
Amazon Personalize: Real-Time Recommendation - davidjnelson
https://aws.amazon.com/personalize/
======
reitzensteinm
The democratizing march of technology. Once the exclusive domain of tech
giants, now even small businesses can integrate this service and attempt to
sell fridges to customers who have recently bought a fridge.

~~~
telaport
What are you talking about? You just searched for an SNL skit. Are you telling
me you don't want to now watch every single SNL episode ever made as well as
join an improv troupe?!

~~~
mikehollinger
That was Interest-based advertising several years ago (or at least the last
time I surged around without an ad blocker). I found it ham-fisted. However -
the interesting thing that comes out of this is that if someone buys, say,
chocolate and marshmallows, there’s a reasonable chance they want to buy
graham crackers. So why not offer them graham crackers at checkout if it’s not
in their cart?

More insidiously - why not offer a higher price on graham crackers if they
seek them out on their own? They’ve already made a decision.

~~~
tetrep
To take it a bit further, you'd probably want to mark down the checkout
suggestion to not only make it look better, but also because you're only
suggesting a very limited amount of options, once customers are used to
trusting the checkout suggestions for a good deal, you introduce higher-margin
and/or promoted products.

More or less the same tactic Amazon used for search results: Return
useful/functional results for a few years to train you users to trust what is
near the top, then start putting promoted products at or near the top and
generally ordering the search by what increases your revenue the most, rather
than for any user-oriented goal, AKA "sort by relevance".

Also the same thing Amazon did with prices in general, get people used to
thinking you're the market with the best price/deal, etc.

------
lbacaj
Honestly using Amazon is like tip toeing around a lion to get something
valuable. Knowing that at any moment they could wake up and and absolutely
swallow you whole.

If you use their cloud products, ala Netflix, they may decide to compete with
you any moment. Netflix may have been too far along to be beat but the next
product won’t be. If you sell products on their market place and if they do
well you run the risk of them copying you. If you do anything in their
ecosystem you are living with the fear that the lion may wake up and swallow
you whole at any point and time.

Edit: Maybe I’m a bit paranoid but this feels like a great way for them to get
to know exactly who your customers are and what their behavior is. All the
while training their own personalization to get much better.

~~~
crb002
They also like to buy shares in smaller companies or outright acquire them.
Not always competition.

~~~
davidjnelson
Right, like with the YC startup Scaphold turning into aws appsync:

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelparis1/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelparis1/)

------
agentofoblivion
Many of these commentors have it backwards. I know this because I’m actively
working on a similar project at AWS. It isn’t that Amazon wants your data to
help it make decisions, so it builds a clever product to get all your data. On
the contrary, Amazon has so much damned data and years of experience turning
that into a valuable asset, that it has started experimenting with ways to
sell that value to other customers. The idea that it wants some mom and pops
retail data is just silly. Our biggest problems are scaling the internal
services we built 5 years ago to handle all the growth.

SageMaker was a ground floor service and you should expect to see many more
services built atop it.

~~~
dmitriid
Amazon’s years of experience usually end up recommending you the same thing
you just bought or just glanced at and never came back to the same category

~~~
agentofoblivion
If you could solve the problem better, at scale, I’m sure they would pay you a
lot of money to come solve it. Along with Netflix, Google, and all the other
places that use standard algorithms designed to solve these sorts of problems.

~~~
shadowtree
It seems odd though to suggest the same item I just bought over and over
again.

Same as YouTube's algo now recommending already watched videos, over and over.

This is either being gamed by bots or someone at those cos is not dogfooding.
And if all else fails, for the love of god, give me an option to train your
dumb algo manually by blocking shit I don't want to see ever again.

~~~
timdavila
Sometimes it makes sense, for consumable goods or even non consumable things
like storage containers, where you might buy more of the same item at
different times. Other things like books I agree don't make sense.

------
dimva
I don't know about anyone else, but Amazon.com's recommendations for me are
laughably bad. "You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for
the next few weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery
collector!"

I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them
useful. Why would anyone want to use the same algorithms?

~~~
ignoramous
> You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few
> weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!"

