The requirements to be a successful seller on Amazon changed a few times throughout the years.
* Just list your products and earn money.
* Get featured merchant status. Earn money.
* Use the FBA program (let Amazon stop and ship your products). Get automatically featured. Earn money.
* Build your own brand and sell your own (chinese sourced) products. Earn money.
* Be the highest bidder in Amazon Ads and all of the above (WE ARE HERE).
So yes, expect a bunch of ads for the same product just with different brands. This is a fight that Amazon wants to incentivize since now they don't only earn the referral fee (15% or higher on some categories) but they also get the ad fee.
Nowadays most of what you pay just goes to Amazon services. For example the first wooden spatula ad [1] price is $6.90. The seller gets $1.63 [2] for that sale. But it doesn't end there, a first spot ad is well above $1 but let's round it down to $1. All that's left is $0.63, and with that they have to buy the product, ship it to Amazon, and pay their employees.
I think at some point something is going to implode because they won't stop rising their fulfillment pricing (they do it twice a year on schedule). Low cost items just won't be affordable anymore on Amazon.
This is only true for low end products that are easily copied. For higher end products it's still "* Just list your products and earn money."
Or not even that, as many manufacturers of high end products don't even bother listing all their catalogue on amazon.
We have an Amazon returns store locally. Every item is $15/10/5/4/2/1 depending on the day. It's a fun way to burn time and occasionally find a deal.
It's striking how few recognizable brands are represented in the many tables of random stuff. There's bound to be some self-selection going on - good stuff is less likely to be returned. BUT it's truly shocking to see how many alphabet soup brands are printed on packages.
It's made me look at the Amazon results page and realize:
1. Most of this stuff is absolute garbage
2. The markup on this garbage is crazy if, after being returned, a $70 item can be shipped to a place like this and sold at, presumably, some profit.
3. the sheer volume of things purchased / returned is staggering. There are three stores like this within easy driving distance.
It's a descent into /r/crappyoffbrands hell, and it's honestly changed how I shop online.
>2. The markup on this garbage is crazy if, after being returned, a $70 item can be shipped to a place like this and sold at, presumably, some profit.
I'm in second-hand retail (including the occasional crate of returns, and even sometimes e-waste) and this isn't necessarily true. The main reason this stuff is liquidated for next to nothing is because they're open box returns.
The expertise and labour required to test each product and guarantee function is often worth a significant percentage of the product's value itself, and doesn't scale well. Might not be an issue if you have 500 of a single SKU, but 1 piece each of 500 different SKUs and it's just not worth your time to appraise and test every single one.
> The expertise and labour required to test each product and guarantee function is often worth a significant percentage of the product's value itself
There is no way in hell half that garbage is tested outside of the assembly line in any real world scenario. Another commenter mentions a headband that dyed their forehead and gave them a rash. What use case, if not for someone WEARING IT, did they test that on exactly? They push product-looking shapes out of a cheap Chinese factory and people gobble this shit up, then return it and none of it matters because it was worthless to begin with so any amount of payment is profit.
I tried it (this sudden interest in spatulas has to be screwing with their metrics) and what stood out to me (besides seeing the same items over and over under different names/sellers) was how quickly the search went off the rails entirely.
On page 2 there was a 2,000 charcoal grill. On page 3 they were offering me a giant wood smoker and by page 5 they wanted me to buy a refurbished mixer.
I found a similar gem in Google search results: click a "People also ask" search result question, and more questions will be added per click. They get absurd quickly.
My fave so far started with a search for the reviews on the newest Android phones. The questions devolved down to "When was the first phone a brick?" And no, I didn't click and I don't know.
You know, I noticed this the other day. I opened up Amazon my desktop and thought, “wow this really feels like Walmart now.”
And what I mean by that is cluttered chaos to the point of being overwhelming. I have to sift through 10 ads for kind of similar products to find the one product I actually want.
