I think we agree with most of the points here in the Forbes article, but is enforcing policy also seen as negative towards it’s customer experience?
I feel the author of the Forbes article is not someone I want for a customer.
He is stupid and lazy,.
He does not want to adapt to doing a search which gets his result. Let Amazon improve its intelligence, he want to type espresso soft pods when I am sure there is an alternative search which might not be spammed.
He wants Whole Foods to adapt to his distaste for taking his wallet out of his pocketbook,
And he wants to bypass state laws that require age verification on alcohol purchases.
He takes a valid concepts and mires it in triviality, laziness and his stupidity.
The only enshitification is of Forbes Magazine, which is no long worthy of respect.
This I agree with you and take umbridge with.
The writer may have bungled the alcohol issue, but he is spot on when criticizing Amazon’s search.
The placement of irrelevant items is so pervasive and so certain, that when I search, the first thing I look for is the word ‘sponsored’. I treat it to mean ‘pass over this’. I ignore all sponsored items. It works, but only if I am willing to scan lots of trash.
More and more I am searching Amazon from the outside. I type the thing I want to find into Google’s search bar, then add the word ‘Amazon’. Not only does it make searching easier for me, but it probably prevents Amazon from scamming my fellow sellers out of wasted fees.
Over the years, I have been aware of far more Amazon sellers who complain about Amazon search results than buyers.
The buyers I hear complain are not committed Amazon buyers, have less history available to the Amazon search, and often do not know what they are looking for.
I freely admit that I do not know how my buyers find my items, on Amazon or Ebay.
The search is so important that I believe Amazon knows more than those of us who are sellers and used to reverse engineering everything Amazon does.
Amazon is probably correct in treating its search algorithms as trade secrets.
I wish they would implement the ability to block all 3P seller results that Walmart has, but suspect that will no longer be needed since there will only be 3P sellers on Amazon. Eat your heart out, Lina Kahn.
Like this:
Amazon clearly knows what soft coffee pods are, but doesn’t seem to care that its advertisers are paying for exposure on a search that won’t yield sales. Nor do they care that the search results the customer sees are cluttered with incorrect products.
Amazon doesn’t care if the Buyer gets the right thing, as long as Buyers make Sellers pay for clicks.