Re:Five U.S. lawmakers accuse Amazon of possibly lying to Co...
by emodendroket on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @01:42AM
(#28927159)
Isn't paying for sponsored results more or less equivalent to paying for better shelf space? The space may not "really" be limited, but for practical purposes, the second page of search results barely exists.
Re:Five U.S. lawmakers accuse Amazon of possibly lying to Co...
by asdff on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @01:49AM
(#28927220)
Not really because even then you could be trumped by an amazon basics result without realizing what happened unless you are checking for this constantly yourself. When you pay for premium shelf space you are paying for the explicit shelf in the explicit store, everything is exactly planned, nothing left to chance or uncertainty, its all very diplomatic in comparison.
Amazon on the other hand doesn't work like a retail store. You aren't leasing a finite amount of space within the Amazon website. You are beholden to the search algorithm run by amazon which is a black box compared to an agreement made for shelf space in a retail store, you don't pay less for worse placement and you can't pay more for better placement, and Amazon continually tries to poach your business with low cost knockoffs and their search engines are uncannily tailored to prefer these results.