[HN Gopher] The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide...
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The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide "hidden tax"
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 562 points
Date : 2023-10-04 11:03 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thebignewsletter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thebignewsletter.com)
| cwoolfe wrote:
| This strategy has been adopted by eBay as well and artificially
| drives up prices. Let me elaborate.
|
| Recently, eBay has made it so that only the products with paid
| ads are shown in places where customers click. This drives up the
| cost of everything by more than 10% which is eBay's ad fee. I
| refused to buy a paid ad to sell my MacBook. It sat on the site
| for a month, which is highly unusual for an in-demand and rightly
| priced product. Finally I lowered the price enough to get it
| sold.
|
| Most consumers use the default site, which filters by Recommended
| (i.e. ads) The play for consumers to win at this new payola ad
| scheme is to always filter by lowest price (or in amazon's case
| Prime + lowest price)
|
| But really, consumers don't win (and neither do sellers) because
| now these ads take up space in supposed "search results" for
| items which don't match the search terms (but are close enough)
| This creates frustration when you are looking for something to
| meet a specification, like E26 light bulbs for example. Here, it
| is pointless to show anything that doesn't meet that
| specification and yet the site shows them, and the seller has to
| pay the ad fee.
|
| Please somebody make a site with no payola!
| granzymes wrote:
| You are touching on a point that Benedict Evans has made quite
| eloquently in the past:
|
| >There was a joke a few years ago that rent is the new
| [Customer Acquisition Cost], and that now applies to
| everything. The [Total Addressable Market] for search ads is
| not 'advertising' (let alone online advertising) but everything
| that is spent to reach and serve a customer, starting with
| retail rents. This applies to Amazon, but even more to Google -
| you can ask whether Google's ads are 'advertising' or
| 'marketing', but also ask whether the TAM for buying placement
| in Google search results is 'advertising', 'marketing' or just
| its customers' operating margins. How do you reach a consumer?
| Do you spend your budget on TV ads or search ads, or on retail
| rents, or on giving retailers a margin versus selling direct,
| or giving the retailer a better price for better placement, or
| free shipping, or a better returns policy? Everything below
| P&G's COGS line is up for grabs.
|
| https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/3/6/ways-to-thi...
|
| There will be no site that does not offer advertising, because
| advertising allows the site to determine which sellers can
| afford to pay more while still being profitable. It's a scaled
| version of the same way a landlord will raise rents on a
| profitable storefront.
| codexb wrote:
| It's going to be a bit harder to win on this end I think.
| Manufacturer's require retailers to agree to this type of
| restriction all the time time (and it's mandatory, not
| voluntary) like it is with Amazon.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| _> There will be no site that does not offer advertising,
| because advertising allows the site to determine which
| sellers can afford to pay more while still being profitable._
|
| It's still possible that people exist who charge "what it's
| worth" rather than "what they can get". Those people can
| still make a fine living off of a two sided market place
| through flat transaction fees. Craigslist is an example that
| comes immediately to mind. Smart market participants are
| already punishing providers that maximize profit with payola,
| which is leading to success of new smaller niche markets -
| reverb.com comes to mind, or bricklink.com or alibris.com.
| That is not to say the market of markets is "solving" this
| problem - we probably want more consumer protection law - but
| it does show that your startement about ads is, strictly
| speaking, false.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Craigslist is a hell hole. I stopped selling there because
| even when I was practically giving electronics away (to
| prevent buyer's remorse), people still emailed insultingly
| low offers. I just gave up on the site maybe five years
| ago.
| afiori wrote:
| But you need the entire marketplace to follow that rule.
|
| You cannot charge "what it's worth" on amazon because you
| either pay the ad tax or you compete for the lowest price.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > Please somebody make a site with no payola
|
| Aliexpress?
| pierat wrote:
| Thats not the only thing I caught, at least with Ebay.
|
| During the pandemic, I decided to sell a bunch of a component I
| had stockpiled. (Im not a scalper. I got the parts when my dad
| died.).
|
| I put them for sale with $100 minimum, auction. They ended up
| selling for $300. I was definitely happy.... until Ebay refused
| to send me my money, and instead demanded access to a bank
| account, after the sale was complete. Fuck that.
|
| I found the user who bought it, traced to a business. Cool. I
| contacted him, explaining what happened. Turns out they did the
| same to him since he too was a seller. I told him that I'd
| honor the same price Ebay told me....
|
| Ebay told me (seller) $300. Ebay told the buyer $350......!!
| Mind you, the fees are taken out of my $300, yet that $50
| difference is Ebays scrape off the top.
|
| Obviously, I sold it to them for $300, and provided screenshots
| of what I was being told, and they did the same. We arranged
| the sale over Paypal and worked like a charm.
|
| And sure, Ebay's scamming as far as I can tell, everyone. But
| it's also reminded me to check on websites with a private mode
| browser and logged in, to see if there's funny games.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| I recently sold some items on ebay. ebay will not release the
| funds for 3 weeks. They give no reason for this. However I
| think the real reason is that if you do this over a large
| enough user base you can use the "time-value" of money to
| make extra money. It's nefarious, and I too will never use
| ebay again.
| j-bos wrote:
| Isn't that open and shut fraud on the part of ebay?
| hiatus wrote:
| How is that fraud? Ebay is brokering a deal between two
| parties. It doesn't seem inherently fraudulent to offer
| differing prices to each party.
| 93po wrote:
| Wow, this is wildly unethical and shitty. I'm never using
| ebay again.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/investigation-ebay-employees-
| st...
|
| They also allegedly hired someone to stalk and harass a
| couple who posted negative reviews of them online.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| eBay stole my money and made it impossible to get a refund
| fifteen years ago. I gave up and stopped using the site.
| Sorry I don't have more details; it's faded from memory. But
| it was dirty behavior, that's for sure.
| NeuroCoder wrote:
| It's amazing how quickly I recognized eBay descending into
| this sort of stuff from its inception. Maybe Amazon did so
| quickly too, but it's so obviously scummy that even as a
| teenager I got this impression. Kudos to you for going the
| extra mile
| sizzle wrote:
| This should be illegal misrepresentation of your selling
| price wow
| helen___keller wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with the opening premise that offering "free
| shipping" is dangling a free lunch that doesn't exist.
|
| Technically this is true but it makes a lot of sense by creating
| an analogous experience as with retail.
|
| If I walk to the corner store to pick up something I'm not paying
| a line item for the logistics that delivered that item from a
| factory in China, nor a line item for the rent to keep that item
| sitting on a shelf in walking distance. I just pay the price of
| the item, and those costs are baked in.
|
| Maybe an economist can argue this isn't the most efficient way of
| paying for externalities but it's hard to argue it's without
| reason. It's clearly a preferred consumer experience. Amazon
| prime is like a Costco membership. The only difference is Amazon
| handles last mile from the fulfillment center, Costco expects me
| to provide last mile fulfillment with my car.
| granzymes wrote:
| I think a physical retail analogy would be to imagine that
| every store charges a variable "restocking fee" based on how
| much it costs to get a replacement for the item that you are
| purchasing. You don't know what that fee will be until the
| clerk is ringing you up. Then one day a store decides to bake
| the restocking fees into the price, and no longer surprises the
| consumer with a variable fee at the checkout counter.
|
| This is clearly a win for consumers, who can now shop the
| aisles knowing exactly what they will pay for the item upfront
| before they put it in the cart and go to check out.
| hyeonwho22 wrote:
| Offering free shipping is not a problem. The problem is that
| mandating your suppliers subsidize free shipping _and don 't
| sell for cheaper prices elsewhere_ is blatantly
| anticompetitive, and has the effect of raising consumer prices
| on non-Amazon markets.
| helen___keller wrote:
| I agree with that, and I think buy box suppression should be
| stopped. I'm just responding to the opening paragraphs of the
| link (and some near the end) where the author appears to be
| arguing against the very conception of free shipping as if
| it's something that can only be offered in distorted and
| monopolistic markets.
| 0xADADA wrote:
| HotTake: the result of this should be to nationalize Amazon to be
| the defacto national provider of AWS services, delivery,
| logistics, and backstopped retail services.
| translucyd wrote:
| But that would nationalize profits as well. What kind a world
| do you think that's a good thing??? /s
| WillAdams wrote:
| Make it into a non-profit co-operative?
| megaman821 wrote:
| Might as well just shut it down in that case. Amazon would be
| abandoned in mass if it was government run. People groan every
| time they see that the USPS is handling their delivery. I can't
| imagine how bad it would be if that same level of government
| competence was applied to all of Amazon's operations.
| OGWhales wrote:
| > People groan every time they see that the USPS is handling
| their delivery.
|
| They do? I am usually pleased when I see it's them. They are
| very consistent and rarely make mistakes, in my experience. I
| don't know what there is to complain about, outside of
| pointless hatred for anything related to the government.
| Meanwhile, it's a crapshoot if the FedEx or Amazon driver
| even gets it to the right address.