Another issue is I have been using subscribe and save. At first this was great. I get a discount on items that I buy often and would normally get at BJs, which I hate going to. But half the time now I get a notice right before the item is supposed to ship that they don’t have that item anymore and giving me little time to figure out where I can now go to source that item. This unreliability makes the whole thing useless because I end up needing to go to BJs then anyway.
And then lately I will order an item and like clockwork it doesn’t arrive by the time they advertise. Usually two days late. This would be fine if they at least were accurate in advertising the real arrival date.
I just tried the experiment myself and I get very similar results to what the article describes.
It's mostly sponsored (4 of the top 10 are sponsored). There is only 1 on the entire first page where I recognize the brand. It's the 2nd last on the page (Cuisinart). I see no KitchenAid or OXO.
My experience is more similar to the parent. Granted, the first row seems to be a sponsored spot with 3 listings of spatulas for a brand called "MOACC", but the KitchenAid spatula is the first in second row, which is also prominently labeled "results". A good portion of the search results are also for brands that I don't recognize, but it's not impossible to find name brands. The third row is labeled "AMAZON’S CHOICE", which contains products from KitchenAid, OXO, and Rubbermaid. The fourth row (ie. second row of results), also contains KitchenAid and OXO products.
This is done on amazon.com, from a US VPN ip, using chrome browser on desktop.
Tried and my results are all spatulas, most kitchen implements type and a few tool types.
I think these anecdotes need some more data to establish patterns, ie. the region. I've done my search in the Spanish store. My account in this region is fairly recent, less than a year. My spend is quite high, as we rely on home delivery for everything that is not supermarket type goods.
I have noticed as the economy does worse, the amount of advertising on Google and Amazon search results goes up and up as well as more difficult to distinguish between paid and organic results. They have a lever they can throttle at their will, and when they need more money, they increase the ads. It takes people a while, maybe 6 months+, to realize their go-to search engine or online store has trashed their UX in favor of increasing the price of stonks.
It looks like the search results got better in the last couple of months. Back in the fall when I was searching for "2TB SSD" the results were completely awful and included things like HDDs (why?!?). Trying the same search today seems to get a lot more relevant results.
I think this is the answer, I opened Amazon in Firefox where I have an adblocker and the first result was KitchenAid. In Safari w/ no adblocker the entire first row was ads and there was an extra ad above that for spatulas taking up another row's worth of space for effectively two rows of ads before real results.
I needed a new toner cartridge for my Brother printer, so I typed in the exact cartridge code on Amazon and got pages and pages of third-party options.
Googling for it brought up the Amazon page for the genuine product, first hit.
Try in private mode so you're logged out, no data. I got a good refillable option here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075X6C5ZW?ref_=293ru2fncn2-brothe... . Also try specific known manufactures and search like "[some brand] vs" without finishing after the "vs" and see what Google suggests!
* Just list your products and earn money. * Get featured merchant status. Earn money. * Use the FBA program (let Amazon stop and ship your products). Get automatically featured. Earn money. * Build your own brand and sell your own (chinese sourced) products. Earn money. * Be the highest bidder in Amazon Ads and all of the above (WE ARE HERE).
So yes, expect a bunch of ads for the same product just with different brands. This is a fight that Amazon wants to incentivize since now they don't only earn the referral fee (15% or higher on some categories) but they also get the ad fee.
Nowadays most of what you pay just goes to Amazon services. For example the first wooden spatula ad [1] price is $6.90. The seller gets $1.63 [2] for that sale. But it doesn't end there, a first spot ad is well above $1 but let's round it down to $1. All that's left is $0.63, and with that they have to buy the product, ship it to Amazon, and pay their employees.
I think at some point something is going to implode because they won't stop rising their fulfillment pricing (they do it twice a year on schedule). Low cost items just won't be affordable anymore on Amazon.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Wooden-Cooking-Spatula-Handle-Solid/d... [2]: https://i.imgur.com/kmK8irY.png (the costs include referral fees, storage and handling costs for shipping but not the shipping cost itself, that's paid by the customer either in the order or through their prime membership. They may also get free shipping on bigger orders)