Amazon Taps AI To Figure Out Why Customers Buy Seemingly Irrelevant Products (venturebeat.com) 76
Why do customers buy products seemingly irrelevant to their web and voice assistant searches? That's a good question -- and one a team of Amazon researchers sought to answer in a study scheduled to be presented at the upcoming ACM Web Search and Data Mining conference in February. From a report: In it, they say that their analyses -- which looked at purchases and "engagements," the latter defined as interactions like sending search results to cell phones and adding products to shopping carts -- suggests customers are partial to products that are broadly popular or cheaper than products relevant to a given search query. Additionally, they say people are much more likely to buy or engage with irrelevant products in a few categories -- such as toys and digital products -- than in categories like beauty products and groceries. "Product search algorithms, like the ones that help customers place orders through [our Alexa assistant], aim at returning the products that are most relevant to users' queries, where relevance is usually interpreted as 'anything that satisfies the users' need,' wrote Laine Lewin-Eytan, senior manager of applied research in the Alexa Shopping group, in a blog post. "A common way to estimate customers' satisfaction is to rely on the judgment of human annotators. (We annotate a very small fraction of 1% of interactions.)"
Because their search sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost as bad as Google these days, instead of showing me what I fucking asked for, they show me what they think I wanted to ask for.
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It seems just so blindingly obvious that they have some false assumptions right from the top!
Hilarious.
It is true. AI Winter is coming. These people are too stupid not to crash and burn.
Re: Because their search sucks (Score:1)
How about this. The day to day flow of my life and what I need to buy from time to time is NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS. If I need a digital turkey thermometer because I have friends visiting and I happen to know they like roast turkey, why the FUCK do we think it's OK for Amazon and every other online group of peeping toms to go over my life and try to figure out why I'm buying it?
Fuck this shit right off already.
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Well, if you bought it from them it literally is their business.
Re: Because their search sucks (Score:1)
lol touché
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Who is Al Winter?
I don't know, but whoever the fuck he is he should really invest in a better screen font.
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Walmart mastered this with their app. If you search for something that doesn't exist in their catalogue, it show you random other crap.
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Worse than Google. Google doesn't then use machine learning to figure out why you clicked on the wrong thing.
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Agreed, Amazon's 'search' is almost useless at this point. Sometimes I just give up and close the browser. 22.4 million products, and 22.3 million of them are the same fucking thing with a different logo or nameplate.
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The question isn't whether it's *useful*, the question is, who is it useful *for*?
For a company like Amazon, helping you find what you want is really only a secondary goal. What they want to do is get you to buy stuff. It doesn't matter if it is what you were looking for. They only have to be barely good enough at finding what you are looking for that you'll try.
A lot of the time people looking on Amazon aren't looking to buy. I use Amazon when I'm shopping in a physical store because often the store has
Re:Because their search sucks (Score:5, Funny)
EXACTLY this. I've been highlighting some of these lately. For example, searching for a new UPS for my desktop, and getting granola bites near the top of the results set. While the granola bites may give *ME* energy, they wont do shit for giving my desktop energy!
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For example, searching for a new UPS for my desktop, and getting granola bites near the top of the results set. While the granola bites may give *ME* energy, they wont do shit for giving my desktop energy!
Often purchased together: granola bites + hand crack generator
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For the same reason that your grocer pays its staff to stack snack food and soda pop in six different places in the same store. Each food impression adds to your urgency to impulse buy. This model applies equally at the source (grocery store) and the sink (your sofa watching television after dinner).
"We're out of chips, honey, add them to the list." How did that happen? Because the 6000 snackfood i
Just like this short from Dust (Score:3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Amazon's search function is deliberately dysfunctional.
When I shop online I generally get what I started shopping for and nothing else. Except on Amazon, where searching is a lot more like browsing in a traditional store, in that you end up looking at a lot of products of marginal relevance before you find the right shelf. This leads to impulse buys.
Generally I try to avoid shopping directly on Amazon's page, going through other search engines to hit the exact page I want.
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I just hopped on, selected Electronics and searched for "nickle plated momentary on push button". A page of momentary on push buttons, the first two nickle plated.
How about "little girl's purple play shoes"? Got an entire page of electronics. Ooops! I forgot to change the department.
Changed to "All". A full page of girl and doll purple shoes. Remove 'play' and all the toys disappeared leaving an entire page of purple little girls shoes
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My recent most frustrating was exactly with looking for clothing. I think your extreme and idiosyncratic "purple little girls shoes" does not model actual clothes shopping very well.