| thfuran wrote:
| Maybe Amazon is popular enough that one party wouldn't insist
| on constantly trying to ruin them.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Come on. My interactions with the IRS, TSA, Social Security
| Office, Passport Office have all been slow and arcane. It
| is a total fantasy to think the Government could run Amazon
| well.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This will seem less and less like a hot take over time, I
| think. People seem generally unhappy that megacorps like Amazon
| and Google simply exist.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Realistically, this rot runs so deep I'm not sure how you can
| stop it. The US economy is built upon a bunch of these hidden
| taxes. Healthcare, the way insurance works and hundreds of
| middle-men between. Google baking in advertising search terms
| into things you search for. Amazon subsidizing delivery by baking
| it in as a hidden cost which causes in-store goods to rise in
| prices to match. Large real estate firms like Greystar using
| algorithmic models to raise prices uniformly across the US rather
| than based on local availability.
|
| It's a good step, but our economy is dominated by rentseeking
| behaviors from large corporations buying their way into monopoly
| and then warping the rest of the market. And unfortunately I feel
| like this case will end like many others, with a handshake and a
| promise to 'properly show consumers how much our stuff on Amazon
| costs'.
| dehrmann wrote:
| This is somewhat misguided. Unless it results in a very specific
| breakup, it won't be what consumers actually want from the
| market. A lot of what drives me to Amazon is shipping. Smaller
| retailers can't scale this at all, so what's needed is a company
| that _just_ does the fulfillment side of things with Amazon-level
| speed.
| [deleted]
| math_dandy wrote:
| Next up, the Apple Tax?
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| I don't understand why you would "Break-Up" Amazon? Why can't we
| just have common rules that says "Hey, we will fine you $50M a
| day you continue to do X,Y,Z?". Then we have precedence and law
| to back up doing monopolistic things.
|
| How does breaking a company work? I mean... we broke up Microsoft
| and that only slowed them down for a few years.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| When was Microsoft broken up? I remember the Microsoft was sued
| for anti competitive behavior but nothing of consequence
| happened.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
| .
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yeah, the breakup was overturned on appeal, and the resulting
| settlement was watered down into "we'll reduce the number of
| tentacles between Windows and IE".
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > Once it achieved monopoly power, Amazon squeezed on price
| through fees to third-party sellers. As a third-party seller, you
| pay fees for listing on Amazon; for using Amazon's warehouse
| services, known as Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA); and for
| advertising services. If you don't pay, you don't get put in a
| place on the site where consumers click.
|
| So consumers get free shipping that is mostly paid for by third
| party sellers because it gives them access to a massive customer
| base. I dont see the problem?
| napierzaza wrote:
| [dead]
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| You could ship outside of FBA but wont get listed in a
| privileged position.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Why should Amazon give them a privileged position?
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| To become a distribution monopoly.
|
| > Amazon, one of the biggest companies in the world, for
| monopolization and unfair methods of competition.
|
| Edit: sorry for snarkyness.
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| FBA de-risks the transaction for Amazon and the vendor. You
| sell a known quantity with a known delivery window. Small
| businesses often struggle with this and criminals use this
| to their advantage.
|
| If eBay/non-FBA is a flea market, FBA is a online mall.
| [deleted]
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Fair play to this reporter for shining a light on all this,
| especially in relation to the redactions. Hopefully the secret
| court restrictions are lifted.
| exabrial wrote:
| Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, break them all up. And for the
| love of crap, stop approving billion dollar mergers.
| jbombadil wrote:
| This.
|
| Also add most major telcos, ISPs and airlines to the list as
| well.
|
| We love capitalism. It's basis is competition. Let's get us
| some of that.
| theptip wrote:
| I object a lot less if the trustbusters don't stop with tech
| and apply their hammer equally to other industries, agree
| with telcos/ISPs (I'm not sure how uncompetitive airlines
| are, they seem really low margin). I haven't really seen
| evidence that Khan is interested in going after non-tech
| companies though. (Would love any pointers to the contrary.)
| Qwertious wrote:
| Capitalism is based on competition, but the _rules_ of said
| competition are largely written by the winners of said
| competition - this isn 't a perversion of capitalism, this
| _is_ capitalism as it has always functioned in reality. Like,
| oil companies get significant political sway over our policy
| on _climate change_ , which is why over the last 40 years,
| the biggest sources of emissions reduction were the 2008 GFC
| and the 2020 lockdowns.
|
| The #1 reason why Comcast hasn't been ousted by local
| community fiber networks is because Comcast politically
| lobbied to make it illegal. This is _normal_. The solution is
| to cut the moneyed interests out of politics as harshly as
| possible, because otherwise we 'll always require the
| permission of junk-food companies before we limit how much
| sodium is permitted in kid's food.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Lobbying needs to be rate-limited to match what individuals
| can say.
|
| Level the playing field by making the largest possible
| political contribution equal to a multiple of the minimum
| wage which one could reasonably expect someone earning that
| to donate in a given year, then require that each
| contribution be made using a check or money order mailed
| with a hand-written note in a first-class envelope.
| efficax wrote:
| and the big 4 banks, and walmart, and a bunch of other
| industries. we're in a monopoly age.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| Why don't we target the 6 (or however many) companies that
| own 95% of everything in the media?
|
| Unless they're reined-in, progress will be elusive; their
| megaphone must be silenced!
| user3939382 wrote:
| And media companies...
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| _Especially_ the media companies! They put artificial
| limits on the range of acceptable thoughts, acting as both
| a muzzle and a noose around the neck of the public.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes because there is absolutely no way for you to get
| your thoughts to people worldwide without depending on
| big media...
| user3939382 wrote:
| Parler
|
| Strawman in any case, having a technical option doesn't
| negate massive horrible effects on the public.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So it's a straw man that anyone can't just set up a blog
| or do podcast and publish their ideas?
| user3939382 wrote:
| It's a strawman because GP wasn't commenting on whether
| or not there is a technical way of reaching the public,
| but rather that media consolidation hurts the public.
| Those are orthogonal issues.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It's not orthogonal, consolidation of media is only
| important if it keeps people's messages from getting
| distributed broadly. Is that really a problem in 2023?
|
| The "media" - ie ways to reach people is less
| consolidated now than any time in history.
| ansmithz42 wrote:
| Oh but remember: "Bigger is better!" and "Economies of
| scale"/s
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Highly fragmented markets are also bad for price discovery - so
| how do we know what size to have?
| klysm wrote:
| We are so incredibly far from highly fragmented I don't think
| that's even worth thinking about at this stage
| RandomLensman wrote:
| If you don't think about it, could create a weird set of
| local/product/etc. monopoly like things instead. Not
| thinking about isn't an option because it ignores the
| incentives if you force limit sizes.
| klysm wrote:
| Yes definitely agree a hard limit on sizes doesn't make
| sense, but I just think it's not going to be a problem
| any time soon with the current state of affairs in the US
| economy.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| I honestly think that this is underestimating how good
| companies can get in optimization their positions. The
| smaller companies would inherit these abilities from
| their "parents".
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I read an economics paper a while back that said you need at
| least four players to get a competitive market.
|
| I'm not sure how you would translate that to limits on the
| size of a company though as every sector would be different.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| I think we need to seriously think about market design at
| some point. Relying on more actors alone is not a great
| strategy.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| At the very least a line can be drawn when a company cross-
| subsidizes a barely profitable enterprise to the tune that
| they're drowning out competitors, or when they exploit
| workers so absurdly insane that they're forced to resort to
| piss in bottles because the algorithm penalizes them for
| taking a civilized bathroom break. AWS makes _boatloads_ of
| money on AWS and uses that to stay afloat with shipping
| stuff.
| userabchn wrote:
| Make corporation tax progressive, resulting in it being easier
| for small companies to compete with big ones, without requiring
| the government to decide what is and what isn't a monopoly.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| You have to add Microsoft to this list unless you live in
| complete denial about the massive monopoly that they have in
| office IT. And they are actually the first that should be
| broken up, splitting the office suite from everything else.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Microsoft should be the first one to be split up. Their
| dominant position is more pervasive than any other market
| because the operating system people use in their computers is
| the gateway to get too these other services.
|
| The second should be Apple for the same reasons.
|
| Then Amazon.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I fail to see why apple should be split.
|
| Nobody forces people to buy macs, very few do, and as for
| iPhones, there are alternatives and apple doesn't have a
| monopoly over the phone industry.
|
| You can very well use icloud on other OSes too.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Apple doesn't even hide the tax.
|
| The shit they get to pull with safari is beyond IE level
| - they straight up don't allow alternative browsers
| (beyond WebKit) on 50% of mobile market.
| SSLy wrote:
| Not for long (* insert EU flag here *)
| dmonitor wrote:
| If Apple had >5% desktop market penetration, you'd have a
| point.
|
| They should definitely open up iOS to installing apps
| outside the app store, but their position isn't nearly as
| abusive as Microsoft's. Even their 50-60% share of the
| mobile market is pretty competitive compared to Windows.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Do exactly how do you plan to beak them up? How would you
| divide them up?
