customers are pleased with results pages. But he warns there could be a tipping point: “There is a very clear tension between advertising and customer experience.”Īmazon told me an internal study found 89 percent of U.S. “Right now, consumers are tolerating ads pretty well overall on Amazon, despite the number of them,” said Andrew Lipsman, a principal analyst at market research firm Insider Intelligence. It pays the bills for much of the internet - including this news website. When it’s done well, ads can inform us about new products and help new businesses get a foot in the door.
Let me be clear: Advertising isn’t necessarily bad. How technology fails us - and ideas to make it better. Not the pet bed Amazon makes the most money from. If you are searching for a cat bed, you have an expectation that Amazon will show you the cat beds that are most useful for you. “We are dedicated to providing customers with a world-class shopping experience, including working hard every day to ensure the ads they see are useful, informative, and help make shopping a little bit easier,” said spokesman Patrick Graham.īut in my experience, Amazon’s ads are often not useful, not informative and can make shopping a little bit harder. Some brands and sellers love Amazon ads because they show up right at the moment you’re making a purchase - though others tell me ads have become an extra Amazon tax they have to pass on to customers.Īmazon insists they’re actually a good thing for us. After selling $31 billion in ads last year, Amazon became the third-largest online ad company in the United States, trailing only Google and Facebook. As I’ve written before, Google search has a big shill results problem, too, though it’s as much about ads as pointing you back to Google’s own products.Īmazon has turned shill results into its next big thing. ( Seriously.) Food-delivery apps shill eggnog and whipped cream when you’re just looking for milk. Shill results now crowd Apple and Google’s smartphone app stores - search for an app used for couple’s therapy, and you’ll get an ad for a dating app. What’s worse, many other apps and online marketplaces are following Amazon’s lead. Even when they contain a tiny disclaimer label - as do Amazon’s - these kinds of ads can be misleading because they fill up spaces people have every reason to expect to contain trustworthy, independent information. We the users want honest online shopping experiences and some common-sense limits on ads that are designed to deceive.
Amazon has pioneered a kind of online advertising business that feeds us sponsored information that can cloud our choices. One of the great promises of the internet is that we can get access to more information and make better choices.
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