Amazon Dies: A Possible, Maybe Likely Future
The everything store is still there. You still can’t find anything in it.
How Amazon loses everything except the one business Jeff Bezos would never have predicted.
An American consumer wants a German duvet cover, 130x200 cm. They go to Amazon. They get four pages of Chinese-manufactured polyester comforters keyword-stuffed with every bed size ever conceived by humanity. The sponsored listings at the top are for products that share no meaningful attributes with what was searched. The organic results, if you scroll far enough to find them, are identical in kind if not in degree.
This is not a search failure. Amazon’s search works exactly as intended. The intent is not to return what you asked for.
The intent is to return what someone paid to show you.
Every subsequent problem in Amazon’s retail business is downstream of that choice, and the choice was rational at every level of the org chart. Individual sellers pay for placement to survive the algorithm. Category managers hit revenue targets from sponsored listing fees. Finance reports higher margin per page view than from actual product sales. Andy Jassy’s predecessor made the numbers. The numbers were real. The product was broken. No one in the chain had the authority or incentive to fix it, because fixing it would require Amazon to voluntarily reduce revenue in exchange for a better customer experience, and Amazon stopped being a company that does that somewhere around 2015.