Amazon and Pinterest: Information or Disinformation

August 30, 2012

I found “Uh Oh! Amazon Researchers Say Pinterest Doesn’t Generate A Lot Of Sales” interesting. Why? When a major Web outfit does research which suggests another Web outfit is either good or bad, my radar pings. Is the article praising Pinterest or is the article criticizing Pinterest. I find survey data remarkably malleable. Information can be shaped in different ways.

Consider this statement:

Will Young, director of Zappos Labs, told Bloomberg that Pinterest users are far more likely to share a purchase than Twitter or Facebook users—but that shared items generate far less revenue than Twitter or Facebook. This is a big problem for Pinterest, because the whole idea of the site is that it’s supposed to be better at monetizing social activity than Twitter or Facebook.

We have a positive statement about the sharing and a negative statement about generating sales.

You decide. My questions are:

Is Amazon planning on competing with or buying Pinterest? A touch of doubt is useful when negotiating.
Does it matter to Pinterest users if they don’t buy at a rate another retail site thinks is “low”? If Pinterest users are happy, does survey data matter?
Were the survey data assembled doing the “right stuff.” When creating questions and analyzing survey data, tiny choices can have major implications for the outputs. I am confident that Amazon Zappos worked hard and did the maths correctly. I am just asking, “Was the finding one that required some tiny decisions about which I know nothing?”

Pinterest, in my opinion, works for a specific demographic segment. “Works” does not mean buy Mr Clean bleach pens on Amazon or snap up discounted evening slippers on Zappos.

Search is subject to similar tiny decisions. What happens when I try just published books on Amazon? I get pages of results listing books that will be published in the future. Tiny decision? Carelessness? An attempt to make a sale before having the product?

Stephen E Arnold, August 30, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.