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Governments' and companies incentives are highly different. I
| live in Turkey where not every service is corporate like it
| is in the US. I can see in practice that a competitor service
| offered by government happens to be that real competition
| which drags the prices down.
| nickff wrote:
| Why? You seem to be expressing outrage, anger, or frustration,
| but you're not giving the rest of us anything to think about.
| esarbe wrote:
| All of them enjoy market domination in their respective areas
| of expertise. Their size makes them effective monopolies and
| their behavior has many times ruled anti-competitive.
| Competition between them is insufficient and they have been
| convicted of organizing in monopolistic manners before.
|
| For consumers and the market as a whole it is more healthy if
| they are broken up into smaller companies.
| thfuran wrote:
| Even if they weren't near monopolies in their respective
| fields, I think we should be wary of permitting the sort of
| concentration of power that arises from the existence of
| trillion dollar corporations.
| koalaman wrote:
| This has been pretty obvious for a while. Whenever I do product
| searches on Amazon the prime eligible results are more expensive
| by exactly the shipping costs of the non prime vendors.
|
| The only reason I keep it is for the video service which I'm
| guessing is the same for a lot of people.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Which products do you observe this for specifically? I buy from
| Amazon US all the time and I can't say I've ever noticed that
| discrepancy, so I can only assume we're looking at different
| products or from a different region.
| elashri wrote:
| > The only reason I keep it is for the video service which I'm
| guessing is the same for a lot of people.
|
| Which will start having ads unless you pay a fee for the ad-
| free experience starting next year [1]
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/22/1201028854/amazon-prime-
| video...
| brvsft wrote:
| Nice, looks like I have an actual reason to convince my wife
| that we switch to Instacart next year.
| spiderice wrote:
| Is Instacart an Amazon replacement for you? Generally, if I
| can buy something at a store within 15 minutes of me I'll
| usually just make the drive to buy it rather than going to
| Amazon. I use Amazon for the things that I generally can't
| get locally (such as heavy duty floating shelf brackets
| that I bought recently. No idea what store sells those near
| me).
|
| But the idea of replacing Amazon with Instacart is
| definitely intriguing to me
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| > such as heavy duty floating shelf brackets
|
| Try a local hardware store, not a big-box like Home Depot
| or Lowes, though they're likely to have it too! I've
| found that so long as I am patient, local hardware stores
| are happy to order things for me.
|
| Amazon is great at instant gratification and that's about
| it IMO.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Instacart has about an 80% accuracy rate IME. Which is
| pretty bad...
|
| I use Target for many things now, they also have free
| shipping and usually lower prices than Amazon
| temporallobe wrote:
| Tangentially related, even in YouTube Premium you can still
| see ads if the content creator embeds ads as part of their
| content. This seems like double-dipping to me and I am seeing
| more and more of this.
| makestuff wrote:
| Yeah I have zero issues skipping host read ads as a YT
| premium subscriber. I'm already paying not to see ads.
| pierat wrote:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ is your friend :)
|
| crowdsourced auto-skip for in-video adverts.
| chongli wrote:
| I consider that stuff part of the content and weigh it
| appropriately. Creators who get too obnoxious with
| sponsored content are dropped from my subscriptions.
|
| The creators I tend to watch the most these days either
| don't have sponsorships or they only run their ad at the
| end of the video in which case I just stop watching or
| click to the next video.
| fjert wrote:
| This never bothered me much since I can skip them
| immediately. I've been trained at this point to immediately
| skip a minute or so into every video
| dylan604 wrote:
| I love the take that talking about a sponsor isn't an ad.
| <facepalm>
|
| Even the lame concept of throwing up Pateron supporter's
| names on the video for mere frames scrolling by is just
| moronic to me. Do people really think they are special for
| having their username flashed on a screen? What
| value/meaning is derived from this?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > What value/meaning is derived from this?
|
| Someone is supporting a creator whose content they like
| and the creator is publicly saying thank you.
|
| How is this confusing to you?
| dylan604 wrote:
| They can say "thanks to all my supporters". it's just
| fallacy to think the creator actually cares. it's a
| simple copy&paste from a list from their patreon (or
| whatever) to the text editor of their editing software.
| it's even less if they aren't even the ones doing the
| editing. sure, they all say "we love our supporters".
| it's just like people that donate to NPR so they can have
| their names read out over the air.
|
| how is their sincerity (more to the point, lack thereof)
| confusing to you?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > They can say "thanks to all my supporters". it's just
| fallacy to think the creator actually cares.
|
| How deeply cynical and also, besides the point; even if
| you believe all creators don't give a shit (I believe
| many do), people still like being thanked.
|
| I mean, clearly you don't ...
| dylan604 wrote:
| what you call cynical, I call naive on your part. We
| clearly have different opinions on creators and their
| level of sincerity towards supporters. i hold them just
| this side of influencers. i understand that they may
| depend on the support, but it's not like adding someone's
| name on a screen for .5 seconds means "they care about
| me". it just means they're fulfilling some obligation
| they used to entice people to donate. people that decide
| "because my name will be on the video for .5s" is what
| pushes to donate is beyond silly.
| endisneigh wrote:
| A more charitable take is that Amazon is raising the price
| (for the nth time) of prime, and introducing a small discount
| if you put up with ads.
| philipov wrote:
| Amazon doesn't need charity; they can afford to pay.
| biohax2015 wrote:
| The shareholders (me, you, our 401ks) demand growth.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| The "hidden tax" described in the article is to sellers, not
| consumers. Free shipping is subsidy for consumers that costs
| Amazon billions of dollars. I have personally never seen what
| you're describing.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I fairly frequently see a little "may be available at a lower
| price from other sellers without Prime shpping" thing on
| listings.
| prettychill wrote:
| this is pretty common from what I have seen. especially with
| books.
| dspillett wrote:
| While this varies by territory, I'm UK based, I find the main
| benefits of Prime to be the next-day (even weekend) delivery,
| Saturday (even if not next day) delivery, and sometimes the
| locker delivery option.
|
| Even where prime price is the same as other+delivery this wins
| out. Though at each price rise or other change I have to
| rethink if I consider I'm getting a good deal.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Fast delivery of things i want is good too
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| That's likely because the non-prime vendors have to _lower_
| their prices to match prime, or they wouldn't sell much.
| granzymes wrote:
| >If this suit is resolved in the government's favor, the remedy
| could be anything from ending anti-discounting measures to
| breaking up the firm.
|
| There's a bit of an odd remedy issue with this lawsuit. The harm
| being asserted by the FTC is that Amazon charges more fees than
| competitors but requires that sellers not charge more on Amazon
| than on competing sites. Originally Amazon allegedly accomplished
| this with a Most Favored Nation clause, and today Amazon will
| kick you out of the "buy box" promotional space if they detect
| you offering lower prices elsewhere.
|
| First, a breakup doesn't cure this harm. You could go all the way
| to the extreme of splitting Amazon's third-party marketplace into
| its own company and yet that company could still charge higher
| fees than competitors and condition the buy box space on sellers
| not offering lower prices elsewhere.
|
| Second, no injunction makes sense either. Is a court going to
| force Amazon to advertise a price in the buy box that Amazon
| knows is not the lowest price available on the market? That's an
| absurdly anti-consumer thing for a court to order (and so a court
| would likely _not_ order it).
|
| So what cures the alleged harm?
| s3p wrote:
| Breaking the company up into smaller units that don't have the
| monopoly power of forcing their sellers to fix prices.
| granzymes wrote:
| But how? The smallest unit of a possible breakup would be a
| standalone 3rd-party marketplace company, and yet that unit
| would still have the same market power for 3rd party sellers
| as Amazon as a whole does today.
| thfuran wrote:
| Why is that the smallest possible unit? It may not be
| especially practical, but it's certainly possible to break
| Amazon up by retail product category (one company for
| books, one for kitchenware, etc).
| granzymes wrote:
| Because you run into the issue of "unscrambling the
| eggs". If Amazon is not organized by retail product
| category (and I would assume it is largely not), then it
| will be very difficult to split the company in that way.
| Courts really aren't in the business of restructuring
| companies and the last thing you want is for the new baby
| companies to fail because the restructuring went poorly.
|
| Which employees go where, who gets what IP, what happens
| to all the underlying website/physical infrastructure? A
| "3rd party marketplace" unit is already likely smaller
| than is feasible for a court to oversee. By comparison,
| it would be a lot easier to split Amazon into "AWS" and
| "not-AWS" because the company is already organized that
| way.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Fortunately, our work on the secrecy of the Google trial is
| paying dividends. Here's FTC official Douglas Farrar arguing that
| the commission will push to get rid of the redactions:
|
| We share the frustration that much of the data and quotes by
| Amazon executives in the complaint that describe what we allege
| is monopolistic and illegal behavior is redacted. Amazon has 14
| days from the entry of a temporary sealing order to provide
| legitimate justification for preventing this information from
| being revealed. We do not believe that there are compelling
| reasons to keep much of this information secret from the public."
