Your Thoughts on Critical Guardian Article: Exaggeration or Valid?
Over the weekend The Guardian ran a feature titled: "Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?" (Technology section, Oct 5, 2025) — NSFW warning for language.
Anyone curious can search that title plus “Guardian” to find it.
The piece uses provocative language to argue that Amazon has gone through three phases:
- First, being good to customers.
- Then, being good to business partners while making life harder for customers.
- Finally, extracting maximum value from both sellers and buyers.
The article's claims include:
- Top results in product searches aren’t the most relevant but the ones paying the highest fees.
- Small merchants are forced into ever-higher ad spending just to stay visible.
- Customer trust is eroding as search results become dominated by pay-to-play listings.
The piece is written to stir outrage and seems to oversimplify both the challenges of running a giant e-commerce platform and the possible fixes.
Still, many sellers will recognize what’s described:
- Rising ad costs and mandatory fees that eat into already thin margins.
- Search placement that's unrelated to relevance and reviews.
- Seller support that seems designed to be more frustrating each year.
Even with its inflammatory tone, the piece raises a valid question: how long will sellers and buyers tolerate these shifts before Amazon either makes changes or a competitor manages to break through its engineered market advantage?
I’d be interested to hear how other sellers view this.
Your Thoughts on Critical Guardian Article: Exaggeration or Valid?
Over the weekend The Guardian ran a feature titled: "Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?" (Technology section, Oct 5, 2025) — NSFW warning for language.
Anyone curious can search that title plus “Guardian” to find it.
The piece uses provocative language to argue that Amazon has gone through three phases:
- First, being good to customers.
- Then, being good to business partners while making life harder for customers.
- Finally, extracting maximum value from both sellers and buyers.
The article's claims include:
- Top results in product searches aren’t the most relevant but the ones paying the highest fees.
- Small merchants are forced into ever-higher ad spending just to stay visible.
- Customer trust is eroding as search results become dominated by pay-to-play listings.
The piece is written to stir outrage and seems to oversimplify both the challenges of running a giant e-commerce platform and the possible fixes.
Still, many sellers will recognize what’s described:
- Rising ad costs and mandatory fees that eat into already thin margins.
- Search placement that's unrelated to relevance and reviews.
- Seller support that seems designed to be more frustrating each year.
Even with its inflammatory tone, the piece raises a valid question: how long will sellers and buyers tolerate these shifts before Amazon either makes changes or a competitor manages to break through its engineered market advantage?
I’d be interested to hear how other sellers view this.
26 replies
Seller_kIukTwdhvntAp
" Top results in product searches aren’t the most relevant but the ones paying the highest fees."
It's nice that at least SOME press has finally decided to wake up. If there are any sellers here that did not already know this, you have been in a coma for the past many years.
They have a SALES ENGINE. It is designed ENTIRELY to show you what THEY want you to BUY. Don't forget that these are the same people that have been 'testing' the results of removing all brand names from ASINs because they don't consider them to be important to buyers!
If that were NOT the case doing a search for a UPC number would ONLY come up with the product that has that number and NOT a dozen 'sponsored' products that appear BEFORE the actual item.
Having said that, Amazon is actually being a bit MORE transparent when they said some time back that their so called 'search’ “removes less recognizable brand names.".
Quite some time back there was a post where the OP said "We believe we have brand equity ", They were clearly delusional. The ONLY 'equity' on here belongs to AMAZON.
" Small merchants are forced into ever-higher ad spending just to stay visible."
This is the mirror image of the race to the bottom for pricing merchandise. If a seller is dumb enough to keep lowering their prices to try and be the 'low cost provider' they are probably the same ones that keep bidding up the prices on ads. BOTH are a good way to end up broke and out of business.
" Customer trust is eroding as search results become dominated by pay-to-play listings."
Amazon does not care. They earn AD REVENUE for all those lousy results.
The engineered market advantage in the end is not going to matter. What they are now doing is building a massive infrastructure for DELIVERY which they will handle for multiple sites.
They are now advertising handling ALL your business for eBay, Walmart, and more. The 'sales' side is an afterthought.
