Barry

I do hope they only deliver Product Ads when there are no matching results in the Amazon Marketplace. So it would round out their keyword inventory without stepping on their participating merchants’ toes or adding extra hassle for customers by giving them too many options. This would have a huge impact on conversion rates on Amazon.com - any time you introduce extra options you’re going to lower conversion. Now the customer has to go and check other sites to see if the offers are more attractive. One of the benefits of the Amazon marketplace is that you can quickly compare new and used items side by side, and place your order through Amazon.

This will be interesting to watch.

A couple of articles have been published in the last hours, commenting the new Product Ads program quietly launched by Amazon US:

Comparison Engines: Amazon becomes the largest shopping engine
Amazon Strategies: Amazon Product Ads launched?
TechCrunch…

Honestly, the big advertisers want access to Amazon’s customers, if Amazon keeps finding ways to increase their overal margins they can continue to price aggressivly on their own product. The breadth (No one wants to stock the long tail) comes form all of these other sources (3P Sellers, WebStores, ClickRiver, Product Ads).

Look at this scenario, An online reatiler can’t get into Amazon becasue they haven’t opened their category yet. So they use Product Ads to get their product in front of Amazon’s customers. Amazon sees where the deman is and decideds to open a new category based on it, all the while getting paid for their data gathering.

Or a smaller seller opens up an Amazon WebStore, using Amazon FBA to fulfill their orders and then uses Product Ads to get Amazon traffic to their WebStore. Amazon makes moeny from the click, from the sale (FVF 7%) and from the fulfillment. The Webstore has Amazon’s A2Z guarantee and everybody is happy.

Now I find that almost everything has to be shipped separately because they’re coming from different stores, the site is a mess to look at because it’s covered in adverts and upselling and the total cost of shipping is almost 50% of the purchase.

It’s clear that becoming a search engine and a credit card company has better margins than being a physical retailer but if that’s what Amazon want to do then they need to be careful to factor in the loss of value as their proposition goes away.

I already have Google for search, I wanted Amazon for speed, ease of use and value, all of which are slowly eroding away.

http://www.jhatak.com/Buckler/BucklerHomePage.htm

I admire Amazon!

I understand that inventory is expensive, but they are already mostly a pipe, with lots of merchants running around. Why would they need ads?

Alex

In my experience as a consumer, the affiliates program detracts from the Amazon brand . Buying with affiliates means that the goods might not get to me on time and the price may not be competitive. If there’s a problem, customer service and returns might be a pain in the ###. I’d rather be able to filter my search to only Amazon products than see more products from affiliates.

The Amazon brand is unique: it’s not another search shopping site, and it’s not a manufacturer’s site or specialty store. It’s a trusted online general store. When you tell someone you bought with Amazon, that person should know what that experience means.