|
| If Amazon has done nothing wrong then why so many redactions. It
| might succeed in keeping the facts sealed away from public view
| but it only raises more questions.
|
| It sounds like Amazon is a heavy source of bots on the web if
| they need to continually scrape millions of websites to monitor
| pricing. Perhaps someone can explain how that works.
| dantheman wrote:
| Lina Kahn is the worst type of politically motivated bureaucrat.
| Instead of executing the law, seeks new interpretations so that
| she impose her world view on others. She's never created or done
| anything of value other than be a student or a bureaucrat.
|
| Hopefully this case will be another in her long list of failures.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I think US anti-trust law has been far too toothless for far
| too long. I wish we had some politicians from the 1920-30's
| that would actually go after big companies instead of taking
| bribes. Did I say bribes? Sorry I meant campaign contributions.
| dantheman wrote:
| I mean, I doubt you have any understanding of actual anti-
| trust cases. But by the time standard oil was broken up it
| was down to 60% market share and the price of oil continued
| to fall.
|
| The only monopolies that have truly existed in the USA are
| government granted ones.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Go do google next!
| dmix wrote:
| Whats the likely scenario if they lose? Stop offering free
| shipping? Doubling the price of Prime to factor in lower margins
| if they cant artifically push up prices? Bully sellers for more
| margins even more than before?
| darklycan51 wrote:
| Oh man the people defending Amazon in the comments, I understand
| many of you are investors but come on... let's stop pretending
| for a second that Amazon doesn't deserve a break up for what
| they've been doing for years now, even after being called to
| congress for it.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| We need a new act that explicit addresses platform economics
| antitrust.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Actually we don't. We just need the bureaucracy and judiciary
| to overturn the last 50 years of subversion of the original
| intent of the antitrust acts. The appointment of Lina Khan was
| a good first step on that path. This case is a good second
| step.
|
| But a new act would make the process a lot simpler. Judicial
| precedence is powerful and doesn't change quickly or easily. A
| new law would make precedence for the old law moot.
|
| IANAL.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Maybe if they weren't going after FAANG exclusively I could
| take this seriously and not think it is entirely politically
| motivated BS. ISP monopolies are 10x more harmful than
| anything they are going after. They have even taken subsidies
| and then refused to deliver what they promised to get the
| subsidy, and kept the money. But all I hear about is cases
| against Google and Amazon for things that sound to me like a
| real legal stretch.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| We have a good sense that there are problems, but specific
| problems aren't enumerated and so proving they're not ok is
| tough.
|
| The EU's Digital Market Act is a good step.
| tyingq wrote:
| It does feel like some updating would be helpful. The
| existing language, for example recognizes that markets are
| sometimes restricted by geography, that you don't need market
| domination nationwide to be a monopoly. But it doesn't
| recognize modern day non-geo boundaries. Like, for example,
| poor people are mostly stuck in an Android "monopoly" because
| they can't afford an iPhone. It's a separate market. That's
| just one example. Captive app stores and their relationship
| with developers are another. I imagine there's more.
| DannyBee wrote:
| I'm gonna disagree - the original act from 1890, still used,
| had interpretation issues from the start, which all of the
| "subversion" you speak of comes from.
|
| It is a difference in how the text is read for sure, but the
| text is badly written.
|
| It says ""Every contract, combination in the form of trust or
| otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce
| among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby
| declared to be illegal. . . ."
|
| The immediate problem with this is easy. he act does not
| define restraint of trade, either, so courts were left to
| define it.
|
| This led, nearly instantly, to limiting the act to those
| contracts that "unduly" restrict trade using the rule of
| reason.
|
| "To treat as condemned by the act all agreements under which,
| as a result, the cost of conducting an interstate commercial
| business may be increased would enlarge the application of
| the act far beyond the fair meaning of the language used.
| There must be some direct and immediate effect upon
| interstate commerce in order to come within the act."
|
| Standard Oil, quoting Addyston Pipe & Steel Co. v. United
| States (1899).
|
| Standard Oil also goes into the fact that restraint of trade
| is not defined anywhere in the act, etc, as further
| justification.
|
| All that has happened since then is deciding what "unduly"
| means for this section
|
| At this point, the sherman act is 133 years old. It would be
| good to update it and make the language less subject to
| interpretation.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Sure, but my point is that we don't "need" a new act, as
| the OP states. All hope is not lost if we don't get one.
|
| Bad precedence and an unclear act makes Lina Khan's actions
| very difficult, but not quite impossible.
|
| The split nature of Congress, its showmanship and quorum
| rules make getting a new act very difficult, but not quite
| impossible.
|
| We should be pursuing both paths in parallel.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "Bad precedence and an unclear act makes Lina Khan's
| actions very difficult, but not quite impossible."
|
| No, but she's totally ineffective at knowing where to
| push or not - so it will be impossible, unfortunately.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Good!
|
| Though, to be fair, the switching cost for a consumer to start
| using Target.com (for example) isn't that high. I go to vendors
| like Target.Com, HomeDepot.Com, BestBuy.com and AliExpress.com
| for most of the things I used to use Amazon for.
| proamdev123 wrote:
| Thanks for the list of alternatives!
|
| Have you experienced any unexpected pros and/or cons from using
| those vendors instead of Amazon?
| Qwertious wrote:
| >Thanks for the list of alternatives!
|
| I'd love to hear a list of more, if anyone has them - I
| suspect most of them don't focus on Australia.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Sometimes things take a few days longer, but no real
| problems. Target and HomeDepot also both allow "third party
| sellers" so there's the same clutter issue, though it's not
| nearly as bad as Amazon.
| kibwen wrote:
| The issue here is that Amazon's behavior makes the switching
| cost higher than it would otherwise be. You are penalized for
| the existence of Amazon even if you don't use Amazon.
| xgl5k wrote:
| FTC should go after other industries that are far more harmful to
| customers than tech. ISPs, healthcare/insurance, etc. Tech should
| be no where near the top of concerns for the FTC.
|
| This is a political stunt. If Lena Khan and the FTC were actually
| interested in consumer protection, they would go after other
| industries first.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > This is a political stunt. If Lena Khan and the FTC were
| actually interested in consumer protection, they would go after
| other industries first.
|
| Totally! As we all know, the FTC is legally bound to only doing
| one thing at a time.
|
| A more aggressive FTC is starting to target drug mergers and
| industry middlemen:
| https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/regulatory/more-aggressive-...
|
| How the FTC Is Tackling 'Below the Radar' Healthcare Deals :
| https://medcitynews.com/2023/09/how-the-ftc-is-tackling-belo...
|
| FTC warns of 'rampant' pharma consolidation as it targets $28bn
| Amgen deal:
| https://www.ft.com/content/bbe06477-22e6-4d46-a4c2-03964a2f8...
|
| FTC writing new internet rules to safeguard users' search,
| health and location data:
| https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/22/ftc-writing...
| seatac76 wrote:
| Tech is omnipresent, is flush with cash that it frequently uses
| to disrupt (drive existing businesses out and then monopolize)
| and has an outsize influence on people. It absolutely should be
| first on the list for anti trust action. and it's Lina Khan.
| xgl5k wrote:
| Most of the disruption is done by startups not the big
| companies.
|
| The influence is nowhere near as negative as the impact from
| the other industries I mentioned.
|
| They gained gained market share by providing better goods and
| services than the alternatives.
|
| Still, there are viable alternatives to essentially every
| good or service provided by these companies.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The only actual monopoly in the tech industry is Google
| search. There is also a very concerning duopoly with Google /
| Apple app stores controlling all software loaded on mobile OS
| that needs to be forced to allow alternate channels. Besides
| that, I can't think of anything in tech that is actually a
| concerning monopoly. Amazon has no such monopoly position in
| e-commerce. The market share really isn't that big.
| xgl5k wrote:
| Even with Google search being so dominant, there are
| alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo. Many people are
| also starting to use ChatGPT as an alternative to some of
| the things they used search engines for.
|
| On Android you can sideload apps, install alternate app
| stores.
|
| Implying these companies are monopolies is an
| overstatement.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Big tech is no longer the disruptor. Mature big tech way too
| easily devolves into rent-seeking just like those other
| industries you listed, just with shinier tech.
| overflyer wrote:
| If I was superstitios and I had to pick a person that is pure
| evil, Jeff Bezos would be in my TOP 5.
| oldbbsnickname wrote:
| If proven true in court, I don't see how breaking-up Amazon would
| be the right remedy because doing so would increase costs to
| consumers through unnecessary inefficiencies and losses of
| economies of scale. Just forbid anti-competitive behavior and
| levy a sizable fine accordingly.
| lsedgwick wrote:
| I think this demonstrates a way in which all centralized power
| becomes, for good or for ill, partially absorbed into state
| power. A major country's government will always be able to exert
| lots of leverage against, e.g. tech companies, whether for
| legitimate or illegitimate reasons, it matters not which. They
| can always threaten regulatory or legislative actions which would
| be annoying or devastating to shareholders. Hence, behind-the-
| scenes conversations will always have an implicit fact of "please
| censor as we ask, provide data and backdoored access to which
| servers we ask, please don't take on the wrong political causes,
| elsewise there will be consequences."
