honest, I was only exposed to one segment of their business, but I still find it hard to believe that kind of culture would be limited to a single part.

ß: an extreme example: one of their more senior managers explained to me that a 1-year old team is already too old and ready to be disbanded. Knowing, from personal experience, that it can take two years to build a well-functioning team - that was a massive red flag.

During my time there I never saw any evidence that they cared about employee retention. The same pain points came up year after year on the tech survey, and were invariably ignored.

Amazon is customer obsessed in the same way that Google does no evil.

Amazon may have created a more object way of measuring the same thing, but without needing to actually ask customers. They probably know at least a some of garbage products sold on their platform. If that's the case, merely tracking visits and revenues from customers who received poorly made products and comparing with customers who've received well made products over time probably produces a more accurate picture of the effects that low-quality products have on their bottom line over time.

The metric you’re talking about is “churn.” It’s distinct from NPS, as NPS predicts growth—the additional value your brand has in people’s minds above the threshold for leaving, where it becomes a virality coefficient—whereas churn is just a self-evident measure of the percentage of people who see your brand as having value below the threshold.

The fact that NPS (and measures like it) are predictors is useful, in that you end up also collecting real growth data, and the difference between NPS-predicted growth and actual growth can tell you how much of your growth was organic vs. marketing-driven, and thus give you a picture of your brand’s “inertia”—how valuable it is just sitting there doing nothing, separate from any marketing projects. Tracking that allows you to judge the brand impact of everything you do. But you can’t do it without some measure that actually gives you brand value, rather than simple growth.

FWIW, I worked on a team that built a platform which used customer activity to predict their NPS score. The algorithm was straight-forward and the results were pretty accurate; enough so to be used by A/B testing platforms for testing new features on users. A side-effect of our research was insight into the key features that dictated a positive response. Even with a complicated product, success was highly dependent upon about four of the 200 or so features we collected.

I suspect that the minds at Amazon could come up with a much better solution than what we did. By virtue of having smarter, more experienced people on average, and a more simplistic product.

I agree. It seems that it is by design in some way. The shift is really dramatic.

Perhaps it is just "we're not eating enough of the wall-mart (call it what you want) market". And now they're going after that at the expense of the larger brand.

They're big enough now that they'll grow / maybe miss what they're doking up until it is too late.

I'm already shopping elsewhere more often / actively searching out alternatives to Amazon.

Need not forget the incredibly price sensitive crowd that is embracing Amazon.

Based on my limited experience of visiting Walmart, I think most of their low end products are of significantly better quality than low end products from Amazon.

Agreed. I get cheap Stanley tools at Walmart that have a no questions asked lifetime replacement. Walmart is still cheap, but becoming more like Sears once was in quality (on some items).

As for Amazon, I like them too. I know they have a lot of cheap Asian stuff. But sometimes, that is exactly what I want (cheap but good DC stick welders).

I guess the issue is with the knock-offs and dangerous items on Amazon. That's fraud. No question about it. Walmart does not have this issue at all. Amazon should do something about it.

> As for Amazon, I like them too. I know they have a lot of cheap Asian stuff. But sometimes, that is exactly what I want (cheap but good DC stick welders).

I'm of the same mind - sometimes (ok, a lot of times) I want the cheap stuff from China; in many cases, it's the only way to get it at a reasonable price.

I could buy a 40A Bosch relay from China for $1.00 (if that) - or I can go to AutoZone and buy the -exact- same relay (because guess where AutoZone sources it from?) for $15.00. Now - why should I do that?

Multiply that out to a ton of other products.

Now - some things I know I can "Buy USA" with - like DC gear motors. I can go on Amazon, and get a particular DC gear motor for say, $15.00 each. Or I can source something similar made by an American company (let's say Ametek), perhaps using DigiKey or Mouser - and for virtually the same motor, pay $100.00. Yeah - ok. I'll get right on that.

I was once trying to source new gears for a surplus Pittman gear motor I had purchased for a few dollars - the company wanted me to buy 50 pieces of the gear, at $2.50 each. I told 'em thanks but no thanks.

People wonder why parts are bought from China - well, there's your answer.

As individuals, You and I can purchase such items without running into the tariff issue - whether we go thru Amazon or AliExpress or some other direct-from-china method. Now, that doesn't work for businesses of course, so they have to use other methods.

My concern, though, is that we're going to end up in a world where if you are a consumer and not a business, you won't be allowed to purchase from overseas suppliers - due to either uproar over inferior products, or dangerous ingredients, or industry pressure. You'll only be able to shop at USA-only "consumer stores" - and forget about being able to get any of the "off-brand" or "strange" items only available in China (that aren't even carried on Amazon today - a lot of these, you have to dig thru AliExpress, or other direct-from-asia retailers - though the best way tends to be thru taobao and similar - but it's really easy to get hosed, too).

Yes. The problem I have experienced from a customer service perspective is that marketplace sellers who ship dangerous or otherwise clearly defective/scam products (eg I had a power wallwart explode on first being plugged in) just respond to any and all complaints by processing an immediate refund. This doesn't seem to get picked up properly by amazon and presumably their margins are good enough that this strategy works for the sellers (at least for a while).

