Regarding the Oatly ad at the top (Another ad for our oat drink providing no reason at all why you should try it), this ad does have a signal. It's a humblebrag. It's saying, our product is so well known, and the reasons for using it so obvious, that we don't need to say anything. It's cementing Oatly brand in the minds of anyone who already thinks that they should be switching to non-dairy milk for any reason (health, environment, etc).
Not true. There is limited ad space which all advertisers compete for. No matter which model, CPC or CPA, the advertiser who pays most gets the ad placement.
Its similar to SEO. Nobody says "Oh my god, advertising via SEO is free, what a blessing!". It's still a competition. It's still a zero sum game.
This has little to do with equilibrium analysis, it is just the market for lemons story but for the ad space. You need to investigate the buyers and what they believe about brand quality.
One of the remedies proposed, tying product reviews to the manufacturer instead of the storefront is a very difficult thing to implement.
Manufacturers are in a fundamental conflict with Amazon precisely because they desire to fully control the retail channels and set their own promotions, online discounts etc. and capture most of the surplus themselves while still segmenting the market and, for example, selling at different prices through certain local distributors.
Amazon has the exact opposite incentives, they want distributors of the same brand to compete amongst themselves so they can offer the lowest global prices, and that it's Amazon and its users that capture most of the surplus.
This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve, manufacturers aren't willing to vouch for their products when sold in secondary channels they do not fully control. So this means they will not collaborate on the "global rating" scheme either.
They can definitely solve some problems. There's a number of items that are well known to have common forgeries. Weirdly common is things like Lamy pens[0]. I've gotten legit ones from amazon but seem fake ones.
One big problem I see is if you go to the storefront of some seller there isn't a way to see all their items. I find this baffling, and a clear red flag. Just start clicking on the stores when you're poking around next time. It's very common for things like pet toy sellers or even electronic component retailers. I've seen even certain colors of products be listed on a different page and sold for much cheaper.
There's also the classic example where a page was originally for one product but now has another. You look at the reviews and they're talking about a different product, sometimes related sometimes drastically different. This is actually a great use case for some ML. Flag products if a classifier says the item is significantly different than the previous photos. Could use some basic NLP to check product titles and see if they match. It creates some issues but Amazon has such a big problem that it would be worth it for the customer experience.
But I think the problem is all of this doesn't "make more profits." If it's hard to verify a product a user will spend more time on Amazon. If the idea is that more time increases likelihood of buying more things then a little fraud is good for them. Worse for the customer but better for them. I'm not sure how you solve this problem
That explains the success of platforms like Temu: every search generates many identical products that are all dirt cheap, which makes my search much easier. I find myself buying a lot faster because there is not a lot of variety and relatively little trickery/ads
The cited research that buyers use price as an indicator of quality was from 1985. Does that hold true these days?
My gut suspects not?
Perhaps in the early and mid 80s you could still buy quality products, but now is seems 99% of things are just mass-produced where ever it is cheapest. People are conditioned on Amazon to find the same product from a jumble-of-letter manufacturer who is selling the exact same thing at the lowest price. I do not trust that if I buy a "known brand" for a product that it is going to be any different from a similar same no-name thing that is 20-30% of the price (...and very possibly built in the same factory). If it's all low quality crap (which a lot of the time it is) then you may as well get the cheapest one
Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.
I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there.
As a consumer, my reaction to all this is simply to stop looking and stop buying. Unless it's something urgent, I put it on a list and wait. Many times the need goes away. Better than dealing with all this crap.
I'm recently seeing some ads on TV, that make me avoid ads by any means. There simply weirdness and harmfulness to eyes mixed and served. I think this is being done to attract viewer attention, which became 99% of the goal, rather than being informative or signaling. Sometimes there is hardly any indication what the actual product is, and how it is relevant to whatever weirdness that took up most of the ad time. Things like putting a mouth on the forehead of people, fast flickering scenes, and I can't even dare to speak about other weirdness. Oh god, the ad designers are a desperate bunch for attention. I'm really fearful of touching TV remote. And if these ads really liked by people, then I'm fearful of the future of the world in the hands of these people.
