<story><title>Amazon Is Quietly Eliminating List Prices</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/amazon-is-quietly-eliminating-list-prices.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tuna-piano</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s really an awful process buying a lot of items nowadays.  It seems like the exact same item will be sold under 30 different brands with different star levels, with many reviews full of the &amp;quot;free product&amp;quot; in  for honest (usually 5 star) reviews.&lt;p&gt;I wish Jeff Bezos would try buying a travel adapter (among many other items I&amp;#x27;ve tried to buy recently) and tell me that it&amp;#x27;s a customer friendly process: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel+adapter&amp;amp;keywords=travel+adapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are approximately 5 actually different adapters sold under maybe 50+ brands, and all the reviews are so padded with 5* free reviews, it&amp;#x27;s tough to know which ones are crap and which are good.&lt;p&gt;Reviews aren&amp;#x27;t as important for retailers like Wal-Mart that curate their products.  But for a marketplace like Amazon, reviews are absolutely critical to prevent scams.  I hope Amazon realizes the enormity of this issue and is working on it.&lt;p&gt;I believe Amazon should:&lt;p&gt;1. Fix the reviews.  Disallow giving items for free or reduced prices in exchange for reviews.  This may have worked originally for books, but any benefit received now is far out shadowed by the negatives.  Alternatively, just limit it to 5 total free &amp;#x2F; reduced reviews per product to limit the negative effect.  Police this policy heavily.&lt;p&gt;2. For the duplicate products (where one identical product is sold under 10 different brands, like in the travel adapter example above): Group the products together, and choose the brand like you might choose the color or size on a t-shirt.  I recognize that there isn&amp;#x27;t a UPC numbering system that makes this easy - but there are probably only a few thousand items required to group together to make the buying process a lot easier for a large percentage of purchases.</text></item><item><author>uptown</author><text>The thing I don&amp;#x27;t get about Amazon is they&amp;#x27;ve allowed entire categories of products to become unbuyable from their site. Batteries? Every review seems to indicate what&amp;#x27;s sold is some substandard knock-off. Medical products like thermometers? They&amp;#x27;re all reviews from people who got the product for free in exchange for writing a review. Their brand is rapidly being tarnished in my view.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deanCommie</author><text>Sorry I don&amp;#x27;t understand your point about travel adapters.&lt;p&gt;1. I go to your link&lt;p&gt;2. &amp;quot;Oh cool, there&amp;#x27;s a lot of travel adapters&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;3. Filter by free shipping&lt;p&gt;4 (optional). See the top 2 are Sponsored, which makes me less likely to trust them, so ignore them. [NOTE: This is similar behaviour to using ANY search engine]&lt;p&gt;5. Open the top 3 links (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;MX-UC1-Protector-Universal-Charger-Adapter&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;B00E0FZSQC&amp;#x2F;ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1467713126&amp;amp;sr=8-4&amp;amp;keywords=travel+adapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;MX-UC1-Protector-Universal-Charger-Ad...&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Adapter-Worldwide-Universal-Converters-Charging&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;B01DJ140LQ&amp;#x2F;ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1467713126&amp;amp;sr=8-5&amp;amp;keywords=travel+adapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Adapter-Worldwide-Universal-Converter...&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Grounded-Universal-Schuko-Adapter-Germany&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;B004SY5O5K&amp;#x2F;ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1467713126&amp;amp;sr=8-6&amp;amp;keywords=travel+adapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Grounded-Universal-Schuko-Adapter-Ger...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;6. Dismiss #2 because it&amp;#x27;s twice the cost of the other ones and has lower reviews&lt;p&gt;7A. Pick #3 because it&amp;#x27;s a &amp;quot;best seller&amp;quot; - which means it has been vetted by other customers&lt;p&gt;7B. Pick #1 because it looks the nicest&lt;p&gt;Both have mostly good reviews with some bad ones, but hey it&amp;#x27;s a 7 dollar piece of plastic that tries to work in 150 different countries, it&amp;#x27;s not going to be perfect.&lt;p&gt;What is so customer unfriendly about this process?&lt;p&gt;Oh and by the way, this is a POWER user process who really wants to get the best one. A layperson could have just as easily just went straight for the &amp;quot;Best seller&amp;quot; and been satisfied.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon Is Quietly Eliminating List Prices</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/business/amazon-is-quietly-eliminating-list-prices.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tuna-piano</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s really an awful process buying a lot of items nowadays.  It seems like the exact same item will be sold under 30 different brands with different star levels, with many reviews full of the &amp;quot;free product&amp;quot; in  for honest (usually 5 star) reviews.&lt;p&gt;I wish Jeff Bezos would try buying a travel adapter (among many other items I&amp;#x27;ve tried to buy recently) and tell me that it&amp;#x27;s a customer friendly process: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel+adapter&amp;amp;keywords=travel+adapter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;ref=sr_pg_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Atravel...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are approximately 5 actually different adapters sold under maybe 50+ brands, and all the reviews are so padded with 5* free reviews, it&amp;#x27;s tough to know which ones are crap and which are good.&lt;p&gt;Reviews aren&amp;#x27;t as important for retailers like Wal-Mart that curate their products.  But for a marketplace like Amazon, reviews are absolutely critical to prevent scams.  I hope Amazon realizes the enormity of this issue and is working on it.&lt;p&gt;I believe Amazon should:&lt;p&gt;1. Fix the reviews.  Disallow giving items for free or reduced prices in exchange for reviews.  This may have worked originally for books, but any benefit received now is far out shadowed by the negatives.  Alternatively, just limit it to 5 total free &amp;#x2F; reduced reviews per product to limit the negative effect.  Police this policy heavily.&lt;p&gt;2. For the duplicate products (where one identical product is sold under 10 different brands, like in the travel adapter example above): Group the products together, and choose the brand like you might choose the color or size on a t-shirt.  I recognize that there isn&amp;#x27;t a UPC numbering system that makes this easy - but there are probably only a few thousand items required to group together to make the buying process a lot easier for a large percentage of purchases.</text></item><item><author>uptown</author><text>The thing I don&amp;#x27;t get about Amazon is they&amp;#x27;ve allowed entire categories of products to become unbuyable from their site. Batteries? Every review seems to indicate what&amp;#x27;s sold is some substandard knock-off. Medical products like thermometers? They&amp;#x27;re all reviews from people who got the product for free in exchange for writing a review. Their brand is rapidly being tarnished in my view.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kordless</author><text>I work at Data Alchemy. We&amp;#x27;re an Amazon Merchant who runs our system on a search engine, built by search engineers who used to be at Looksmart and Loggly. Amazon does merge ASINs occasionally to help improve quality of listings (and merging comments), but we&amp;#x27;ve found focusing the algos on the listings that both sell well and get a lot of good comments and support work really well. Our store on Amazon is the result of this search algorithm running on about 1.7 million listings: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;s?me=AZHZ102UTKBMA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;s?me=AZHZ102UTKBMA&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>