|
| Goodness knows that if the intelligence community or state law
| enforcement has ever wanted access to anything in AWS, now of all
| times would be when they have the easiest time asking for it!
| Anything to curry favor with someone who can speak a word of
| support to federal agencies and state officials.
| lsedgwick wrote:
| I guess this makes me a little demoralized about the utility of
| "anti-big-tech government actions," because to the extent any
| of these actions succeed, it's probably just sending a clear
| message to enhance state influence/access of other tech
| companies. If I get excited (and I want to) because "Amazon
| might be broken up!!1!", maybe that just means Google finally
| got the message and decided to put backdoors into <insert
| platform here> on behalf of <insert agency>.
| jononomo wrote:
| I don't understand the people in this thread defending Amazon.
| They're just an impersonal corporate conglomerate that doesn't
| give a *&$! about you. Capitalism is about competition and the
| more competition the better.
| nologic01 wrote:
| There should be counterincentives to corporate gigantism and
| conglomeration. Its as simple as that.
|
| A smartly organized market economy does not wait for oligopolies
| to wreak havoc before it resorts to costly and slow litigation.
| Sevii wrote:
| You basically can't shop for products with many options on amazon
| anymore. It still works for books and things where you know you
| are getting the right product. But for most goods its easier to
| use Apple Pay on a shopify store.
| keepamovin wrote:
| I think the general idea across many companies in the U.S. is a
| good one: breaking up monopolies that are more vulnerable to
| external, globalized forces. The goal is to fertilize the
| business landscape with their metaphorical "whale-fall
| carcasses," enabling a flourishing of smaller, competitive
| entities. This strategy aims to revitalize and fortify the
| American economy against the looming tidal wave of foreign
| competition. Although this approach may be painful on a local
| level and even humiliating for some individuals, it's ultimately
| a sound strategy for macroeconomic management.
| lhoss wrote:
| yes , one good reason for the break-up, that also Scott G.
| explains in this new vid: https://youtu.be/jl-
| SRHMzZHk?si=o2LpMMESWEIrejld ( Interestingly he his Amzn stock
| holder, favors the breakup, and believes the parts more
| valuable than the behemoth currently itself. thus a Win,Win,Win
| !)
| seatac76 wrote:
| This was blatant monopolistic behavior, control over prices
| outside your platform with the threat of platform access to
| enforce it is a slam dunk case.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| The TL;DR is that the "hidden tax" is onerous advertising fees
| paid by third-party retailers to have their products appear high
| in search results.
|
| I don't really see the issue here, since this appears to be a
| win-win for both consumers and sellers. Consumers get the cheap
| stuff they want with free shipping, and sellers get access to
| hundreds of millions of customers and the volume of sales needed
| to survive in a low-margin business. The fact that sellers are
| willing to pay these fees suggests that's it worth it for them to
| be on Amazon. If it wasn't worth it, they would be somewhere
| else.
| rk06 wrote:
| Nope, the core issue is Amazon has monopoly on advertisement
| and distribution. And Amazon is abusing it to suppress
| competitors.
|
| Consider the scenario:
|
| Amazon executive want more bonus, so they decide to increase
| retailer prices by 10x.
|
| Now, retailers cost have increased for Amazon by 10x. But other
| distribution channels remain the same.
|
| So, retailers should increase prices on Amazon only. But Amazon
| forces them to increase prices everywhere.
|
| This interference of Amazon on other business is the issue
|
| Amazon sees that it's profit is lower
| hnuser847 wrote:
| If Amazon did that, sales would drop to zero and retailers
| would leave Amazon. eCommerce is a low-margin business.
| Sellers will only stay on Amazon as long it's profitable for
| them.
| zb3 wrote:
| You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap. And Amazon
| (using its size) made it impossible for sellers to sell their
| products cheaper elsewhere. This is anticompetitive.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| > You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap.
|
| Except they are, otherwise consumers wouldn't use Amazon.
| Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9
| times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer
| with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns. If
| that wasn't the case, I would have no reason to use Amazon.
| jononomo wrote:
| You don't realize that the price could be cheaper.
| midnightclubbed wrote:
| And that is why this case is being brought. Amazon are
| requiring that the price on Amazon is the cheapest price,
| even if the retailer would like to sell it on their own
| store (or eBay, Walmart, etc) for cheaper. If it's sold on
| Amazon you won't see it cheaper elsewhere.
| pahkah wrote:
| > Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9
| times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer
| with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns.
|
| That's the problem! The issue is that Amazon forces sellers
| to raise their prices elsewhere, so that Amazon is the best
| deal for a shopper. But if Amazon didn't have the power to
| do that (if it didn't have a monopoly as the gateway to
| online shopping) then other retailers would be able to
| lower their prices.
|
| That's the "tax" referred to in the article. By inflating
| prices across the board, but still ensuring that they're
| the least expensive option, Amazon retains customers and
| increases profits. Individual consumers choose it because
| it's the best deal, but the system as a whole loses out
| because prices are higher than they "should" be.
| hnbad wrote:
| I'm a consumer who uses Amazon for 90% of their online
| shopping and let me tell you: I'm not doing it because
| Amazon is cheap. In recent years more often than not,
| Amazon isn't actually the cheapest option except for the
| occasional deal for a subpar product they want to remove
| from their inventory (but these would be cheap in brick and
| mortar stores too). Even the deals are largely bogus:
| "Prime Day" largely exists to buy Amazon equipment at a
| more reasonable price point and the rest of the time the
| deals are either for "stocking fillers" (i.e. the kind of
| stuff you'd find in the discount bin at the supermarket) or
| noname white label dropshipping products you can barely
| tell apart from the real deal until they arrive.
|
| I don't use Amazon because it's cheap. I use it because
| it's convenient. I can do 99% of my non-groceries shopping
| on Amazon and I get 30 day free returns on most products
| and next day delivery for some of them, not to mention free
| shipping on most things I buy (or near-free shipping if you
| consider the cost of Prime).
|
| What's been pushing me away from Amazon recently is that
| they're not very good (or even increasingly worse) for some
| categories of products and in many cases search results are
| cluttered by Chinese dropshipping products to the point I
| can't find trustworthier brands at all or for categories
| I'm less familiar with have to do research to figure out
| which brands actually exist outside of Amazon's Chinese
| dropshipping hell. And again because of the free returns
| (and in the case of non-free returns the A-to-Z guarantee
| still often resulting in free returns or full refunds) this
| is not a cost issue but more about the reduction in
| convenience.
|
| Mind you, I live in Germany and German Amazon is likely
| different. But Amazon is still the biggest online retailer
| here despite not being the cheapest. Arguably it still
| maintains the illusion of being the cheapest because of the
| free shipping (if you pay for Prime) and the constant
| barrage of "deals".
| globalnode wrote:
| did you read it all? it claims the prices are higher due to the
| hidden tax and that amazon is price fixing by threatening to
| block 3rd party sellers if they sell at a more reasonable price
| elsewhere. this doesnt necessarily mean that consumers will get
| a better deal elsewhere but it is probably unhealthy to put all
| that price setting behaviour in the hands of one company.
| proamdev123 wrote:
| This is an excellent point.
|
| I'm extremely curious to see if the evidence shows that
| Amazon's practices actually drive up prices in the market or
| whether there's not much impact.
|
| I suspect the answer may vary drastically depending on the
| product category.
| fallingknife wrote:
| That doesn't really sound like price setting power. They are
| saying you can set whatever price you want, but it has to be
| the same as other sales channels.
| Qwertious wrote:
| "Other sales channels" being Amazon's competitors - suppose
| you sell a... cup that costs $1 to produce, and you sell it
| on Amazon and Bmazon. Amazon charges $2 in fees, and Bmazon
| charges $0.50 in fees.
|
| In this hypothetical example with _demonstration numbers_
| for effect, you could sell your cup for a minimum of $1.50
| on Bmazon and $3 on Amazon - everything above that is pure
| profit. In such a scenario, you would obviously much prefer
| selling at $2.50 on Bmazon over selling for $3.50 on
| Amazon, since you make 2x the profit, and _the average
| customer_ would much prefer to buy the device at a ~30%
| discount! Unless the customer legitimately derives an extra
| $1 worth of value from using Amazon instead of Bmazon, in
| which case Amazon gets the sale anyway.
|
| But, if 90% of your sales are on Amazon, then you _can 't_
| offer this deal that both you and the customer are
| legitimately incentivized to do, because you'd lose 80% of
| your revenue.
|
| In such a scenario, Amazon has _no_ competitive incentive
| to reduce their fees! It suppresses market signals towards
| lower-overhead sales platforms, i.e. you have no way to
| signal to your customers that a sale on Bmazon benefits you
| _twice_ as much as on Amazon.
|
| Basically, Amazon is trying to abuse a network-effect
| instead of actually competing with their competition.
| They're deplatforming anyone who doesn't voluntarily price-
| fix for them. It's insane.
| stale2002 wrote:
| The rule means that a seller cannot pass the savings onto
| the consumer, by giving the consumer the fee that they
| would otherwise pay amazon.
|
| Thats the issue.
