Are Ads Causing Shoppers to Lose Faith in Amazon Search Results?
fliptop writes:
Amazon.com has long been the main go-to place for online product search, but a recent Washington Post article finds that it is no longer giving customers what they want because advertisements are muscling out the real search results:
Running a search for "cat beds," the Post found that the entire first screen of results displayed advertisements masquerading as listings rather than products arrived at because they provided the best combination of price and quality. The results included one ad that featured a dog in the picture, rather than a cat.
On the first five pages of search results, more than half of the listings were either ads or Amazon's own products. A Profitero study found that Amazon lists sponsored products on its first page of search results at a rate twice that of Walmart and four times that of Target. Other online outlets, like food delivery platforms and Google and Apple's app stores, have also started displaying ads as search results.
[...] According to a recap of a webinar published on Search Engine Journal in 2018, 70 percent of customers searching for a product on Amazon never click past the first page of results, 35 percent click on the first product featured on the search page and the first three items account for 64 percent of clicks.
Didn't Google and Amazon both promise to boost third-party sellers' visibility? Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.
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