Amazon Purges Billions of Product Listings in Cost-Cutting Drive (businessinsider.com)
- Reference: 0177872289
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/30/1954240/amazon-purges-billions-of-product-listings-in-cost-cutting-drive
- Source link: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-bend-curve-project-purges-billions-product-listings-everything-store-2025-5
The initiative represents a shift for the company that built its reputation as "The Everything Store" through three decades of relentless catalog expansion. Bend the Curve forms part of CEO Andy Jassy's broader cost-cutting strategy, saving Amazon's retail division over $22 million in AWS server costs during 2024 by reducing the number of hosted product pages.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-bend-curve-project-purges-billions-product-listings-everything-store-2025-5
to under 50 billion by December 2024. (Score:2)
I hope they don't delete the info on their working time machines.
I want to buy one of those.
Here's a better idea (Score:2)
Eliminate the endless duplicates of cheap Chinese crap
I usually see many repetitions featuring the same photo, each from a seller with a different nonsense name
More time machine stuff (Score:1)
"reducing the total from a projected 74 billion to under 50 billion by December 2024"
Nice to know this happened last year, or the summary is a HUGE glaring typo.
This is what happens when no actual human reviews stuff, and every-day-Joes decide to become Amazon "resellers" or eBay "resellers" and just cut and paste the entire listing (it takes too much time to snap a couple pics and type a paragraph about an item).
0.035% of their annual revenue (Score:2)
Their 2024 operating income was $68.59 billion and the online selling business is more than half of their sales. Of course that's doesn't mean it's as profitable as the other parts of their business. But $22 million isn't much compared to 24 billion ASINs and a third of the total ASINs.
Billions? (Score:2)
Am I the only one who had to reread this to make sure I actually read "billions"? I get there is an ASIN for every color of cheap ethernet cable offered by 100 different vendors, but it never occurred to me that this would result in billions of unique products,
Re: (Score:2)
One of the reasons why it was getting so hard to find things when I stop using Amazon years ago. It would probably be easier for them to just delete all the ASINs associated with companies residing in China.
Re: (Score:2)
Then they'd delete the counterfeit stuff, which is among their best sellers.
Re: (Score:2)
LOL, the very reason I left in the first place.
Re:Billions? [No, "billions and billions"!] (Score:2)
Mod parent funny and the Subject change is with apologies to Carl...
But the billions I'm thinking about are the Amazon profits and you could even make money betting that Amazon is not dropping any products that contribute significantly to the black ink.
In search of a fresh joke, in the category of the "I just know it's true" genre, has anyone managed to measure how the rankings of the Amazon search results are tilted in favor of the products with larger profits for Amazon?
Or perhaps I should try to revive a
Re: (Score:3)
Nope. None of that gets you to a situation where you have 24 BILLION extraneous listings. The only way to hit those numbers is to knowingly allow scammers and spammers to fill your platform with fake listings in order to create the appearance growth.
24 BILLION...that doesn't happen by accident and that doesn't happen with the platform knowing. This is a sign of a platform that embraced the fraud wholeheartedly.
Re:Billions? Bots. (Score:2)
They became the 'nothing you want' store. Those billions are because of automated listing software; call it bots if you like.
Why sell one thing when you can sell the same thing under 20 different names. It's why AZ marketplace sucks.
If something is out of stock for more than one month it should simply be de-listed for new searches.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't believe they sell 50 billion unique products.
50 million would even be a stretch.
If true they have thousands of ASIN's for most of each of their products. That's a management nightmare.
They better watch out - a few companies are developing agents to find what you want on manufacturing companies' websites and providing an Amazon-like shopping experience without Amazon.
Fulfilment is still a factor so it's not like Prime but very much like Sold and Shipped by orders.