I had very specific things I was looking for in men's coats and I am pretty sure the coats I was looking for really exist (I am trying to replace one I already had), but none of the first few pages of the thousands of items returned matched all of the criteria, many matched none of them and were only vaguely associated. And of c
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It must get a lot of idiots to buy shit they didn't intend or has a higher profit margin, or they wouldn't play this game.
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Generally I try to avoid shopping directly on Amazon's page, going through other search engines to hit the exact page I want.
I hadn't really thought about it, but I generally search via Google or DuckDuckGo, and take the Amazon link from those searches to get where I want to be. I generally only search within Amazon when I have an exact model ID that I want to find Amazon's offering for.
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At least they have stopped suggesting that I buy something I already did.
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Pricing insane (Score:1)
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It could be, but usually it's because there is an issue with the item they need to fix and don't want any sales on it. On many platforms pulling the item down completely instead could trash metrics / sales history / rankings for the item, so better to keep it up. It could also be someone testing a listing process but without wanting to bother with official sandboxes.
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Easy answer (Score:1)
Their algorithm is defective and doesnâ(TM)t really know whatâ(TM)s relevant to that particular user.
Re: Easy answer (Score:1)
Bad assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
They are coming from the assumption that my searches and what I buy are correlated.
They're missing that I live my life with more input and interaction than google can see. I only search & surf for a tiny subset of what I do and think about in a day.
AI can't help when you're looking for a pattern that isn't there.
Re:Bad assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they're also coming from some angle where they don't understand why you're not buying what they're telling you to buy.
I think there's some kind of assumption that they have enough data to create purchases instead of just suggesting or even steering them.
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My friends randomly send me amazon links asking my opinion. Then amazon spends weeks giving me ads for these things I have absolutely no interest in. Its kinda funny really. Also, giving ads for things I just bought. Like I really need another bed after buying one.
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Ad block... I don't understand why people still see ads online. Also duckduckgo.
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They may be bad assumptions, but they may also be the assumptions that Amazon has to work with. And I have to believe they're aware of that. I did some work on trying to correlate searches for science datasets with the data that users eventually downloaded. The idea was to try to see whether keywords and other search aids were actually helping people find what they were looking for.
In an "ideal" session, a user goes to the site, searches for something using the correct and relevant keywords, is presented wi
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"I live my life with more input and interaction than google can see"
There's the problem!
Well they aim to fix that, don't they?
And if they can't fix it technologically, they'll figure out how to do it (with tame government officials) legislatively.
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They also seem to assume that I am going to buy something that I just bought last week.
This may be valid for a consumable, but if I just upgraded the RAM in my PC, I'm probably not going to do so again for quite a long time.
Browsing vs Buying DUH! (Score:5, Informative)
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Oblig XKCD (Score:5, Funny)
https://xkcd.com/1807/ [xkcd.com]
That is all
why show them (Score:3)
If the product is "irrelevent" why the hell does it show up in the damn search?!
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The scary possibility is that the algorithm is really damn good and knows what to show people, but humans don't understand how or why it works and mistakenly think it's broken or flawed.
The more realistic explanation is that occasionally people get results that include items irrelevant to the search, but which contain a product that's appealing nonetheless. I wonder if there's some element of the absence of choice (and associated choice paral [wikipedia.org]
beauty products and groceries (Score:2)
Maybe it is because "beauty products and groceries" are mostly bought by women and they don't mess around browsing irrelevant stuff after they buy what they are looking for.
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SubjectsInCommentsAreStupidCauseTheSubjectIsTFA (Score:2)
It is called shopping. (Score:2)
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But you should not underestimate the degree to which physical shopping venues are engineered to maximize the purchases you make.
Take a department store. You always have to get past the fragrance counter to get to what you want. They do this because they can move a lot of high margin product that way. It might not work for you, but clearly they expect a lot of people to leave the story with perfume they hadn't planned on buying.
In essence this is no different. If Amazon can understand what makes you buy r
What is the name of that thing again? (Score:3)
I was looking for a whits-it, but what I wanted was a whats-it. Meanwhile, I found a good deal on that thing-a-ma-jig.
Seriously, the answer is that people have a historically HUGE amount of disposable income, and Amazon is the largest superstore ever created. People impulse buy walking down the virtual aisles. Not that I've ever done that personally.....
They are stoned, drunk, or senile (Score:1)
There you go Amazon, I only want a couple million for that information. And it took way less time then developing AI to figure it out.