Patrick explained it why it might be like so:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209](https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209)
(thread:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057246209.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057246209.html)
)

> I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them
> useful.

Amazon does various forms of recommendations (no way limited to just recent
purchases) based on

1\. Purchases

2\. Searches

3\. Browsing history (via trackers, ads, affiliate links)

4\. Activities (on their digital devices, tagging things on their websites in
wishlist, adding preferences in your account etc)

5\. Global and Local trends (people in your area/country buy..., people with
similar buying pattern buy..., It's Eid and you're Muslim, so you buy...)

...And probably many other signals I might be missing.

They must have got pretty good people working with this and enough data to get
their models right.

Also, Amazon makes decisions on new retail businesses to start depending on
those signals. [https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-private-label-
bran...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-private-label-brands-are-
killing-it-says-new-report/)

That, and considering the fact that Amazon has an unshakeable culture of
making data-driven decisions for everything it does...

I guess what I'm trying to say is, Amazon and its subsidiaries may not be as
dumb at AI/ML as it might seem to be by gauging against one datapoint.

Also see: [https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/09/big-data-knows-youre-
pregnan...](https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/09/big-data-knows-youre-pregnant-and-
thats-not-all.html)

~~~
jawns
Patrick's explanation is that because of buyer's remorse, and because if a
thing is going to break, it often breaks early in its expected lifetime,
people are more likely to buy an item (e.g. a refrigerator) soon after buying
another one than they are to buy the item in general.

Okay, that makes sense to me. They go from 0.02% likelihood of wanting to buy
a fridge to, let's say, 2% likelihood. A marvelous leap!

But even though they are now much more likely to buy another fridge than the
average person ... I would think that they would be more likely still to buy
other types of products than to buy another refrigerator.

Even if their likelihood of needing to buy more consumable products (e.g.
deodorant) is only 5%, that's still double the likelihood of their likelihood
to buy a fridge again.

So I would think that there would be some bias toward more frequently
purchased items, even if your likelihood of buying a less frequently purchased
item does indeed increase after purchase.

I'm sure the math checks out somehow, and that the creators of the
recommendations algorithm wouldn't be pursuing strategies that don't work, but
I don't think Patrick's explanation fully captures it.

~~~
ec109685
The revenue on the refrigerator to Amazon is 10x or more higher than the
deodorant.

------
rswail
If AWS was ever found to be "leaking" information to Amazon the
retailer/logistics company from the services that it sells, it would be the
end of AWS.

They are certified under HIPAA and PCI/DSS in terms of their isolation of
customers data from other customers and their infrastructure management.

Anyone who thinks they would deliberately attempt to steal customer data is
beyond paranoia.

~~~
tramGG
Paranoid or not, why would I trust a potential competitor with the
centralization and management of all my information?

~~~
dx034
The reason to be cautious is because they could raise prices or cancel your
contract at their will. But as long as you are able to change providers by the
time the current contract expires (which can be several years for large
corporate clients), you're fine.

A reason not to use AWS as a competitor of Amazon is that you wouldn't want to
give them cash they can invest in their other business lines.

------
0xADEADBEE
I'll get right on using this the instant I want to bombard my users with 20
recommendations for a product they already own. Is there a bit of a lack of
knowledge of how their recommendation system is perceived by the general
public or is this something more interesting/explicable by corporate politics?

~~~
camtarn
I haven't worked at Amazon for several years, but back when I was still there,
there was a massive drive to find existing technologies which could be turned
into AWS services - I guess part of trying to sell the AWS ecosystem as a
uniquely full-featured package of services.

I worked with Amazon recs on one of my teams. We all complained about how
inane the recommendations could be on a regular basis. So I doubt it's a
perception issue.

------
erichocean
I hope they're giving it away, because their recommendation system sucks.

~~~
notyourwork
Is that based on data or your personal perception?

~~~
goldenkey
I don't know anyone who thinks Amazon recommendations are any good. They
recommend the same product after I already have purchased it like 90% of the
time. And I'm not talking about batteries or cosmetics that one might buy
monthly.