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do.
| Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In
| fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and
| Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected
| price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement
| often has a stipulation that the same product can never be
| cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as WalMart gets
| specific SKUs. 2. On the other side, Costco makes the majority of
| its money from memberships. The membership is a significant sunk
| cost and maintains brand loyalty from a mass affluent customer
| base (notice the similarity to Amazon Prime). Existing vendors
| will work closely with Costco to tailor products to this
| desirable market (see Costco specific SKUs for TVs, routers,
| etc). Upstart brands will go even further to get their wares in
| front of an audience with ample disposable income.
|
| The Amazon policy basically says that the vendor must offer free
| shipping. Coincidentally, nobody can offer shipping for less than
| what Amazon offers therefore Amazon(FBA) is by default the lowest
| price. The only other company that can fight this with a
| logistics network of its own is...WalMart.
|
| Then you have Chinese vendors who sell through networks of
| dropshippers and resellers at Amazon and other venues. It's why
| you see many vendors of seemingly the same item.
|
| One thing to note is that it's mostly small and medium vendors of
| relatively low margin items that are the most hurt by Amazon's
| policies. Seller's of high margin items just eat into their
| margins while large vendors push back at Amazon and sometimes win
| e.g. Toilet Paper that comes directly out of a Georgia Pacific
| warehouse instead an Amazon warehouse despite being labeled as
| Prime and sold by Amazon.com, not a third party.
| Salgat wrote:
| Amazon's biggest advantage is that they can sell fakes and
| patent violating products to undercut other retailers.
| time0ut wrote:
| Don't forget copyright violating products.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| > The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product
| can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as
| WalMart gets specific SKUs
|
| Yep, this is anti-consumer and anti-competitive -- it should be
| illegal. Here's where it gets interesting though...
|
| In wal-mart's case they're trying to win on price competition
| alone. They're hoping with their volume, operations and
| efficiency, nobody else can sell with a lower margin. But
| Amazon is doing the opposite.
|
| I looked into selling on Amazon recently and the fees were over
| 30%! Amazon requiring that sellers can't offer a lower price
| elsewhere drives the prices up on Amazon and off Amazon.
| Primarily, they're trying to prevent sellers from directing
| buyers to their own website where they can offer the product at
| a lower price because there are no 30%+ fees.
| Guvante wrote:
| Amazon Prime isn't the same as Costco Membership unless you
| ignore everything beyond "richer customers are willing to pay
| for it".
|
| Costco makes its profit off its membership.
|
| Amazon Prime offers a product at less than cost and then shifts
| that cost onto its manufacturers.
|
| After all if I am paying Amazon for Prime shouldn't Amazon pay
| for the difference between more typical free shipping and two
| day shipping at minimum? Isn't that what the payment is for?
|
| The reality is Amazon Prime is more akin to a loss leader and
| Amazon realized it could use its market position to avoid
| inflating it's price to reflect that loss by putting pressure
| on its partners.
|
| Of course whether this is legal is an open question obviously
| but it certainly isn't the same as Costco using a membership as
| a profit source.
|
| Walmart vs Amazon is more nuanced as the difference gets into
| market overlaps. Should Amazon be able to force you to use its
| fulfillment service to use its website (which is generally
| illegal for drop ship style setups like Amazon who doesn't take
| ownership).
|
| So Amazon is certainly rubbing against a "you can't force
| bundling like that". The question is whether their "forcing"
| you in the way their website heavily focuses on Prime.
| darkarmani wrote:
| Isn't that totally different? I thought brick and mortar stores
| actually buy inventory (or commit to buy orders in this age of
| just-in-time) where Amazon is just the middleman connecting
| buyers and sellers and charging fees on both ends.
|
| If Amazon wants to commit to certain sizes of orders, I'm sure
| the vendors will be happy with contractual price setting.
| viraptor wrote:
| Amazon warehouse inventory is held ahead of time. That's how
| the commitment to some stock levels works today.
| coltonv wrote:
| I hate that every discussion of reigning in abusive companies
| has to come with 1000 comments about how other companies are
| also being abusive, which should apparently make us just wave
| the white flag. Nah, let's deal with all the monopolies, and
| Amazon is a good place to start since like you said, they are
| just incredibly blatant.
| mycologos wrote:
| In what sense is Costco an "abusive" company? They squeeze
| their suppliers, but their suppliers legitimately have other
| options. I'm not aware of any market what Costco is the only
| game in town.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's a very strong argument to say that the practice
| currently being pursued by the FTC has been a long standing
| and generally accepted as legal practice in the retail
| industry. The fact that they are going after Amazon for this,
| but have not ever gone after anybody else who has been doing
| it for decades leads me to the conclusion that this is not
| about the actual trade practice it claims to be about, but
| rather a politically targeted attack on Amazon.
|
| And the FTC is very much capable of running multiple
| enforcement actions at once. Why are there no such charges
| against other companies doing the same thing. They don't have
| to be one at a time.
| [deleted]
| araes wrote:
| It's obvious astroturfing.
|
| The top two posts with the most upvotes are "Ebay is just as
| bad" for the startoff line, and "Everybody's just as bad as
| Amazon. Why are you being so mean and cruel to Amazon?"
|
| Obvious astroturfing, just like the entire Amazon review
| ecosystem. Surprise? No.
|
| https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ Bezos' wealth
| relative to "normal" shown as 1-pixel comparisons. Be careful
| once you get to the $Trillion portion (you'll be scrolling
| for the rest of your life.)
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| "all the monopolies"
| bdw5204 wrote:
| The precise term would be the oligopolies.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do.
|
| Walmart and Costco subsidize free shipping by raising prices on
| the third party businesses who sell through them?
|
| Because that's what the article is about.
| thayne wrote:
| The mechanics might be different, but the "free shipping" is
| still subsidized by driving the price of the product itself
| up. Either way, all consumers pay a higher price, so that a
| subset of them don't have to pay for shipping.
| Guvante wrote:
| Historically you are careful with free shipping to ensure
| the loss is less than say a retail cut of the price.
|
| That is why minimum orders were so popular, if it cost say
| $8 to ship something and a retail margin is 15% I can do
| the math on a break even point where it is a wash or better
| for the vendor.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Yes
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product
| can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as
| WalMart gets specific SKUs
|
| Does the trick of creating different SKUs work for amazon
| though? If not, it seems like what they're doing might be
| worse. Since according to the article they're now enforcing the
| rule against having lower prices elsewhere through software,
| depending on how it's implemented it could end up having a much
| broader effect.
| dmix wrote:
| > The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product
| can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as
| WalMart gets specific SKUs.
|
| Are you sure this is done overtly by Walmart? As the article
| says Amazon had this policy but it was dropped because of EU
| and US gov pressure. I'd be surprised if Walmart got an
| exception.
|
| Unless there's some distinction for retail stores not just
| online.
| rybosworld wrote:
| One of the benefits of a tightening economy is that people pay a
| lot more attention to monopolies. The pain inflicted by a
| monopoly reaches a boiling over point when money is tight.
| jldugger wrote:
| I never understood why Walmart bought jet.com, but that was
| extremely good for Amazon. It's not really possible for the FTC
| to unwind that approval without suing amazon though, right?
| 3seashells wrote:
| They thought they escaped all state power via globalization and
| now it's back, lo and behold there is always a bigger fish in the
| water..
| slibhb wrote:
| Legality aside, I'm not sure that Amazon is winning in the long
| run with this strategy. I mostly buy products direct from the
| manufacturer these days and virtually all manufacturers have high
| quality websites with solid ordering experiences. As long as they
| have the name recognition, they can either sell for higher on
| Amazon and take the advertising hit or just ignore Amazon
| altogether.
|
| I continue to buy some stuff on Amazon. Mostly books (they're way
| cheaper than book stores) and gadgets (I bought a 12 volt car fan
| recently). The sort of stuff where I don't care who makes it.
| risho wrote:
| i would pay more money to not have to put my credit card into
| or attach my identity to 100 different random websites all of
| which almost certainly have worse security practices than
| amazon and many of which absolutely will have that data stolen
| at some point.
|
| even for people who don't think about stuff like that, it's way
| easier for the average person to buy everything from a single
| place than to go to a bunch of different random websites to buy
| things they want.
| taeric wrote:
| Isn't this basically what Shopify is, nowadays? Or "buy with
| Amazon" or a few other options that I can't remember the
| names of.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| It is. I've even found myself searching within the shop app
| to find products from smaller stores vs the larger stores.
| It's nice they have a shipment tracker built in and so far
| i've not had any issues. They're even running promotions /
| incentives with their Shop Cash, so they're trying for
| sure.
| takeda wrote:
| There was this feature provided by banks. I remember BofA was
| one. Unfortunately they removed it. You could create a
| temporary credit card number for specific vendor.
|
| It even had option to set one time limit or recurring limit.
|
| I don't understand why it was taken away, was it giving too
| much control to the customer?
| sizzle wrote:
| Capital one Eno browser extension for chrome generates a
| new CC number for any site. I love using it!
