There are always people working in these companies that are trying to get a good product to a customer. These are slowly replaced or overruled by A/B testers who want to maximize profit. I think that process shifts the company from actually doing a service, to greed.
I dont think this is the whole picture. It is generally true that selling products and making a profit is the goal for both.
Optimizing the best result for each query can result in a terrible result for the minority of shoppers for that query. More importantly, it can lead to a terrible result for the majority of shoppers across many queries.
The problem is other considerations that A/B testing metrics often leave out (Satisfaction in the long term, in searches that dont lead to sale, and across multiple changes)
That is to say, on average most shoppers might want cheap shit for a given search. but sometimes, they might want a different/better product and get frustrated.
If you over optimize for the typical use case, you might still lose the typically user because they not typical in every way and every day.
Not sure about A/B testers, but that is essentially the issue. Steve Jobs even talked about it back in the 1990s, about tech companies and markets of the 70s and 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
Yeah, it's like if you sell a multi-tool and realize that 90% of the time people just use the screwdriver. AB testing would tell you that you should make all the tools a screwdriver, but then you would have a shit multi-tool and no one would buy it except people that need a screwdriver.
This is what Amazon has done. They took their Marketplace and turned it into a search engine for the cheapest drop shipped product
>Coverage for drops, spills and breakdowns (plans vary)
If you click through you'll see that the plan specifically excludes drops and spills. Two of the three things they advertise for.
Like that's just fraud and someone at Amazon green-lit this knowing that it's just fraud. It's not optimization gone haywire. It's discovering that you can make money scamming people and not having any qualms about scamming your customers.
And the problem is that the the snake has now reached its tail.
Maybe there are specific conditions, like it might help laundering or help deter competitors from entering their website, whatever that this scheme has a net positive gain for them, but this is insanity.
I would describe it as the company has changed its priority from customer acquisition to customer monetization. When the company starts tuning by touching only its monetization knob, it slowly starts descending into death spiral. Depending on the competition it can take weeks or decades.
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