Grocery stores (and all other brick-and-mortars) spend tons and tons of money and effort specifically arranging their stores to influence which products you will buy. It's done on the scale of which aisle certain products are on, all the way down to the scale of specifically which shelf (and even exact inches away from eye level) certain products are on.
Every single time you walk into a store, the first product you see (maybe in front of the entryway, maybe it's a big banner hanging from the ceiling, or maybe it's the design of the shelf near the cash register) is all meticulously planned.
And if I don't like Tesco I can go to Asda. If Tesco won't sell my product I can try and sell it to Sainsbury's or Waitrose.
The equivalent with Amazon is "If I don't like Walmart, there is some guy with a market stall selling fish, another with apples, a store 5 miles away that has carrots...". Or even, "Tescos won't buy my carrots so I will just drive them to every person myself".
I have said it a few times, you can't be the marketplace and sell through that marketplace. Imagine finding the NYSE were trading shares, and were giving themselves 30ms advantage over everyone else (if you can't imagine, have a browse of the Cryptocurrency markets). Imagine a commodities market who own 90% of the oil themselves, and price themselves into every order (maybe onions...).
To be competitive, you can and you should.
Amazon is a platform company. Platforms commoditize the complements. They didn’t have toys, so partner Toys’R’Us, didn’t have shoes, so partner Zappos, etc.
As the platform, platforms observe transactions, such that through time, they can value complements and decide to co-exist, acquire, or compete.
This is by now a well-known strategy.
Rabbit hole: https://www.gwern.net/Complement
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nyse-jeffrey-c-sprecher-kelly-l...
1. There's limited space at the front of a brick and mortar store. It's not practical to put most of the items at the front, so anyone who's not just there for a bag of chips ends up looking through the aisles anyways.
2. Brick-and-mortar stores usually only sell a few forms of same product. If I want olive oil, there's some store brand, some italian-looking brand, and maybe a brand that advertises some sort of magical health benefits. There might be a few variations for the level of refinement/virginity. It's easy for me to look at all the options and compare them. When I look at a search page on Amazon, there's often 100's of hits, and it's often pretty unclear if there's any difference between them that I'd care about (see https://www.amazon.com/s?k=olive+oil).
There's limited space on the frontpage of Amazon.com, too. If I go to Amazon looking for chips, I won't see it on the front page so I'm going to end up going to the Chips section of the site. If you're just at the store for a bag of chips, you go the chips aisle, which is also meticulously planned to specifically influence which brand of chips you will buy. I fail to see how this is any different than going to the Chips section of Amazon and seeing a specially arranged selection of chips.
>2. Brick-and-mortar stores usually only sell a few forms of same product. If I want olive oil, there's some store brand, some italian-looking brand, and maybe a brand that advertises some sort of magical health benefits. There might be a few variations for the level of refinement/virginity. It's easy for me to look at all the options and compare them. When I look at a search page on Amazon, there's often 100's of hits, and it's often pretty unclear if there's any difference between them that I'd care about (see https://www.amazon.com/s?k=olive+oil).
I don't really see what this has to do with the topic at hand. Can you clarify your point?
So in reality, if your product is on page 5, it is perhaps as good as not being on Amazon anyway for that particular query.
If you look at it this way, the space constraint isn't much different than brick and mortar.
Then you throw in Amazon Shopping ads (aka Sponsored Products) and the shelf space metaphor gets muddled further, because it's like as if every store visitor saw unique and different endcap displays and shelving ordering. There is less individual tailoring to search results than you might expect on Amazon (especially compared to information search engines like GoogleBingBingGo) but it is still a factor.
Then there is the factor of endemic counterfeiting in some categories, so the sketchier the listings are the more likely you are to just buy a counterfeit product, which would never happen in a typical brick and mortar retail shop.
IMO Amazon's private labels are so minor and make up such a small portion of store sales that it ranks very low on the scale of things that Amazon does that are morally/legally questionable.
But they are, which is what you're missing. Again, these stores spend millions and millions of dollars collecting these requests and arranging their store in response. They collect feedback and rearrange the shelves nearly every day based on requests (which can be actual verbal/written requests on their website or to store workers, or derived from things like sales numbers).
You can think of it in this way: each time someone goes to the "Chips" aisle, that is a implicit "request" from the customer that they want to buy chips, and the store has arranged their aisle in such a way that influences which chips you buy, just as Amazon arranges their search results page.
Stores maximizing the revenue they receive from their average customer, which they do quite aggressively as you note, feels very different from what Amazon is doing.
>the store has arranged their aisle in such a way that influences which chips you buy, just as Amazon arranges their search results page.
To make a somewhat silly comparison that illustrates how this is is not "just" like Amazon - I have never been in a grocery store that places their brand of chips on both ends of the chips aisle. I might find my chips before I see their brand. Amazon, on the other hand, can rearrange their shelves for every customer, and so their ability to manipulate the consumer experience is much greater.
Ultimately the arranging of physical displays, no matter the amount of zeal or data involved, seems categorically different to me than stores which can arranged differently not only for every customer, but every customer request. I think you're saying they're basically the same thing - in which case we'll just have to agree to disagree.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=lp_16310101_nr_n_6?fst=as%3Aoff...