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Google offers virtual credit card numbers fyi. I don't
| think they are vendor locked, but offer a potential
| solution for you. Albeit one with additional drawbacks.
| kij wrote:
| I use Revolut alone for that reason. Single-use virtual
| cards they call it.
| 93po wrote:
| privacy dot com does this really well
| BLanen wrote:
| Many countries have solved this without needing
| monopolies/monopsonies by having sane payment methods.
| amoshi wrote:
| Many sites support Paypal which means your payment data is
| safe
| xur17 wrote:
| I really wish there was an open standard for something like
| this.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There is. https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/
|
| Supported everywhere except Firefox (where there's
| currently a flag to enable).
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...
| szatkus wrote:
| I coded a credit card payment a few times in my career and
| from what I saw it's always just a token. That token could be
| only used to make transactions from your account to the
| specific vendor's account. Of course there's always could be
| some incompetent developer who thought that saving credit
| card data into a database is a great idea, but overall it's
| not as risky as people think.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I would (and sometimes do) pay more money to not give money
| to Amazon. Also, I feel like the vast majority of sites
| support Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal and/or Venmo these days
| so I rarely find myself entering my credit card number.
| hroa wrote:
| I do the same. I try to buy on manufacture sites when I can.
| Mainly because of the 1 bin policy. Feels like some times I get
| products that a seller bought at a discount because of defects
| or package damage, and these are treated the same as new.
| endisneigh wrote:
| It seems the government's main issue is that they have problems
| with companies being large. If that's the issue they should lobby
| congress to simply enforce some maximum size/impact a company
| has.
|
| My opinion on this is that e-commerce is extremely competitive
| and consumers are already highly motivated to pay the least
| amount of money. If it were cheaper for consumers to go elsewhere
| they would, and sellers would follow.
| abirch wrote:
| I agree with you. I quit using Amazon late last year and it's
| pretty easy to change to different vendors. Hopefully more
| consumers do this so that vendors don't have to use the Amazon
| price everywhere else on the internet.
| proamdev123 wrote:
| Where do you shop online now for things that you used to buy
| on Amazon? Have you found any unexpected pros or cons from
| going to alternative online stores?
|
| I'm not planning to leave Amazon, but I'd love to find good
| alternatives.
| endisneigh wrote:
| eBay, Walmart, Wix, Shopify stores, etc. You can use Google
| Shopping to find even more places. Amazon rarely has the
| best price for all items these days.
| abirch wrote:
| For smaller things I use Target. I rely more on Costco as
| well (versus Amazon's subscribe and save)
|
| For more niche items I buy in bulk from different the
| manufacturer's site. To be honest it's a little more work
| but to help retailers it's worth it. Sometimes I have to
| pay for shipping but I do remember that I'm saving 130
| dollars a year by not being Prime.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| That's a very naive view of the free market. What has been
| happening is Amazon consolidated the market, creating
| artificial barriers to entry as they do so (e.g. any and all
| exclusivity deals). This was always their plan, and they
| operated in the red for a very long time to get there. Hardly
| fair competition.
| endisneigh wrote:
| What's the barrier to entry? It's hardly a requirement to
| sell on Amazon. It's extremely straightforward to sell stuff
| on the internet these days.
|
| Sellers are just complaining that they can't access Amazon's
| audience and do as they want. Luckily there's eBay, Shopify,
| Wix, etc. etc.
| alkonaut wrote:
| A free market is where everyone can sell their products in
| the town square. Amazon isn't a seller on the town square,
| they _are_ (a large part of) the town square. And that 's
| not in the best interest of consumers long term. There are
| other examples, such as Apple's app store that have this
| pattern too. It's true that there are other players, but
| when Amazon has the market share it has, it's often not
| feasible to ignore that customer group. And that means
| customers pay too much.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| I think you're right that the government does have 'limit the
| size of companies' as a motivation, but I don't think that's
| their main motivation.
|
| For one thing, how would you even right and enforce a law on
| maximum size/impact of a company? How would this even
| politically get through? There's already enough push-back
| against enforcing laws like "don't form cartels". The pushback
| on maximum size/impact of a company would be even more intense.
|
| In any case, as the article states, "Today, Amazon tells
| sellers that if it detects a lower price for their products on
| any other online store, they will be punished, which is to say,
| their ability to get their products onto a place on the Amazon
| website where customers click will go away.". In other words,
| e-commerce is not extremely competitive.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > In any case, as the article states, "Today, Amazon tells
| sellers that if it detects a lower price for their products
| on any other online store, they will be punished, which is to
| say, their ability to get their products onto a place on the
| Amazon website where customers click will go away.". In other
| words, e-commerce is not extremely competitive.
|
| This is a good thing, and those sellers can leave Amazon.
| [deleted]
| Semaphor wrote:
| Hm, is the forced price country dependent? Because I've actually
| bought or found several products via Amazon, that I later started
| buying for less on the seller's private store. Germany.
| hnbad wrote:
| I routinely see higher prices on German Amazon than on other
| stores to the point of seeing sellers for third-party products
| asking for almost twice of what an item would normally cost
| when bought directly from a seller who doesn't sell on Amazon.
| For example you can buy Starlink equipment on Amazon but it'll
| always cost a good 20% more (or more) than you'd pay when
| buying from Starlink directly.
|
| I'm not sure if the forced price exists in Germany for first-
| party sellers but it might explain why there seems to be a
| cottage industry of third-party sellers selling overpriced
| goods on Amazon. That is of course in addition to the universal
| problem of a dozen brands with names lifted from a word
| generator selling the same dropshipped white label product out
| of a factory in China at vastly different price points to
| create the illusion of choice.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| european countries usually have customer protections with teeth
| where as US seem to have corporate protection rather than
| consumer protections
| someonehere wrote:
| What does breaking up Amazon look like? I'm genuinely curious
| because half the comments I see in here are "break up Amazon!" or
| "break up FAANG!"
|
| What does that look like? What would Amazon look like if broken
| up?
|
| In the end we all know lobbyists from Amazon will somehow
| influence their outcome.
| thsksbd wrote:
| One option is to divide AMZ along business units. Thats the
| natural, easy way to do so. Itd cause least loss of value to
| the shareholders.
|
| I disagree. AMZ babies would still be essentially monopolistic
| in their markets. Nor do I think shareholder value, after being
| inflated through monopolistic abuse, is sacrisanct.
|
| Divide AMZ slicing through the business units. Make a half
| dozen vertically integrated baby AMZs. They all have access to
| AMZ IP, held by a separate company that can license it out to
| third parties (ie if they don't license their web tech to, say,
| Best Buy this AMZ baby has no revenue and goes to receivership
| since all other AMZ babies don't have to pay licensing fees).
|
| EDIT: I almost forgot liability. Transfer all current known and
| unknown AMZ liabilities, including fraud and sale of fake
| goods, to the baby AMZs.
| theptip wrote:
| I'm suspicious, I think most people underestimate how hard it
| would be to split companies.
|
| If you have everyone in the company go dig holes for 24
| months, the stock price would tank and much value would be
| destroyed.
|
| Likewise splitting is a massive effort that amounts to
| burning resources that wouldn't otherwise be spent.
|
| Now part of the point is to destroy the monopoly, which
| reduces company value too. This is a subtle point; we are
| probably ok with this because implicitly this is profit
| extracted as rent and which should really go to competitors.
| We'd probably say the value here is being redistributed.
|
| But the monopoly rent is different from the actual OpEx and
| CapEx required to restructure. I really want to see even a
| rough quantitative analysis here before making any
| commitments.
|
| The approach you put forth here seems maximally complex and
| inefficient as an end state, FWIW. Shared access is going to
| be a nightmare to operationalize. Much better to cut at
| existing business unit org boundaries.
| themagician wrote:
| Amazon Retail (Vendor Central), Amazon Marketplace (Seller
| Central), and Amazon Brands (Amazon Basics, Pinzon, etc.)
| probably need to be separate companies. You also have decide
| where Amazon Ads and Amazon Registry will live.
|
| Currently these four services all exist under the same roof and
| it gives Amazon basically unlimited power to unilaterally
| destroy entire companies or brands with zero consequences and
| no effort.
| ezfe wrote:
| Here are some possibilities (not claiming these are practical
| or a solution):
|
| The first is splitting Amazon-retail from their other products
| (Alexa, Ring, AWS, etc.)
|
| The second is splitting Amazon-logistics out. I'm not exactly
| sure how this would work, but it could be argued that Amazon
| logistics could operate standalone.
| timmaxw wrote:
| The latter seems plausible to me, but the former makes no
| sense. If the problem is that Amazon-retail has too much
| market power, how would splitting off AWS help with that
| problem? Amazon-retail would still have the same fraction of
| the retail market as before.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Exactly, people here who shout "break them up", don't put
| an ounce of thought into it.
