Why is Prime Day so hard?

Question

I do 70+ orders with Amazon a year; I have 6 themed wishlists; many items I purchase repeatedly, or items like it; 75% of my purchases should be easily identifiable as belonging to a category + subcategory (Computers - Video Games; Music - Synthesizers; Books - SciFi; Baby Stuff - Male Toddler; etc).And yet for 3-4 years running I have not bought a single thing on Prime day; going through pages of hundreds of assorted random items results in failure and frustration. If there IS a deal that appeals to me, it's well hidden and I cannot find it.It feels like in this day and age, a 3rd year ComSci student with Python knowledge and few open source libraries should be able to fill up my cart :PSo why don't I (or any of my friends - they all seem to share the perspective) have more luck with Prime day? Is it a business decision of some sort?More broadly, for all the incredible privacy-invading technologically-ingenious, morally-dubious tracking and advertising, why don't I get exposed to things I actually want - why does so much effort get put into something with so little seeming business value? What am I as a consumer missing in this whole analytics/advertising ecosystem? :-/

mtmail · Accepted Answer

I see Prime Day as their way to clear the warehouse shelves. You're right, best would be to present products to the user they actually want. But maybe the aim is to display those products which usually aren't displayed, the long tail, the random ones.(Used to work at Amazon, but back then they didn't have Prime Day yet).

matt_s · Answer

As much as there are lots of people working on AI suggestion algorithms, I have not seen much suggested to me be close to what I want usually. This goes for Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, etc. They all seem to think whatever I bought/watched recently must be like the only thing I'm interested in.
Just some basic logic could weed out stuff from suggestions - if I buy a fairy princess doll (for a niece) but all my other purchases are tools, computer/electronics, video games, household supplies, etc. then obviously that was a gift or one time type of purchase, even if I shipped it to myself. Don't make suggestions for more fairy princess doll like products because that is the last thing I bought.
I would think they could group users together anonymously and provide trending suggestions based on that. I'm sure there are lots of people with similar sets of categories and they are buying/watching things.
The Netflix Top 10 in the US list is a start in that direction.
Unfortunately Amazon seems more motivated to suggest advertised products (actual advertised ones and ones with inflated fake ratings), their own products and probably stuff they want to get out of warehouses before caring or tracking what a customer is actually interested in.
Them caring about what you want doesn't make them more money.

gwittel · Answer

The main goal is similar to other holiday sales -- a handful of loss leaders and a lot of crap they hope you buy along the way.The first few prime days had a lot of real deals on name brand stuff. More and more, deals on name brand items are less common or supply constrained. Other 'deals' were fake deals (discount off artificially high list price) or deals on random no-name products (or garbage products).

fred_is_fred · Answer

A better question is why do you care so much? This isn't some kind of national holiday you are missing out on, it's a company trying to get you to spend money. If you find the way the do it annoying - don't buy anything or shop elsewhere.

burntoutfire · Answer

Physical store optimize for you wasting time in them, not for your convenience (e.g. most bought items, such as bread, are always at the back of the store). I don't see a reason why Amazon would be different.

duxup · Answer

I think there are two issues here.1. Prime day just doesn't have a lot of really good deal. They've got the usual Amazon stuff that are legit sales, and a few other items.Beyond that it's mostly second rate stuff on sale and a bunch of non sale stuff advertised as on sale.2. I wonder about how crappy advertising is all the time. I've git lists of things I might want and I never see adds for those things ... mostly things I already bought or stuff I don't care about.I suspect the truth is whatever AI there is or advertising that is there, it isn't FOR us, it is pointed AT US. It's there to try to make us do what someone else wants... so they advertise women's clothing ... to me ... a guy, with no interest in those things because they're motivated to sell that, not what I want.

8note · Answer

For the advertising - the stuff you want to buy doesn't need the advertising to sell it to you, so who's paying to show it to you? The point of the advertising ecosystem is to make you want to buy stuff you don't already want to buy

tmaly · Answer

I use to buy items on prime day. I totally forgot about it this year, and was surprised that it was prime day yesterday.I was looking for a mechanical pencil last night when I stumbled onto the fact it was prime day. I think the biggest trouble this year is the categories. Rather than just showing me some popular products on sale, they want me to drill down into categories. This is my opinion was not a good strategy.

enonevets · Answer

The simplest solution would be for them to implement a search for prime day deals only but I didn't see an option for that.