This is part one of a series covering the Amazon market and how massage chairs have been affected there. In this part, we will cover the massage chair market on Amazon.
Amazon.
When most people think of amazon, they consider it a necessity. A service that makes the purchase of products relatively simple, cheap, and fast. Amazon has become a great household name in recent times to the point where many people rely on its services for most of their needs like groceries from Amazon Fresh, or movies and shows through Amazon Prime Video. And a large portion of that success has come through the introduction of Amazon Prime, a system that allows for consumers to get 1-2 day shipping on their purchases instead of waiting the usual 5-7 business days for normal shipping times. Through this, Amazon has garnered a lot of attention and praise for its outstanding customer service; being able to provide cheap, fast, and reliable service to its consumers has made it one of the top consumer-focused companies out there.
While Amazon is a bustling place for consumers, it is also home to a large variety and quantity of sellers-with sellers of all kinds ranging from office supplies to home furniture. Due to its large market, Amazon boasts a large selection of products available for purchase. At times, it may seem overwhelming, i.e. how many different products there are for a basic cutting knife.
I checked and it gave me over 8000 results. I narrowed it down to a chef’s knife, and it still gave me over 8000 results, which showcases just how many different products there are on Amazon.
To combat this, Amazon employs a tactic of categorizing specific products under the same product page. What is a product page you might be asking? Well, it’s the website page that displays the product as well as product descriptions, reviews, and other listings. The last part is a huge difference and part of the reason why Amazon is different from other seller websites like eBay. eBay treats each product listing as different products, so, going back to the cutting knife, two knives of the same brand might be listed independently of each other due to having a different seller associated with each product. Due to this, new & used products of the same specific product would be under the same product page on Amazon, as opposed to eBay separating them.
Now why does this even apply to massage chairs? And in the Amazon market? Well the reason is that the massage chair market on Amazon is overly flooded with product pages. When we looked closely at the massage chair market, we quickly began to notice that there were many duplicate product pages for the same specific product. For this, we didn’t count color variations as those were clearly two different products due to the change in color, and were typically under the same product page; for this analysis, we looked for two separate product pages that clearly showed the same exact product.
There are hundreds of massage chairs in the Amazon market, with it showing over 10,000 results when searching up the terms “massage chair” in Amazon. So it can be hard to distinguish between different products on the site. So when there are multiple product pages for the same product on Amazon, it makes your product more likely to be seen compared to your competitors due to having multiple product pages. In order to get around having to list their specific product under one page, they utilized different brand names, but used the same product images, same descriptions, or even same product names. We don’t want to pinpoint any one brand in particular, but it’s also that we can’t. Due to the high influx of different massage chairs flooding the market, we can’t pinpoint which group is responsible for this.
The massage chair market has greatly developed over recent years, with a lot of interest being shown towards improving technology and pricing of chairs. And due to this, the chairs are getting better every year with huge improvements being made in strides where the newest massage chair model might outdo its other competitors. However, the influx of massage chairs has made the quality of these chairs diluted, meaning many chairs out on the market lacks the quality assurance that the massage chair market has been developing over the years. Brands that are desperate enough to make sales will create “new” duplicate listings in order to appeal their products to consumer, and it’s partly in fault due to the marketplace system that Amazon has provided. While consumer satisfaction for Amazon is at such a high standard with their Amazon Prime service, sellers are unable to do much about how Amazon runs their system because, frankly, Amazon is a necessity for both the seller and consumer. And who knows? This could be happening to other markets within Amazon, and this is something that’s happening in a niche category like massage chairs.
There are flaws with the Amazon system; it’s a great system for the consumer, but the sellers’ system has many problems that might not be obvious. From these multiple listings of the same item to questionable patterns of reviews, the sellers’ market is getting punished for it, and consumers are unaware because consumer experience is at such a high standard on Amazon. So we created this series to inform you—inform you about how the Amazon market has been shaping out, and how consumers might not see things that sellers’ can see.
We aren’t condemning anyone in particular. This is our version of a warning for those looking to purchase a massage chair; the market is being filled by these chairs, and harming the integrity of quality massage chairs on the market. With multiple sellers for the same product, other products listings are being pushed back, allowing these cheap chairs to be at the forefront. We don’t have anything against cheap massage chairs, in fact the cheaper the better for consumers, but our next part of the A Closer Look: series will cover what is going on with these chairs, how their advertising could potentially be hurting the market, and why we might not want these chairs to be on the market, all from the perspective of a massage chair seller in the Amazon Marketplace.
Thank you for reading this! Let us know down in the comments about your thoughts, opinions, or just stop by to say hi.
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