Ad Business A Boon For Amazon But A Turn-Off For Shoppers

Mike Maddaloni went to Amazon.com knowing exactly what he wanted to buy.

- 

But instead of showing him the Synology router he was searching for at the top of his results, Amazon bombarded him with ads for hard drives and routers that he didn’t want.

Maddaloni, a web strategist in Appleton, Wisconsin, said searching on the world’s biggest shopping site had always been a good experience for him up until a month ago, when he started seeing more ads.

“Now I have to scroll down,” he said. “It’s annoying.”

Amazon has turned its online store into an advertising powerhouse in just a few years. It overtook Microsoft last year as the third-largest ad platform in the U.S. following Google and Facebook, according to market research firm eMarketer. That’s mostly due to Amazon’s search bar: Most shoppers now go to Amazon first instead of Google to look up products, according to Jumpshot, which tracks online shopping behavior.

The downside to Amazon’s booming advertising business is the impact on the user experience. Companies and brands can bid to get their products in Amazon’s search listings, sometimes pushing down what shoppers are searching for and making them harder to find. It risks betraying Amazon’s customer-friendly reputation and irritating shoppers like Maddaloni, who are used to Amazon being the place they go to find what they want to buy quickly.

Amazon’s ads show up at the top, middle and the bottom of its search listings, as well as within pages for other products. They look exactly like regular product listings except for the word “Sponsored” in gray. Holiday shoppers may notice more of them: In September, Amazon began putting three sponsored ads at the top of its search results, up from two, according to Marketplace Pulse, a market research firm that focuses on Amazon and other online marketplaces.