Amazon’s Choice is a fantastic little program, and it’s probably informed a handful of your purchases. But have you ever stopped to ask who chooses Amazon’s Choice, or how the program works behind the scenes?
Amazon’s Choice is a Byproduct of Alexa
As a whole, Amazon is successful because it makes shopping easy. It’s hard to complain about free one-day shipping, low prices, easy returns, and the largest retail selection on earth. But Amazon has a seemingly unfixable problem: there are too many products on its marketplace.
While most retailers sell their products directly to customers, Amazon relies on an open market system with a ton of 3rd-party sellers. Anyone can sell items on the Amazon marketplace, and these 3rd-party sellers are responsible for half of Amazon’s sales according to Jeff Bezos. As you’ve probably guessed, this system works well for Amazon and its customers. Open markets create competition, which leads to lower prices, better service, and a wide selection of items to choose from.
A wide retail selection is usually a good thing. But what happens when you need to buy something cheap and ubiquitous, like a USB-B cable? Well, you’d better know what you’re looking for. Among Amazon’s 400+ search results for the term “USB-B” cable are a ton of weird options and technically incorrect results. This ultra-convoluted selection is manageable (albeit annoying) on a computer or perhaps even a phone, which is why Amazon didn’t do anything about it until 2015 when Alexa launched.
Whenever Amazon rolls out a big new product, you can expect it to have access to the Amazon marketplace. You can shop for books through a Kindle, buy apps on a Kindle Fire, and rent movies through Fire TV. You can shop just by talking to Alexa, too.
Here’s the problem: Alexa is meant to make life easier, but shopping for socks and toothpaste with your voice is a nightmare. To fix the problem, Amazon decided that you should only be able to buy specific, popular items through the Alexa interface. These items were dubbed “Amazon’s Choice,” and the label was extended to the Amazon website to make it easier to shop from your computer.
Amazon Won’t Say Who Chooses Amazon’s Choice
The purpose of Amazon’s Choice is pretty clear, but how do products get the Choice label? According to Alexa, the Choice label is awarded to “highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately.” Sure, anyone could’ve guessed that but who chooses which products are marked as Amazon’s Choice? Is it done through an algorithm, or are Amazon employees involved? Can a company pay for its product to be listed as Amazon’s Choice?
Long story short, nobody knows who chooses Amazon’s Choice, not even the Amazon sellers that are awarded the Choice badge. We asked a representative from Amazon for more information, and she reiterated Alexa’s claim that Amazon’s Choice “launched in 2015 as a way to simplify shopping for customers by highlighting highly rated, well-priced products ready to ship immediately.” Good to know. She also clarified that “companies cannot pay to have their product listed as Amazon’s Choice” but didn’t tell us if Choice is fully algorithmic or if there are people involved.
Now, if you’ve gone half a decade assuming that Amazon’s Choice products are vetted by actual human beings, this conversation can be a little frustrating. The name “Amazon’s Choice” suggests that real humans are picking out products for you, and it’s possible that Amazon is tight-lipped about the program’s workings because it’s entirely run by robots. But Amazon is probably just protecting the integrity of the Choice system. Amazon’s algorithms are routinely manipulated by sellers, and the Choice program could be compromised if its inner-workings go public.
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Source : Amazon’s Choice: Who Chooses It, and How Does It Work?
