Part 1: What's good for Amazon is good for ... Amazon

I recently saw Cory Doctorow speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (he's the mind behind enshittification), which inspired this piece. It's not a small topic! So I'm going to tackle it in two parts. This week, what Amazon's search page costs you. Next week, why that is entirely by design. Enjoy!

💙 Amanda

Amazon is the largest public company in the world by revenue. To bring in that much money, it must be screwing someone over. But we keep shopping there because we assume that someone isn't us.

Amazon tied for top online retailer in the 2026 American Customer Satisfaction Index. An industry survey found 95% of customers are satisfied with their search results. (That's an impressive degree of satisfaction!) And almost half of Amazon Prime members don't comparison shop because they believe Amazon has the lowest prices.

But the odds that you're ever actually paying the lowest price — even just the lowest price on Amazon itself — are slim.

The top row trap

Earlier this week, I did an experiment: I searched Amazon's US site for a 6-foot USB-C charging cable. The top results all looked similar. If I'd been shopping, I would have picked one and moved on. And although I wouldn't have known it, I would have paid more for less.

But I wasn't shopping. I logged the first 25 results and worked out the best deal (more on how at the end). Turns out, it was all the way down at the 20th item: a five-pack that cost less than the top result's two-pack. Per cable, the first result cost 182% more.

Grabbing the first result is exactly what most of us do. We shop on Amazon because it's fast and easy, not because we enjoy the browsing experience. The first three results get about two-thirds of all clicks. And more than half of frequent Amazon shoppers say they always buy the first thing listed.

That's a bad bet. I ran my experiment for nine other products, including AA batteries, garbage bags and black leggings. The best deal was in the top row (the first four results) in just three of the 10 searches, and the first result was the best deal only once.

The best deal is rarely in the top row

Position of the best deal among the first 25 results, by item.

My experiment was a quick-and-dirty version of a study called Amazon's Pricing Paradox. In 2023, Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal ran 100 Amazon searches, looked at roughly the first 48 results and measured how much shoppers overpay depending on what item they buy.

They found the best deal sat, on average, at slot 17: the fifth or sixth row on a desktop screen. And buying results in the top row meant paying extra.

Ads will cost ya

Then there are the ads, which often don't look like ads. (The tiny "sponsored" text gives them away.) In my experiment, 34 of the 40 top-row spots were sponsored. (The number of results per row depends on your screen; I counted the first four as the top row, like the study did.)

Here's what the first 25 results looked like when I searched for an adult-sized bean bag chair. (Why a bean bag chair? Why not?)

That was a long scroll! So many ads! And of the 25 items that appear in the 'results' or 'more results' sections, 12 are also just ads.

Ads are annoying, but they also cost you. A 2024 study of millions of Amazon results compared the ads at the top of each search with the same number of regular results right below them. On the US site, the ads were pricier in 71% of comparisons, and in more than half of all cases they were at least 50% more expensive.

Items in the ads were also rated worse, which I saw in my experiment, too.

OK, so just skip the ads? It helps, but not much: Van Loo and Aggarwal found you're still going to overpay:

Bargains where there are none

If you've made it past the first row of results, and found your way through the swamp of ads, you'll still have to contend with misleading marketing tactics. Results are littered with deal badges, Prime sales and crossed-out 'regular' prices.

I've written about these before: A high 'regular' price makes the real price feel like a great bargain, even if the product was rarely, or never, actually sold at that price.

I did my experiment during a Prime sale day, so the deals were everywhere: nearly half the listings had a Prime deal badge, and two-thirds had a crossed-out 'regular' price. Even among items with no sale, more than a third still showed a crossed-out 'regular' price.

But a deal signifier doesn't mean a good deal. Of the 117 listings marked as Prime deals, 92 cost more per unit than the best deal on the same page, typically almost twice as much! And Van Loo and Aggarwal found that shoppers who go for the biggest apparent discount in the top row pay, on average, 31% more than the best deal.

Put it all together — the top row trap, the swamp of ads, the discount-washing — and this page is designed to screw you over. It's not an accident. It's pure enshittification — the process by which online platforms shift from serving their users to squeezing them.

Could we beat this system? Sure. But who has the time to analyze pages of search results when they just need toilet paper? And, honestly, I don't think the takeaway from this piece should be tips for how to navigate the website of a terrible company that will always get the better of us.

Because Amazon's not just hiding good deals — it's actually pushing up prices everywhere we shop. What's going on behind the scenes is good for Amazon and no one else. That's next week.

What's the best deal?
I followed Van Loo and Aggarwal's method. First, find the best option in the top row, which they defined as the first four results. The best option is the one with the lowest price per unit among those with 4.5+ stars and 100+ reviews (or 4+ stars if none qualify). The best deal is the item with the lowest price per unit in the first 25 results that's rated at least as well, with 100+ reviews. So if it's cheaper, it's not because it's worse.

Let's chart the chaos.

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FULL DISCLOSURE

I spent two years working at the Washington Post, which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns. During that time, he was busy dismantling the publication, so he wasn't well-loved in the newsroom.

A NOT-SHIP PERK!

At the beginning of November, I'll be at the first-ever Visualising Climate conference: Three days of talks and workshops that explore how data visualization can help people understand, and act on, a changing climate.

While there, I'll be your climate-data correspondent! Expect a couple of dispatches loaded with unique data and fresh techniques from the experts reinventing how we talk about the climate crisis.

These special editions are for paying subscribers only. Want in? It's just .

FROM ELSEWHERE

Here's what I found interesting, important or delightful this week:

Search party. Datawrapper's weekly roundup of visualizations is a great place to find inspiration. Roman Sverdan got tired of combing through past issues, so he created a handy search tool.

This one's for you, Dave. Before mathematician Hannah Fry entered the castle for the UK's Celebrity Traitors, she analyzed the data from every previous series, looking for statistically significant patterns. This is so awesome. She's so awesome.

Mind the gap. Tiziana Alocci's new book about the absence of data is now available for pre-order. I haven't read it, but I'm intrigued!

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