This comment made me think about this essay about (among other things), why Amazon ended up focusing on shipping feeds:
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.
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, that even after paying shipping, customers were saving money over driving to their local bookstore to buy a book because, at the time, most Amazon customers did not have to pay sales tax. That wasn’t even factoring in the cost of getting to the store, the depreciation costs on the car, and the value of their time.
People didn’t care about this rational math. People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one’s time is so detached from the event of spending one’s time. Most time we spend isn’t like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback.
Wealthy people tend to receive a much more direct and immediate payoff for their time which is why they tend to be better about valuing it. This is why the first thing that most ultra-wealthy people I know do upon becoming ultra-wealthy is to hire a driver and start to fly private. For most normal people, the opportunity cost of their time is far more difficult to ascertain moment to moment.
Amazon to me is a great example of not trying to exploit your customers for short term profits, instead choosing to give them the best possible experience, and now because of that, they are Amazon—that means both finding a way to not charge for shipping by refactoring their prices and offering prime, even if some customers cost them money, to avoid looking like they charge for shipping, and also to actually offer a good deal and a great interface and so on. They’re not trying to get you to buy overpriced stuff, or waste your time or maximize clicks.
This comment made me think about this essay about (among other things), why Amazon ended up focusing on shipping feeds:
http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes
Amazon to me is a great example of not trying to exploit your customers for short term profits, instead choosing to give them the best possible experience, and now because of that, they are Amazon—that means both finding a way to not charge for shipping by refactoring their prices and offering prime, even if some customers cost them money, to avoid looking like they charge for shipping, and also to actually offer a good deal and a great interface and so on. They’re not trying to get you to buy overpriced stuff, or waste your time or maximize clicks.