> I wonder what would happen if Amazon introduced a boycott feature. It could be a list of active boycotts next to the buy button on a product page
A feature that simultaneously discourages sales, encourages retailers to pull products from the platform, and heavily incentivizes abuse from competitors who would benefit from convincing customers to boycott their competitors products? For some reason I don’t imagine Amazon product managers are going to like this idea.
Boycotts are wishful thinking in the modern era of online shopping. The Venn diagram of people who would actively boycott a product like this and the people who would seek it out on Amazon has no overlap. These products are targeted at people who do purchasing for their office or who click the buy button without taking 1 minute to glance at reviews. The people who care enough to actively boycott have already read reviews of a product before they seek it out for purchase.
If Amazon were competing to win customers, they might do something like this to increase trust in the quality of the products on their store. Of course, that's not Amazon. The only significant threats to Amazon today are anti-trust regulators.
I don't think it's competitive, it's suicidal. No rational storefront would ever tell you all the terrible things about the products they stock, no matter how large or small they are. It's insulting to the suppliers and more importantly, stops people from impulse-buying big-ticket products.
You might argue that showing these "boycotts" would stop people from returning these products, but it would also curtail a whole lot of buyers that would consider it "good enough". Amazon deserves their fair shake by the FTC but if you think this is the reason then you've got pretty bizarre expectations.
Agreed, sadly comment OP is in dreamland about why an E-commerce company would ever even consider doing anything to stop people from buying things, regardless of quality or any other external factor.
A feature that simultaneously discourages sales, encourages retailers to pull products from the platform, and heavily incentivizes abuse from competitors who would benefit from convincing customers to boycott their competitors products? For some reason I don’t imagine Amazon product managers are going to like this idea.
Boycotts are wishful thinking in the modern era of online shopping. The Venn diagram of people who would actively boycott a product like this and the people who would seek it out on Amazon has no overlap. These products are targeted at people who do purchasing for their office or who click the buy button without taking 1 minute to glance at reviews. The people who care enough to actively boycott have already read reviews of a product before they seek it out for purchase.