There may be something interesting here to think about, but I'd argue that the following statement is literally much more useful than that entire article.
"When advertising, appealing to emotion is much more important than information or logic."
I love that this reduces to math a "special theory of enshittification" because it describes how no-name vendors can profit from the "general theory of enshittification" put forth by Doctorow that describes the platform monopolies like Amazon under which the vendors operate.
>Ratings compression
Star ratings on major platforms increasingly cluster between 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to distinguish products.
Last year I was skimming through IKEA furniture and majority of reviews are 4 or 5 stars. And that makes me think that people who don't like IKEA products are either so pissed that they do not want leave 1 star review or IKEA removes bad reviews.
> "Star ratings on major platforms increasingly cluster between 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to distinguish products."
The good ol' 7 out of 10 problem. Where the entire lower half of the rating system is unused.
The way I solve it is to have 0 be the middle, If the transaction exceeded expectations you can give it a +1 if it failed to meet them give it a -1 (thumbs up/down if you prefer) you can even throw in a +-2 if you want to allow for more subtlety of expression
Reviews are basically useless today. I'm sorry but it is true. Pick any hobby you deeply understand enough to not require handholding by a reviewer, and watch the reviews about that segment. It is a joke, pure PR. "This one is good but this one is pretty gooder" None of these sponsored reviewers want to bite the hand that feeds them and gives them free product to review for their channel. They never go very deep into anything. Classic Gell-Mann amnesia
Customer reviews are also useless. 10 people go 5/5 no comment. One guy goes 3/5 "good thing." ???? Another person didn't hold it right and rated it 1/5, another person got a defective product customer service would have replaced if they had reached out and rated it 1/5.
IMO the solution is doing actual due dilligence. What is the spec sheet? What is actually relevant to what I am doing? How was this thing made? What are the tradeoffs of using this technique in in this product vs other techniques? Where does this featureset stand against other offerings in this segment and pricepoint?
You can do all of this yourself from the primary materials, the product pages, etc. It also doesn't take longer than you'd spend agonizing over yet another half dozen 20 minute review videos. And you'd end up better informed than most content producers, most customer reviewers, even most redditors on the relevant subreddit.
You operate along these lines and all 5 friction points mentioned in the article become irrelevant. You don't give a shit about the brand, you care about the merits of the component. Prolific advertisement is no longer required as a signal for quality since you are actually evaluating the merits of the component directly and not using proxy signals. Return status also doesn't matter because you are evaluating the merits of the component directly. Ratings don't matter. Pricepoint also doesn't matter because you don't include price in your analysis save for comparing capabilities across a price point vs assuming costly product = better.
And of course maybe you are bad at estimating a components merit. Maybe you are suffering from Dunning Krueger effect. For most things in life this hardly also matters because the effective difference between a most optimal product and one that is merely good enough is basically zero especially when you lack the ability to determine the differences between perfect and good enough (probably means that precision is not required for you use case).
> You can do all of this yourself from the primary materials, the product pages, etc.
Unless you can't. What exact Ethernet card is embedded in your extensive brand port extension hub? No way to know unless someone knowledgeable disassembles it.
Valuable information doesn't just float around one google search array.
Product pages are too often the same kind of garbage like the reviews you've described, containing very little useful info
20 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadIts similar to SEO. Nobody says "Oh my god, advertising via SEO is free, what a blessing!". It's still a competition. It's still a zero sum game.
Manufacturers are in a fundamental conflict with Amazon precisely because they desire to fully control the retail channels and set their own promotions, online discounts etc. and capture most of the surplus themselves while still segmenting the market and, for example, selling at different prices through certain local distributors.
Amazon has the exact opposite incentives, they want distributors of the same brand to compete amongst themselves so they can offer the lowest global prices, and that it's Amazon and its users that capture most of the surplus.
This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve, manufacturers aren't willing to vouch for their products when sold in secondary channels they do not fully control. So this means they will not collaborate on the "global rating" scheme either.
One big problem I see is if you go to the storefront of some seller there isn't a way to see all their items. I find this baffling, and a clear red flag. Just start clicking on the stores when you're poking around next time. It's very common for things like pet toy sellers or even electronic component retailers. I've seen even certain colors of products be listed on a different page and sold for much cheaper.