Seller_LVZcgxAgZ2xBv
There's another ugly trend taking place when it comes to Amazon PPC: They are running low on Amazon website inventory, so now they are offloading impressions to junky apps and websites where viewers have no intention to buy, like People and imdb. Most of these clicks are worthless, but eat up PPC spend nonetheless.
"Increase reach off Amazon" spend is turned ON by default when you create a new SP campaign. You need to manually go into each SP campaign and toggle it to "limit off Amazon spend" to reduce this gigantic waste of money. It's not possible to disable off Amazon spend completely.
Seller_LVZcgxAgZ2xBv
It's one of many dark patterns in Amazon Ads. Others include:
- High default bids (once, recently, it was $3/click!)
- High suggested bids
- Dynamic boost UP as well as DOWN by default
- Ads set to run forever (no end date unless you specify one)
Many sellers don't know what they are doing and trust Amazon, and at scale this lifts bids for EVERYONE.
It was sometime last year. In the spring, alerted by someone else, I toggled it off for all of my campaigns and recorded the dates in a spreadsheet. At some point between then and the end of September, Amazon toggled "increase reach" back ON. No notification, I discovered it after other people started reporting problems with off-Amazon spend. Who knows how many thousands of dollars were wasted on garbage off-Amazon clicks.
Seller_ONDn9UyWE3G3e
Based on just the claims in this lawsuit, I'd say they missed quite a few charges. Fortunately, I'm taking care of that already. I'm disappointed more people don't already know about this, but they notice an article from the Guardian, a UK news rag? (FYI- added BOLD emphasis mine)
FTC and Plaintiff States v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 2:23-cv-01495 (W.D. Wash. Sept. 26, 2023)
Case Description
The FTC and plaintiff states alleged that Amazon, an online retail and technology company, is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anti competitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.
According to the complaint, Amazon engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. The complaint alleges that Amazon’s anti competitive conduct occurs in two markets — the online superstore market that serves shoppers and the market for online marketplace services purchased by sellers. Tactics described in the complaint include
Anti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon, keeping prices higher for products across the internet.
Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products — a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon — on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service, which makes it substantially more expensive for sellers on Amazon to also offer their products on other platforms. This unlawful coercion has limited competitors’ ability to effectively compete against Amazon.
The complaint also alleges that Amazon extracts enormous monopoly rents from all market participants, including:
Degrading the customer experience by replacing relevant, organic search results with paid advertisements and deliberately increasing junk ads that worsen search quality.
Favoring Amazon’s search results to preference Amazon’s own products.
Charging costly fees on the hundreds of thousands of sellers that currently have no choice but to rely on Amazon to stay in business. Combined, all of these fees force many sellers to pay close to 50 percent of their total revenues to Amazon. These fees harm not only sellers but also shoppers, who pay increased prices for thousands of products sold on or off Amazon.
In September 2024, the Court denied Amazon’s motion to dismiss the state plaintiffs’ and FTC’s claims under federal law as well as under most state statutes.
Seller_Ggt6s7zXEwLbA
FTC says internal Amazon documents it obtained show the company has been intentionally "poisoning" the search results to not show the best and most relevant or cheapest products, but instead the goal is to place marginally relevant ads everywhere because making buyers click around generates huge profits for the company.
But that is something we've seen in real time.
As a buyer there are times I've just given up searching on Amazon and bought elsewhere. The site is sometimes just ads with a real listing provided here and there. It can be an awful experience.
Seller_bLpzUne3tRjkG
It's certainly true that Amazon is a very different company now than it was in the 1990s. But most everything was better back then.
Seller_YdqBO6bifWZxv
How long will sellers tolerate it, the magic question! I personally find it utterly amazing how allllllll my top sellers miraculously get suppressed at Prime day! I can always count on it! It find it amazing that after 2.5 hours and 3 people in chat I couldn't get my inventory moved back to its proper ASIN, the one it was shipped to, checked In and and the moved mysteriously by Amazon during Prime days. I find it incredible the any evidence I show Amazon of wrong doing is met with silence and no action taken. I find it Amazong that my partner told Customer Service yesterday that the day we sell will be the happiest day of his life. I find it amazing for 9 days I've had to battle with some uninformed person at Amazo why they should not relabel correct packages with an incorrect label and then how I could not even decipher their freaking emails. So how long will sellers stick around ....ha yea!
