I dunno, I'm leaning toward "Pair of feet with deformed right toe with gout inflammation", which seems more family friendly, for when my kids play golf on my phone.
This has been going on for years. I can't find the particular listing anymore, but I once went searching Amazon for an EnOcean (wireless protocol) motion sensor and found a phone case with a photo of a motion sensor on it.
Presumably most of these are never purchased, but they generate thousands of listings and print them on demand if one ever gets an order.
There was also someone who had a bot that made "Keep Calm And [Random Bot Text]" t-shirts. Unfortunately I can't find the link to the news story about it though. From memory, that one was actually making money.
Yeah, I wanted to get an RFID-blocking passport wallet and I searched on Amazon, only to find thousands of options (the vast majority of which I assume have never been physically produced) with different slogans in different languages, which looked to be the output of a script that plugged in things into a template.
Many of them look quite plausible but if you keep looking you come across bad transliterations from other languages, extremely specific "I [Place|Activity|Relative|Pet]", "World's Hottest [Profession]", and lots more.
The most implausible to me is that they have "I love you" in foreign languages but not always using the foreign languages' actual writing system, sometimes using unofficial transliterations. (Although apparently people are willing to get tattoos of this kind of thing, so maybe they're also willing to buy passport holders with it...)
I bet this company is still small potatoes compared to the overall scale that the script-assisted product listing game can reach on Amazon.
Another thing was a company that produced custom e-books of Wikipedia articles about different Amazon search terms, so if you searched for "hypochondria" or something, they would be selling an e-book about hypochondria, consisting of a print-out of the Wikipedia page about it.
I'm hoping there isn't and someone realizing the premium for prime/FBA products produced a ton of them after picking designs algorithmically and shipped them to Amazon.
Somewhere, in an Amazon warehouse near you, there is a Samsung S3 infected toe phone cover. What a time to be alive.
"Seller Fulfilled Prime allows you to list your products as Prime-eligible and handle the fulfillment yourself. You can display the Prime badge on the products you already ship directly to customers with 2-day shipping and free standard shipping. There is no fee to enroll in Seller Fulfilled Prime.
Before you can participate, you must satisfy performance requirements during a trial period to demonstrate that you can meet customers' service expectations. After successfully completing the trial, you're automatically enrolled in the program."
At some stage we'll hit a tipping point where most posting traffic across the internet is created by bots. Already we're reading bot curated news, looking at bot analysed kitten pictures, and now bot created products. I would love to go back in time and try and convince younger me and co., that this fancy inter-network we're playing with is not actually for us, but for our future bot overlords.
Eventually the internet will just be bots creating content for other bots to consume. And us humans can go outside and find something better to do with our time.
At some point, bots will produce more music a week than humans have produced in all of history. Then, when humans go outside and play a real instrument, a bot listening in will deliver a bill for royalties to the song that sounds nearly identical to one they wrote first.
They may be optimizing for views. These provocative covers may have risen to the top through analytics because people are like "wtf?" click So they make more of those.
I very much doubt it. I think the more straightforward explanation is far more likely - that someone has fed an Amazon listings bot with a big library of cheap or pirated stock photos. If you look on any stock photo site, you'll see huge numbers of unusual images with very specific titles. For stock photography, it makes perfect sense; there's a very long tail of articles that need cheap illustration. Healthcare is a very lucrative niche, hence the preponderance of medical images. Obviously this dataset is massively unsuited to this particular purpose, but if the cost of a listing is effectively zero, then there's no real downside to being completely indiscriminate.
Given that the seller has listed nearly 32,000 items, I don't think that there's any amount of human decision-making involved.
I was hoping that this was the work of a brilliant artist. But reading the comments suggests it's the work of an automated workflow that optimizes for Amazon's search algorithm. Maybe it's still art.
39 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 97.4 ms ] threadPresumably most of these are never purchased, but they generate thousands of listings and print them on demand if one ever gets an order.
You have the same type of listings for hoodies, mugs and many other "consumables" that are cheap to print on demand.
You can see for yourself:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_sa_fashion?url=searc...
Many of them look quite plausible but if you keep looking you come across bad transliterations from other languages, extremely specific "I [Place|Activity|Relative|Pet]", "World's Hottest [Profession]", and lots more.
The most implausible to me is that they have "I love you" in foreign languages but not always using the foreign languages' actual writing system, sometimes using unofficial transliterations. (Although apparently people are willing to get tattoos of this kind of thing, so maybe they're also willing to buy passport holders with it...)
I bet this company is still small potatoes compared to the overall scale that the script-assisted product listing game can reach on Amazon.
Another thing was a company that produced custom e-books of Wikipedia articles about different Amazon search terms, so if you searched for "hypochondria" or something, they would be selling an e-book about hypochondria, consisting of a print-out of the Wikipedia page about it.
Somewhere, in an Amazon warehouse near you, there is a Samsung S3 infected toe phone cover. What a time to be alive.
"Seller Fulfilled Prime allows you to list your products as Prime-eligible and handle the fulfillment yourself. You can display the Prime badge on the products you already ship directly to customers with 2-day shipping and free standard shipping. There is no fee to enroll in Seller Fulfilled Prime.
Before you can participate, you must satisfy performance requirements during a trial period to demonstrate that you can meet customers' service expectations. After successfully completing the trial, you're automatically enrolled in the program."
-Jarbot
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/
Does that mean yelling at my Alexa to play a Spotify track? It's the only interpretation that makes sense.
This isn't the first the internet has seen something like this. (Remember Horse ebooks?)
Given that the seller has listed nearly 32,000 items, I don't think that there's any amount of human decision-making involved.
Digging a little further, the seller had basically every word + background combo you could think of. Surely created by a bot and made to order.
also looked at this one: https://www.amazon.com/Goldblum-Waterproof-Curtain-Curtains-...