There's also the classic example where a page was originally for one product but now has another. You look at the reviews and they're talking about a different product, sometimes related sometimes drastically different. This is actually a great use case for some ML. Flag products if a classifier says the item is significantly different than the previous photos. Could use some basic NLP to check product titles and see if they match. It creates some issues but Amazon has such a big problem that it would be worth it for the customer experience.
But I think the problem is all of this doesn't "make more profits." If it's hard to verify a product a user will spend more time on Amazon. If the idea is that more time increases likelihood of buying more things then a little fraud is good for them. Worse for the customer but better for them. I'm not sure how you solve this problem
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/fountainpens/comments/q14p5w/are_la...
My gut suspects not?
Perhaps in the early and mid 80s you could still buy quality products, but now is seems 99% of things are just mass-produced where ever it is cheapest. People are conditioned on Amazon to find the same product from a jumble-of-letter manufacturer who is selling the exact same thing at the lowest price. I do not trust that if I buy a "known brand" for a product that it is going to be any different from a similar same no-name thing that is 20-30% of the price (...and very possibly built in the same factory). If it's all low quality crap (which a lot of the time it is) then you may as well get the cheapest one
Sadly you need to rely on things like YouTube videos to actually get any kind of idea on if the item is trash or not, and even then there is the risk of paid-reviews so you need to take multiple sources into account, who they are, trust levels etc. it's sad. Either that or - and I know this is madness - go to a physical store and inspect the goods before you buy it.
I would argue that the article is correct that quality is often secondary to speed of delivery and cheapness though. Amazon has totally won there.
- use other information channels like review media (fashion sites)?
- trust secondary sites like brand retailers (IE. John Lewis in the UK?)
????
"When advertising, appealing to emotion is much more important than information or logic."
Last year I was skimming through IKEA furniture and majority of reviews are 4 or 5 stars. And that makes me think that people who don't like IKEA products are either so pissed that they do not want leave 1 star review or IKEA removes bad reviews.
The good ol' 7 out of 10 problem. Where the entire lower half of the rating system is unused.
The way I solve it is to have 0 be the middle, If the transaction exceeded expectations you can give it a +1 if it failed to meet them give it a -1 (thumbs up/down if you prefer) you can even throw in a +-2 if you want to allow for more subtlety of expression
Customer reviews are also useless. 10 people go 5/5 no comment. One guy goes 3/5 "good thing." ???? Another person didn't hold it right and rated it 1/5, another person got a defective product customer service would have replaced if they had reached out and rated it 1/5.
IMO the solution is doing actual due dilligence. What is the spec sheet? What is actually relevant to what I am doing? How was this thing made? What are the tradeoffs of using this technique in in this product vs other techniques? Where does this featureset stand against other offerings in this segment and pricepoint?
You can do all of this yourself from the primary materials, the product pages, etc. It also doesn't take longer than you'd spend agonizing over yet another half dozen 20 minute review videos. And you'd end up better informed than most content producers, most customer reviewers, even most redditors on the relevant subreddit.
You operate along these lines and all 5 friction points mentioned in the article become irrelevant. You don't give a shit about the brand, you care about the merits of the component. Prolific advertisement is no longer required as a signal for quality since you are actually evaluating the merits of the component directly and not using proxy signals. Return status also doesn't matter because you are evaluating the merits of the component directly. Ratings don't matter. Pricepoint also doesn't matter because you don't include price in your analysis save for comparing capabilities across a price point vs assuming costly product = better.
And of course maybe you are bad at estimating a components merit. Maybe you are suffering from Dunning Krueger effect. For most things in life this hardly also matters because the effective difference between a most optimal product and one that is merely good enough is basically zero especially when you lack the ability to determine the differences between perfect and good enough (probably means that precision is not required for you use case).
Unless you can't. What exact Ethernet card is embedded in your extensive brand port extension hub? No way to know unless someone knowledgeable disassembles it. Valuable information doesn't just float around one google search array. Product pages are too often the same kind of garbage like the reviews you've described, containing very little useful info