~~~
cthalupa
Do we really think that Amazon doesn't have the talent and ability to tweak
their models and do A/B testing to see what provides the highest return?

Maybe enough people return their fridge right after and buy a new one, or are
flipping houses and need to buy multiple washing machines, or are moving into
a house with more rooms and new multiple TVs, or decide to buy a mattress as a
gift for their parents after buying one for themselves, or any other of the
hundreds of events that some exceptional to you or I but happen frequently
enough in the aggregate to actually make it a normal enough occurrence to
still recommend items that are usually one off purchases.

Or maybe one of the most valuable companies in the world that has gotten to
that point largely off of selling us crap is too stupid to realize that people
don't usually buy 3 fridges or is unable to hire the talent to tweak the
models to reflect this sort of behavior. I've got no firsthand knowledge, but
I feel like the former is more likely than the latter.

~~~
erichocean
> _Do we really think that Amazon doesn 't have the talent and ability to
> tweak their models and do A/B testing to see what provides the highest
> return?_

A/B testing a bad model does nothing. I'm sure Amazon's recommendations are
the "best they've got" given their tech. Which sucks.

Google runs a massive recommendation system at scale: their ad placement
product (in Search and elsewhere). Google's recommendation tech is
astoundingly better than the equivalent at Amazon, rapidly putting the most
profitable ads in front of the best potential customers.

That said, Google will never release their ad tech recommendation system "as a
service", since it would kill their golden goose. That whole part of their
company is a black hole of information.

------
steve19
Literally handing over your most valuable customer data to a current or future
competitor. Surely only small time ecommerce operations in niche industries
would dare use this.

~~~
Gaelan
Amazon: "All data analyzed by Amazon Personalize is kept private and secure,
and only used for your customized recommendations."

Anyone know if there's something in the AWS contracts about Amazon using your
data?

~~~
dodobirdlord
The AI services have a clause allowing them to use your data for training
their models unless you opt out.

------
paulcarroty
My recommendations was not so bad: after CPU purchase Amazon suggest me RAM,
HDD or another PC stuff - not overpriced and not cheap Chinese noname brands.

~~~
purity_resigns
Long ago, when I was at Amazon, we used Collaborative Filtering pretty
heavily. It's great when there's a heavily sweetened path with lots of things
ordered together or in a chain.

It's horrible for moderately popular items though.

------
sigstoat
i'd find it more compelling if they'd base it on the tech they used circa
2004-2008. it's been years since their recommendations were valuable.

------
shock
Any idea why this page has a tracking pixel from Linkedin?

~~~
mxuribe
Hidden amazon recruiting (tracking) effort maybe?

------
72usty
I'm curious to know how their algorithm works when a site offers truly unique
items? In other words, if I was buying a custom hand-crafted ring what would
it recommend?

Going a step further, if I was buying the Mona Lisa, would it know to
recommend me other Da Vinci items, or other renaissance items, or would it
fail to make that inference due to there being no co-occurrences in purchasing
behaviour.

------
m0zg
Heh. So Amazon gets to mine your product browsing event stream and conversion
funnel, and use the insights to guide their own purchasing and manufacturing,
and on top of that they'll charge you for giving them all your data.
Brilliant!

------
discordance
This seems relevant for online retailers, although using a competing giants
technology doesn't sound like it would be in their interest?

------
StreamBright
It is amazing how Amazon search & recommendation works almost never for me.
Not sure about other people.

------
aboutruby
I remember having to build one with solr, that was a mess.

------
NicoJuicy
Wait, someone would use this? :P

------
stef25
If one uses this product do users have to be notified of this, in light of
privacy / GDPR and all?

I built a very basic recommendation engine myself but would love to try out
something with actual brains behind it, just being curious about the results.

~~~
darrenkopp
Unlikely because you aren't going to share personal, identifiable information
with this service; you would just send the primary key of the user in your
database (usually an integer, guid, etc, as long as you aren't using some
string that includes personal information like email or possibly username
where they user picks their own name).

You can share all the information you want with other entities under GDPR as
long as the information you are sending as long as you can't uniquely identify
someone from that data _without_ additional information.

