<story><title>Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa-devices-echo-losses-strategy-25f2581a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsclough</author><text>The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine.&lt;p&gt;How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically listed price per volume labels? These things are all labeled specifically to fool people who are alive but not conscious. Again, we are just a rounding error to these monoliths</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>This a million times.&lt;p&gt;I swear I will never understand why Amazon&amp;#x27;s supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster.&lt;p&gt;Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there&amp;#x27;s a single listing for each book, and the price doesn&amp;#x27;t change much, just some discount from list. It works.&lt;p&gt;But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it&amp;#x27;s utter chaos. Multiple listings for the same item, sizes and quantities that mysteriously move from one listing to another, prices that vary 10x or more...&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s utterly baffling to me why Amazon created this consumer-hostile nightmare. I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but everything home and toiletries I buy from Target online, simply because the listings and prices are totally consistent. Even though I have Prime! I don&amp;#x27;t understand why Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t figure out that Prime consumers like me &lt;i&gt;buy from Target instead&lt;/i&gt; because Amazon&amp;#x27;s household supplies listings are such utter unpredictable garbage, while Target just works like a normal store.</text></item><item><author>swatcoder</author><text>&amp;gt; I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot;. Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision.&lt;p&gt;This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (rightly or wrongly), blind ordering might be more tenable.&lt;p&gt;But some other head on the beast wants to keep Amazon shaped like an unmonitored digital marketplace where orders are fulfilled dynamically by bidders and algorithms, so your Tide Pods could be anywhere from $6.99 to $64.99, and you might get anywhere between 10 and 100, and they might arrive tomorrow or next week, and they might come in retail packaging or as a bag of tide-pod-resembling-mystery-objects, etc.&lt;p&gt;Of course blind ordering won&amp;#x27;t work when you can&amp;#x27;t give your customers any  assurances (let alone guarantees) about price, quality, volume, etc</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout &amp;quot;Alexa order me Tide Pods&amp;quot; from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that consumers don&amp;#x27;t behave like that. This is also why Amazon&amp;#x27;s Dash buttons failed. I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot;. Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision and suddenly order more things.&lt;p&gt;If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience. The tech is still pretty much where it was in 2014. Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that&amp;#x27;s basically it. Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn&amp;#x27;t mind paying a subscription fee for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rkachowski</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s absurd that you have to become a being of continuous price comparison in order to be considered conscious. This is predatory behaviour loaded with decades of psychological research around manipulation strategies to increase purchases (e.g. price anchoring, physical positioning on shelves, store layout).&lt;p&gt;These things only work because of innate human biases and cognitive defects. The idea that anyone less than a pure rational being lacks consciousness is just silly. There&amp;#x27;s a huge power imbalance which is systemically leveraged against the consumer and it&amp;#x27;s more useful to see this as a designed aspect of the system rather than the collective individual failures of &amp;quot;nearly all the consumers&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/tech/amazon-alexa-devices-echo-losses-strategy-25f2581a</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsclough</author><text>The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine.&lt;p&gt;How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically listed price per volume labels? These things are all labeled specifically to fool people who are alive but not conscious. Again, we are just a rounding error to these monoliths</text></item><item><author>crazygringo</author><text>This a million times.&lt;p&gt;I swear I will never understand why Amazon&amp;#x27;s supply, organization, and pricing for household goods is such a disaster.&lt;p&gt;Because their experience for mainstream books is mostly perfectly fine -- there&amp;#x27;s a single listing for each book, and the price doesn&amp;#x27;t change much, just some discount from list. It works.&lt;p&gt;But for things like paper towels or Tide or whatever, it&amp;#x27;s utter chaos. Multiple listings for the same item, sizes and quantities that mysteriously move from one listing to another, prices that vary 10x or more...&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s utterly baffling to me why Amazon created this consumer-hostile nightmare. I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon, but everything home and toiletries I buy from Target online, simply because the listings and prices are totally consistent. Even though I have Prime! I don&amp;#x27;t understand why Amazon doesn&amp;#x27;t figure out that Prime consumers like me &lt;i&gt;buy from Target instead&lt;/i&gt; because Amazon&amp;#x27;s household supplies listings are such utter unpredictable garbage, while Target just works like a normal store.</text></item><item><author>swatcoder</author><text>&amp;gt; I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot;. Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision.&lt;p&gt;This is compounded by the multi-headed monster that large orgs like theirs have no choice but to become. If customers could trust that every day essentials had a relatively stable price and availability pattern like they trust from their local grocery store (rightly or wrongly), blind ordering might be more tenable.&lt;p&gt;But some other head on the beast wants to keep Amazon shaped like an unmonitored digital marketplace where orders are fulfilled dynamically by bidders and algorithms, so your Tide Pods could be anywhere from $6.99 to $64.99, and you might get anywhere between 10 and 100, and they might arrive tomorrow or next week, and they might come in retail packaging or as a bag of tide-pod-resembling-mystery-objects, etc.&lt;p&gt;Of course blind ordering won&amp;#x27;t work when you can&amp;#x27;t give your customers any  assurances (let alone guarantees) about price, quality, volume, etc</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout &amp;quot;Alexa order me Tide Pods&amp;quot; from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs.&lt;p&gt;The problem is that consumers don&amp;#x27;t behave like that. This is also why Amazon&amp;#x27;s Dash buttons failed. I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click &amp;quot;buy&amp;quot;. Reducing the number of clicks is not going to make me change my decision and suddenly order more things.&lt;p&gt;If they want to salvage Alexa, they need to forget shopping and start doubling down on the smart home and assistant experience. The tech is still pretty much where it was in 2014. Alexa can set timers and tell me the weather, and...that&amp;#x27;s basically it. Make it a value add in my life and I wouldn&amp;#x27;t mind paying a subscription fee for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Phiwise_</author><text>If by &amp;quot;these companies&amp;quot; you mean the third party suppliers, then sure, but Amazon obviously loses business when a customer can&amp;#x27;t trust the branded microphone cylinder they bought to place the desired order for them and make the program profitable. This is especially evident in the failure of Amazon&amp;#x27;s bid over the past decade to replace the big box supermarkets and grocers: clearly customers aren&amp;#x27;t pleased enough with the service quality to select it over physically picking their &amp;quot;essential goods&amp;quot; themselves, even when their probable prime subscription partially went to setting the system up. What good does Amazon get in hamstringing its own ability to acquire new markets in exchange for enriching someone else? The argument that they&amp;#x27;ve arrived here out of some rational, intentional economic calculation that they can but choose not to change is clearly penny wise but pound foolish.</text></comment>