To extend it again to the grocery store example, if I walk into a Target and ask the customer service person for their recommendation for some crackers, and they walk over to the Cracker aisle and point directly at the Target brand crackers instead of the Nabisco ones, are you saying that's problematic?
I don't think there's anything wrong with stores recommending something in general. For instance, I don't think there's anything wrong with the "amazon's choice" label that Amazon uses.
This feels different to me, because as I said originally, this isn't Amazon recommending their brand. Amazon still ranks search results based on some combination of popularity and (probably) profitability.
To return to the in-store scenario: let's say you asked someone in Target to recommend crackers. The employee has a recommendation, but to hear it you first need to be shown the Target brand crackers, and then the employee will give you their recommendation.
This is an extremely important part of the service that every store provides. The only difference with Amazon is that they offer a wider selection of everything. In brick and mortar stores, only one or a few products of each type are stocked and the rest are simply not offered. You don't think about the store providing the service of sorting the products that they decided not to offer, but they do.
A Safeway house brand is usually offered at a small discount to the name brand, because the consumer trusts the name brand more.
Is that really true? Maybe once upon a time, but Amazon is the last place I turn to when trying to find a product that's suitable for purpose. As their marketplace has become a wasteland of cheap knock-offs and fake reviews, I find the only way to successfully use the site is to first find a product on an external review site (i.e. NYT's "Wirecutter") or search specifically only for brands I already know and limit the results to those sold directly from Amazon.
This is the same problem that Google creates.
Imagine if the Yellow Pages advertisements, listed categorically and alphabetically, were re-sorted according to an algorithm according to whomever was accessing them.
To use a popular term, sorting has been "weaponised".
It is a form of filtering, curation, gatekeeping. Businesses compete to pass through the filters, past the gate.
For example, when a user selects an app for her phone, she selects from a "top 10" or some such. As with being on "page one" of Google search results, manipulating the algorithm becomes a goal. Another popular term online, "winner take all" or "network effect", is in part enabled through sorting. All those hundreds of thousands of other apps are sorted out to create a "top 10" for which all must compete.
Instead of letting users sort results on their own initiative, e.g., according to popularity or rating, listings are sorted by default.
Alphabetical listings do not create the competition that drives up the value of the "top 10" or "page one". Alphabeticisation is a transparent algorithm everyone can understand, not a trade secret.
Even on HN, we see comments re-arranged in their order in a thread, in order to manipulate reader response.
There is certainly an element of utility and convenience but, in effect and perhaps by intent, there is more to the sorting than simply what may benefit the user.
I rarely use amazon for anything today because the volume of garbage easily outweighs the good products, mad it's like rolling craps dice if you get a good seller. I opt to purchase directly from the manufacturer or a known retailer that know owns the product they are selling now, if I use amazon, it is exclusively for amazon brand products only.
if this type of behavior pushes 3rd party sellers off the platform and returns amazon to their glory days of being the actual retailer, I think it's a good move
The key advantage that Amazon has over other retailers (for consumers at least) is that its logistics are so damn good. I’ll usually go to Amazon first to look for what I want, because I know they’ll probably ship it faster. But more often than not I usually end up buying from a more specialized retailer for one reason or another.
Is that their brand though? I've never been convinced of that due to all the sponsored results (which are very similar to how brick-and-mortar stores arrange their products) and most egregiously, not providing consistent per unit pricing. I've never felt like Amazon is helping me make the right choice at all, but rather duping me into a choice that benefits them.
I think this is going a bit too far. "removing to get to the branded one" would be appropriate if you had to go to 2nd page of search results to see branded products, but most results on Amazon show competing products above the fold.
A better comparison would be reserving the best shelf space for Amazon Basics.
That is incorrect. You may be surprised to learn that grocery stores sell prime shelf space to distributors/brands.[0]. In this case, it's the distributer's request - not yours.
[0]https://cspinet.org/news/supermarkets-%E2%80%9Crigged%E2%80%...
Amazon can be the e-commerce site and sell commodity things. It would be different if it lacked transparency or was trying to hide it's involvement in the private labels.
I mostly realise that they are Amazon brands when I notice they are strongly pushed by Amazon’s algorithm.
Amazon's brand (as a store / marketplace) is that it helps you sort through many options to select the product they believe you will like the best. This is different from the service offered by traditional grocery stores which offer many different products, but are not arranging those products in relation to a particular request.
This means that, when Amazon is operating as a store, any re-ordering of the display results disrupts the value they provide to consumers. It also, of course, disrupts the value they provide to the products they sell. Any other product that receives poor reviews would be punished by being displayed later, but Amazon branded products will never suffer that fate. The same is true of any other algorithmic sorting.
Amazon is, with one side of its mouth, suggesting a business model that it claims will benefit both sellers and buyers (that the best products will win and consumers will be shown the product best matched to them) and also explicitly excluding itself from that system.
To return to the supermarket situation, you might imagine a supermarket which stocks all brands, but the first item in every row is the store-brand equivalent of that product which you must remove to get to the branded one.