Is Amazon.com Lying to Get Your Money?
Amazon is certainly dying to get your money, we all know that. Lately, however, I’ve been wondering if they are lying about sales data to make a given product seem more attractive and therefore entice you to buy. We know that for less-popular books it’s easy to game the Amazon reviews. If there are only five reviews, then of course the author could easily have her husband, mother, agent and grandmother supply four, while the author supplies the fifth. Or why go to all that trouble when you could just create five accounts? So nobody can pay too much attention to the reviews.
Amazon has, however, added a relatively new feature that tells what people did after viewing a given item, and this is where I think that Amazon is lying or at least not telling the whole story. Well down the page there is a rubric that asks "What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?" Now, I would say that in the vast majority of the cases, the customer leaves the site without buying anything. So the answer to the question should be "He gets up from his Starbucks table where he is using the free Wi-Fi, and buys another latte". But that is not what one finds on the Amazon site. Some examples:
- Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob. According to Amazon, 83% of customers bought this item after viewing it. Well, it sounds like it might be a good read, so why not?
- Ryobi 10″ Bench Top Table Saw – Factory Reconditioned. According to Amazon, not only did a full 80% of those viewing the item buy it, but 20% happened to also buy Trim Carpentry and Built-Ins buy Clayton DeKorne. Now, when users actually view the DeKorne book listing, supposedly 81% of those end up buying it.
Now let’s get real for a minute. Is this even remotely possible? One out of every five users who look at a page about a table saw end up buying a particular book? I don’t think so. Let’s do a little simple math. I’ll make an assumption: some users look at four things and buy nothing, which is what I just did in "researching" this post.
| Number of items I look at without buying | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|
Number of users who look at one item and buy it to bring the sales average to 80%
|
4
|
8
|
12
|
16
|
20
|
|
Number of users who buy both items they look at in order to bring the average to 80%
|
2
|
4
|
6
|
8
|
10
|
Now really, do you believe that for everyone like me who looks at 5 (or even 20) items without buying anything, which is my typical Amazon behavior, there are 20 (or even 80) other surfers who show up, look at one item, and then buy it? Or perhaps, to achieve the same ratio, there are 4 surfers (or 16) who show up, look at five items and buy every single one? Not a chance.
Perhaps Amazon is suggesting that the ratio is the ratio of customers who buy something, so it takes me out of it. Again, this seems just as ridiculous, since it still requires that, as one scenario, that users actually buy 4 out of 5 items that they viewed. Again that seems like an equally improbably scenario.
Why does Amazon do this? Presumably because they believe that if they can convince me that others thought the item in question was worth buying, that it will break down one more barrier to purchase. In other words, Amazon is attempting to exert peer pressure, to make you think "The vast majority of people who viewed this item ultimately bought it, so you are making a mistake by leaving this page without buying." All I can say is that it makes me want to go somewhere else to buy.
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