A few recent articles point to the arbitrariness and poor value of Amazon’s Choice, a rating the company theoretically uses to distinguish better value products, but that, apparently uses biased and easy to trick algorithms.
The growth of Amazon has turned its website into a huge panoply of products where brands fight to stand out and where users increasingly face the paradox of choice. Faced with this hyperabundance, Amazon’s Choice is a way of recommending a series of products to users in each category, usually products that are found in the company’s warehouses, in order to ensure a quick delivery, or which are regarded as offering the best value. The rating is delivered based on some type of algorithmic criteria using certain characteristics, but the company does not offer any information beyond “highly rated, well-priced products available for immediate delivery.” However, comparisons suggest that the label, which is decisive in many people’s decision making, in reality means little, and should not be interpreted meaning the product offers good value.
Amazon is now a monster that accounts for 49% of all e-commerce in the United States and around 5% of all retail spending. The company is increasingly copying the business model of traditional shops, selling more and more advertising on its pages in the same way that supermarkets and hypermarkets charge brands to advertise or to occupy certain spaces.
So what’s the problem with this approach? In two words, customer confidence. If somebody who goes to Amazon looking for a specific product is flooded with advertisements from brands that have paid for that position, along with all kinds of arbitrary positioning, she is like to realize that Amazon’s recommendations mean little and may well decide to opt for other channels that are just a few clicks away. Growing numbers of people are already unhappy with Amazon’s irresponsible, aggressive and unsustainable tax practices, while at the same time there is growing awareness of its sale of its dystopian and malfunctioning facial recognition technology to governments, and last but not not least, for its total insensitivity to environmental issues. In many ways, as The Daily Telegraph said, Jeff Bezos’ mid-life crisis could end up costing us the Earth.
For the company with the highest stock market valuation in the world, more than $1 trillion in April (it is currently below that figure), could apparently reach $3,000 in a couple of years, and has, according to some studies, the most valuable brand in the world, these concerns may seem secondary. But when you lose the confidence of your customers, you have nothing, and many choices made by Amazon lately seem to be betraying that confidence. And without a doubt, these are very bad choices that suggest that the company is heading in the wrong direction.
