Got a Hot Seller on Amazon? Prepare for Amazon to Make One Too
I think the mixed incentives problem is becoming more and more glaring with each passing day.<p>Want to write an app that people use on their phone? Awesome. Become an Apple Dev or a Droid Dev. It&#x27;s the lottery: the providers love you playing, but only about 1-in-100 make it, and &quot;making it&quot; is not about quality. The garden is too big to be manually cultivated, so the winners are the ones that can play the algorithm.<p>Have a site online you&#x27;d like people to visit? If you&#x27;re advertising it, you&#x27;re going through Google or Facebook. Just be sure you don&#x27;t accidentally flip any yellow flags with them. If you do, they can yank your advertising and you&#x27;re talking to a robot trying to get it back. Unless you&#x27;re big, of course. Or you can play the algorithm.<p>How about if you sell a physical product? What if you&#x27;ve been selling it for years? Well, you gotta go to Amazon. They own internet product sales. But guess what? If you switch to a provider, you don&#x27;t have an email list, you don&#x27;t have a unique internet address, you don&#x27;t provide a unique experience, and whatever you do has just become a commodity. And we&#x27;re back to the algorithm thing again, because if you can source, package, and sell it on Amazon? Somebody else can too. Probably cheaper. Maybe it has high quality parts. Maybe not. There&#x27;s far too many products for Amazon to manually curate, so you&#x27;re back to worshiping the algorithm. The algorithm provides traffic, it provides recommendations, it provides an indication of quality text content -- it provides sales.<p>Make a mistake in the old brick and mortar days? Go change your sign. Deal with complaints through the BBB.<p>Make a mistake now? Sure, there&#x27;s recourse. Sometimes. It&#x27;s all about the algorithm. And we can&#x27;t tell you what&#x27;s in the algorithm, because if we did? Everybody would be gaming it. Like they are now.<p>The algorithm rules all.<p>Cross it and die.