Why be Amazon when you can instead make everyone else be Amazon and take a cut?Īmazon’s dominance has bent competitors such as Walmart and Target to ape the same tactics that can make the site so unwieldy: Other companies’ search results are now similarly dotted with strange offerings from largely unrecognizable third parties, devolving after a page or two into a heap of listings with indeterminate origins and quality. According to Herrman, that’s mainly because Amazon’s primary goal is selling the infrastructure of online shopping to other businesses-things like checkout, payment processing, and order fulfillment, which even large retailers can struggle to handle efficiently. In the process, Amazon has cultivated a decentralized, disorienting mess with little in the way of discernible quality control or organization. To do that, it has opened its doors to roughly 2 million third-party sellers, whether they are foreign manufacturers looking for more direct access to customers or the disciples of “grindset” influencers who want to use SEO hacks to fund the purchase of rental properties. Last week, the journalist John Herrman published a theory on why, exactly, Amazon seems so uninterested in the faltering quality of its shopping experience: The company would rather leave the complicated, labor-intensive business of selling things to people to someone else. If you squint, you can distinguish between some of the products, which feels like playing a decidedly less whimsical version of “spot the difference” picture games. Many simple queries yield results that appear to be the exact same product over and over again-sometimes with the exact same photos-but all with different names, sellers, prices, ratings, and customer reviews. The proportion of its inventory that comes from brands with names like Fkprorjv and BIDLOTCUE seems to be constantly expanding. The online retail behemoth’s search results are full of ads and sponsored results that can push actually relevant, well-reviewed options far down the page. Sign up for it here.Īmazon is getting worse, but you probably already knew that, because you probably shop at Amazon. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. To hear more audio stories, download the Hark app.

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