The simple answer they are blind to: (Score:4, Funny)
Amazon isn't looking to fix its notoriously broke web site with AI. They are trying to fix their customers for not doing what Amazon expected them to do with AI.
In similar news, they wonder how their car can be low on oil when they just put air in the tires yesterday.
Wait... what?!?!?! (Score:2)
Meanwhile, back in the day (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a wonder that Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck ever got their mail order business off the ground, given that they had absolutely zero insight into what catalog pages their customers flipped to before ordering. They were flying blind!
They had no idea whether someone who ordered radon-infused water had actually opened the catalog looking for horse collars. That conundrum must given them many sleepless nights.
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The thing they got right was listing everyting- if you wanted it, their catalog had it. One stop shopping.
That's that Amazon's got going for it too... why hit a dozen different sites when I know amazon has it?
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Keep in mind that their customers flipped to **ALL** the pages, especially on long, boring winter nights before there was radio or television. Sure, the customers looked at the potato peeler and the blue jeans, but they also looked at the entry for the 2-bedroom house kit that fit into a single rail car. Don't underestimate the power of boredom . . .
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Because spying on people does not work. (Score:3)
Yeah, when I search for "videos australian fires"
That does not mean I want to buy airfare, video cameras or fire extinguishers.
The best thing to give an 80s kid for christmas (Score:4, Insightful)
The Retail Store Christmas Flyer/Book.
This had about 50 pages of toys in it. Nearly all of it was stuff you would never have. But as a kid you would go threw it look at all the toys imagine playing with them, and having general more fun in your head then the toys would actually provide.
For adults who have to live on a budget many amazon searches does the same thing. We get to look at products, pass the time thinking on what we could use this product for, or what people would say if they saw it in a party, all of it pure fiction. And most of us adults, have the maturity to realize that so we don't buy it.
However after the shopping we will then go and get the stuff we were going to get anyways. Replacement Dog Bones, Replacement HDMI Cables, That toy for you kids birthday.
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Tapping A.I. (Score:2)
Duh (Score:3)
Every generation forgets everything previously learned about retail and has to start over.
Some products are more fungible than others. Some random Shiny Slimy Atomic Shithead toy from China is interchangeable with every other Atomic Shithead when you're buying it for your nephew. You don't care what the kid gets, and the kid's 4 and doesn't care either. So yeah, anything vaguely toylike is going to get substituted in the toy section. Same for "digital products", which are exclusively entertainment products. (No, that self-help app is not there to help you—it's to entertain you.) Of course there's a lot of slop in those categories.
Groceries and cosmetics are the opposite. You only buy the Kraft Mac 'n' Cheese because that fucking 4 year old won't eat any other brand, let alone anything else. People have extremely strong food preferences, so grocery products are not fungible. Cosmetics are also very specific. There's only a very limited range of products that work with a particular skin tone and hair type and that's it. Once you find a product that works for you, you stick with it. Even a very small change in formulation may make the product either not work properly with the amount of oil in your skin or not work as well. Either way, it took you several years as a teen and young adult to find products that suit you and given the opportunity, you'll use the same ones for the next 50 years (even if maybe you shouldn't).
Basic economics. Some things are fungible. Others aren't as much. And of course what is considered fungible varies radically depending on economic status of the buyer. When you're starving, anything edible is good enough. The moment you're not, preferences kick in. None of this is even remotely mysterious.
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Because all purchases are done through one account (Score:2)
Plain and simple...
Say I have an Amazon account, and splurged for Prime. All purchases are going to go through me, even stuff I have no interest in and/or never searched for.
I do my searches, and order stuff; Amazon can easily track.
My wife does searching on a different computer, not logged into my account, then sends me an email saying, "Buy this."; Amazon has no clue.
A friend says they can't live without a product. I do all my research NOT on Amazon but on more informed sites. When done, I search Amazon v
SIMPLE FUCKING ANSWER! (Score:2)
A lot of people who are stoned are even more prone to making odd , spontaneous and impulse purchases.
people+internet access = high potential for random purchase
people=weed=internet access = buying some random shit HIGHLY HIGHLY probable
Searching for reviews... (Score:1)
I stand in a store, wonder what Thing X is like, look up reviews on popular online site...
Wow, that Thing sucks, I'm not going to buy it...
or
Great, this Thing does not suck, and is comparably priced, so I'll get it right now at this store I'm standing inside of with Thing on the shelf in front of me. No need to order...
Not For Me (Score:1)
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