>Shipping fees.<p>>People hate paying for shipping. They despise it. It may sound banal, even self-evident, but understanding that was, I'm convinced, so critical to much of how we unlocked growth at Amazon over the years.<p>>People don't just hate paying for shipping, they hate it to literally an irrational degree. We know this because our first attempt to address this was to show, in the shopping cart and checkout process,<p>"People hate shipping charges irrationally", because they perceive them as unfair additional tax that distorts price and makes it harder to compare prices.
If price was including shipping/vat/taxes as single variable no one would be confused by it.
Its not a magic asymptotic limit, its basic psychology:
People want simple interfaces, simpler solutions, simpler interactions.
This is a really interesting look into Amazon's business model around Prime, market segmentation in social media, and other things.<p>The author seems to have a deep understanding of how businesses work. Some of it's pretty gross -- I hate reading about "creating desire", and similar dystopic capitalist memes -- but it's important to <i>understand</i> what's going on in these companies.
> I'm almost invariably more interested in the folks who've registered negative feedback, though I sense many product teams find watching that material to be stomach-churning.<p>YES! I wish more people were comfortable dealing with negative feedback and not just receiving but also giving or soliciting it. IMO positive and negative feedback is complementary.<p>IMO, positive feedback is most useful for reinforcing patterns and trends - driving surplus by optimizing the current model. Negative feedback is most useful for generating alpha as it puts emphasis on where the real friction/desires are, what obstacles lie ahead and therefore what problem to solve instead of what is the best solution - allowing us to update our understanding, and break out of a cycle.
> Sometimes, the product-market fit with early adopters is only that. The product won't go mainstream because other people don't want or need that product.<p>This is something that SV has a problem with. Every product or company is assumed to be targeted at the whole world. There's no room for niche products. Either you take over the world or you end up shut down.<p>(Twitter is also notoriously bad at handling negative feedback)
This was a great read. I think the other unsaid takeaway here - touched on briefly when mentioning Twitter's glacial rate of product development - is that invisible asymptotes become insurmountable if your company has lost the ability to adapt and execute quickly by time you encounter them.
I wonder if this shipping fees asymptote is the reason Amazon never shows me shipping rates until the last possible moment in the checkout process. That drives me crazy.
They don't even show me if the item ships to my country until I try to pay for it... Arghhh
> Seduction is a gift, and most people in technology vastly overestimate how much of customer happiness is solvable by data-driven algorithms while underestimating the ROI of seduction.<p>This is a bit unfair, but keen.
I really identified with what he said about Twitter. It's a service that appeals to me, with my love of the firehose of information. Most people just don't want that - and that's fine.
I know this is an Amazon PR piece but I need to point to their more recent aggressive behavior of growing revenue at the expense of user experience. My grips on their non refundable charges is a great example. Amazon will secretly renew your services without even emailing you and when you go to ask for a refund on a non agreed upon renewal, they will refuse to issue a refund.<p>I guess that's one way of overcoming these invisible asymptotes if all they plan to do is come up with creative ways to charge you.
FYI: For those of you who enjoy articles like these, <a href="https://stratechery.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stratechery.com/</a> might be worth your while ;)
Great article, very long, so I scanned it.<p>It's interesting when it comes to Twitter, the argument seems to be that everyone who is gonna use it has come across it, its features are well-known, and there's not much to be done other than accept that.<p>Which got me to thinking about cryptocurrencies. This has now been in the news across the whole planet, everyone has read about it, maybe not everyone really gets the technical details, but probably the value prop of decentralized currency has reached a huge number of people now.<p>Or is it? What do you think?