In fact, Amazon is so overrun with low quality products that I'd even go as far as saying the average Walmart product is better quality than the average Amazon product.

Amazon is AliExpress with a domestic retailer's markup. At least with Walmart I know that when they stock something on their shelves, they care about liability and bad PR.

This. At any brick-and-mortar store, the store itself takes some responsibility for the quality ("won't fail dangerously or slowly poison your children" quality, not "won't fall apart after a year of use" quality) of their products, if only because it's more clear that they'll catch some blowback from stocking illegal products in their stores.

Speaking of Walmart, I just noticed something very interesting. When I buy something in-store at Walmart, but pay using Walmart Pay, the credit card I've enrolled in Walmart Pay records this as an online sale when it comes to deciding what cash back rewards categories apply to it.

The 2 amazon mantras that apply here are; more selection is good, customers will never complain about a lower price.

If the selection is huge then they need to make recommendations to help people find products. I don't think many users will scroll through more than a page or two of options. The integrity of reviews makes a big impact here in how you are likely to make a choice on those first few pages.

3rd party sellers increase selection and the thought is that more selection creates a fly wheel effect that drives down prices which benefits the customer. Amazon has very limited control over 3rd party sellers but they need them to increase selection.

That said, if you go to any store there are typically a few different options in a product category with different price points and quality. Buyer beware applies in a physical store as much as at Amazon. It would be interesting to see how many consumers prefer less selection.

There is nothing stopping someone from creating a curated "quality" focused frontend that makes money on showing customers only high quality products and then making money on the affiliate referrals for the curation. If this was in high demand I think you'd see these curated stores in the wild. I've not seen one though and since I can use tools like fakespot to help determine the quality of the reviews.

>There is nothing stopping someone from creating a curated "quality" focused frontend that makes money on showing customers only high quality products and then making money on the affiliate referrals for the curation. If this was in high demand I think you'd see these curated stores in the wild. I've not seen one though and since I can use tools like fakespot to help determine the quality of the reviews.

Does anyone actually do that though?

Most retail stores that do a lot of promise on "higher quality things" in my experience are just looking for higher margins and can't help but tack on more to the price for marginally better goods.

And I don't know of any site that really tries to do what you describe, thus I am not sure that they would even if there was "demand" / they would even know.

you could make such a store with the product catalog api.

The actual manifestations are affiliates who pair content with the products e.g a blog style product review with a product buy link in it. I have never seen a pure affiliate storefront focused on curation. You sometimes see curated lists in youtube reviews and videos.

> I don't think many users will scroll through more than a page or two of options.

I don't use Amazon for product discovery so I don't scroll through it at all.

You know, I've seen countless times when, say, Walmart or some other retailer gets caught and body slammed for stocking a product on their shelves that was known to be manufactured under substandard working conditions. It's possible that I'm just not seeing the same frequency of articles lobbed at Amazon, but there's no doubt they are guilty of the same thing on some level. Is it because Amazon found a way to sort of diffuse the responsibility, perhaps by claiming that they're just :the platform" shrug? I'm curious though, what kinds of consequences does Amazon actually face for stocking products manufactured under unfair working conditions, stolen intellectual property, and so on? I'm sure their official policy is that they don't tolerate it. Of course. But in reality, what are they actually doing about this, what incentive do they have to do anything, and how effective has it been?

Well the thing is "unfair working conditions" is subjective and lacks binding force unlike say illegal trade with a sanctioned country. So the consequences are "whatever the consumers decide".

That's the thing though. How subjective is "unfair working conditions" really? I ask that in all seriousness. At least in the US (my only frame of reference) there are fantastic arguments about minimum wage. Should it be raised to $15/hr? Maybe less? Maybe more? But no one is really arguing wether or not $1/day is a livable wage. I think most people with a pulse would say that $1/hr is not a livable wage. The question I was really asking is, what's Amazon's position on this? Do they ever come knocking on anyone's door demanding to see their working conditions? If they are, what does that look like? What incentives do they have to do that? Or, in the worst case, do they just sort of look the other way?

> I think most people with a pulse would say that $1/hr is not a livable wage.

Depends on who is getting that $1 and where they are at in the world. I am certain there are places in the world where $1 an hour would be considered almost unheard of by the working class people in the country. Places where $1 a day is considered good money.

Kind of off topic, but do you have a recommendation on a good HDMI switch? I have struggled with the crappy ones from amazon many times. The most frustrating part is that their "remotes" all seem to overlap with regular tv remote frequencies or something, such that changing the volume on the tv ends up triggering an input switch.

No explicit recommendations, but I generally go to monoprice.com for this type of thing nowadays. I've been very happy with their quality.

If you have an amp then upgrading to a multi hdmi amp/hifi might be a better way to go. I found the hdmi switches always crap out or have the remote issue you mention.

Octava for a premium, bulletproof product. Kinivo or StarTech for low cost.

I buy my electronics from B&H, and the Kanex ones are decent.

Unfortunately, not yet.

“Wall-mart” is a store near the Spanish Wall in Pohnpei. Walmart is Sam Walton’s huge chain of stores.