| burkaman wrote:
| Splitting off AWS wouldn't be enough on its own, but I
| think the argument would be that Amazon makes a substantial
| amount of its operating income from AWS (70% in the latest
| quarter: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-
| release-details...), which allows it to fund anti-
| competitive marketplace practices like undercutting
| competitors at a loss to force them out of business. It
| would be more difficult to sustain such practices without
| AWS income.
| Cerium wrote:
| FBA as a separate business would be interesting for sure. It
| would separate out the value of Amazon marketplace from the
| value of outsourcing your order fulfillment logistics.
| joeframbach wrote:
| All I ever wanted was to be able to search "shipped and
| sold by Amazon" results only. If this is the heavy hammer
| needed to get to that end result, so be it.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The first one seems obtuse. If here were some 1960s-style
| comglomerate that sold shower curtains and offered
| professional bowling ball waxing, with a 95% monopoly in
| both...
|
| Why would splitting it out into two monopolies improve
| anything? Even if there are some unknown, misunderstood
| synergies between the two businesses, will they not just
| collude in that way that bridge players do, without any overt
| actions that could be punished?
| thfuran wrote:
| >will they not just collude in that way that bridge players
| do, without any overt actions that could be punished?
|
| Currently, they get that for free by virtue of being the
| same company. If they were separate companies, it would
| require actual collusion and may, depending on the
| specifics, be illegal. It's also be less likely to occur
| since they'd need some motivation to do so. Why would the
| shower curtain company even attempt to collude with the
| bowling ball waxing business?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > If they were separate companies, it would require
| actual collusion a
|
| I don't play bridge, never learned. A game consists of
| two teams of two players each. My vague understanding is
| that you might win if a partner gets ahold of a card that
| you discard, but that you can't know what card that is
| without saying so (cheating).
|
| Good players can tell what cards their partners might
| need, and discard anyway. This isn't cheating, it's just
| good play.
|
| In a court of law, the former is definitely some
| violation of antitrust law. But the latter is just good
| business. And even if it weren't, no overt acts have been
| committed that could lead to successful prosecutorial
| outcomes.
|
| Philosophically, it may still be collusion. Good luck
| doing anything about it.
|
| > It's also be less likely to occur since they'd need
| some motivation to do so.
|
| Game theory supplies that just fine. If I have a monopoly
| in A, and you a monopoly in B, then I might just protect
| your monopoly in B without you requesting that, without
| you giving me instructions.
|
| And from that point on, if you see a place where you can
| hurt or help me, you might choose to help without me
| requesting it or asking. Because if my monopoly on A is
| hurt... I can no longer afford to help you without you
| asking. Supporting me is a no-brainer. At least if the
| other party isn't a complete imbecile, they can see it.
| While there's no accounting for stupidity (second most
| powerful force after compound interest), we can already
| assume that the leadership of these companies is non-
| stupid just because of the success they've already
| achieved.
|
| > Why would the shower curtain company even attempt to
| collude with the bowling ball waxing business?
|
| When they break these companies up, they don't fire 100%
| of management and rehire. Most of them know each other.
| Most are friendly with each other, if not friends. Sure,
| employee attrition will eventually break those bonds ten
| years down the road. But they already know how each other
| thinks.
|
| Silent collusion, without so much as a wink or a nod, is
| definitely within the realm of possibility. The
| previously existing social connections are present. Their
| goals were largely aligned before, and nothing has
| occurred to de-align them. Mutual success may be easier
| than individual success. A sort of "corporate altruism"
| can emerge.
|
| Evolution does this shit all the time with symbiotes.
| It's not like their colluding to co-evolve with each
| other. You won't find conspiracy evidence in the fossil
| record that they just started helping each other, it only
| proved to be a better strategy than individuality, and so
| they went with it.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Game theory supplies that just fine
|
| To a vastly lesser extent than when it's one company with
| one board and one CEO in charge of multiple business
| units that would be unrelated after the breakup. If you
| break off Costco's chicken selling business from the rest
| of the store, the chicken business isn't going to keep
| their prices so low to boost the other company's sales
| because it costs them too much money to do so and they
| get far less benefit from boosting the other company's
| sales than when they were the same company.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > If you break off Costco's chicken selling business from
| the rest of the store,
|
| It sure seems like that, but in the real world we do have
| many counter-examples where a singular company does do
| the loss leader thing for a long while, going into the
| red year after year. Often, it's never clear why or how
| they could think this was a winning business model.
|
| The chicken-selling business might do the same, and their
| justifications for doing that might never be sound, they
| might not even be the reasons why they're doing it, but
| just some post hoc rationalization to themselves and the
| real reason is poorly understood by all involved.
|
| If the rest of Costco sees this happening, are they going
| to step in and sabotage the chicken-sellers? Lord knows
| it drives some traffic to their stores (they might be
| unwilling to study that and write reports, as it could
| then be used against them if the FTC comes after them
| again, but they'd still notice). If they can subtly act
| to somehow ease the pressure, or make that worthwhile to
| the chicken-sellers without leaving a paper trail, they'd
| be fools not to do it right?
|
| Of course, without exotic economic principles, that can't
| last forever. But unless you're claiming that there are
| business units for AWS are deep into loss-leading, your
| analogy only applies very generally and it's difficult to
| see how they could fall into similar snags.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It would stop cross subsidy. I'm sure I read that the
| distribution side of the business gets AWS services at
| cost.
| burkaman wrote:
| Amazon marketplace, AWS, Whole Foods, Twitch, Fulfillment by
| Amazon, and maybe Amazon Studios could all be separate
| companies. I think Amazon marketplace would also be forced to
| end some practices like not allowing sellers to have lower
| prices elsewhere.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes, because Amazon owning _Whole Foods_ is keeping other
| grocery stores from competing and offering a lower price?
|
| And Amazon Studios is do successful it must be broken up.
|
| Not to mention if AWS was broken up from Amazon smaller
| competitors could come in an offer cloud services distributed
| world wide at scale.
|
| Have you really thought about how useless these suggestions
| are?
| fallat wrote:
| Thanks for saying this, I'd love to see people talking about
| this over everything else.
|
| Maybe it looks like multiple companies, i.e. AWS becomes
| separated with its own CEO, etc.
| endisneigh wrote:
| It doesn't really matter because Amazon isn't going to be
| broken up to begin with.
| distances wrote:
| I think you made your position clear enough already in the
| other threads.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Oooh, what did they say?
| Qwertious wrote:
| He thinks Amazon is acting in good faith, and he's also
| an ideologue who doesn't see anything wrong with Amazon
| deplatforming anyone who passes along lower costs on
| other platforms.
| henry2023 wrote:
| People said the same about Bell.
| billjings wrote:
| An obvious choice would be AWS. AWS operates fairly
| independently of the rest of the company, and its huge profits
| subsidize the retail wing.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| If you imagine the situation in reverse, where they were two
| independent companies it would make very little sense to
| merge them. One is a high margin technology business and the
| other a low margin distribution company. There would be very
| little synergy.
| badrabbit wrote:
| What does this mean realistically? If I were Bezos, would I just
| have more companies on paper? Maybe more manangement and
| different companies doing business with each other but they all
| have the same owners?
| flareback wrote:
| Can we sue the Federal Reserve for it's "Hidden Tax" of
| inflation?
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| What magic does apple work behind the scenes to avoid scrutiny?
| If we're talking about hidden taxes, surely the only app store
| allowed on 50% of smart phones taking 30% is a hidden tax?
|
| And if not that, surely visa/mastercard's fee is it's own hidden
| tax?
| betenoire wrote:
| What's the android version of Amazon, again?
|
| These are clearly different scales of manipulation. On one
| hand, you have a brand controlling their own luxury devices,
| and on the other, you have a brand controlling literally
| everything else.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Walmart? Every grocery store? Its hardly required to shop at
| Amazon if your point is it's a true monopoly, I'm not sure
| what domain you're trying to say they're the only competitor
| in.
|
| Prioritizing your own brand has been the norm at every
| grocery store I've ever been to.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Yes, the FTC should look at Apple.
|
| But Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook would all be higher on
| my "FTC TECH TODO" list than Apple so I'm not sure why you
| focused on Apple in this "whatabout"?
| Twisell wrote:
| Beside DOJ did pretty harshly condemned Apple for the MFN
| they implemented for eBooks in 2013.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.
|
| Interestingly one of the possible starting point for this
| investigation was a complain from Amazon to the FTC.
|
| I am eagerly awaiting the acrobatic justifications Amazon
| lawyers will have to find out to justify that their MFN
| clause is perfectly legal without contradicting their own
| claims of the 2013 case...
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Well Google, Amazon, and Facebook simply don't have
| monopolies, though if you define the market as iPhone app,
| then Apple does, no argument. And the harm to consumer is
| incredibly easy to spot, a 30% tax on any app purchase or in
| app purchase.
|
| Each of the web companies also have one of the most comically
| low barriers to change of any 'monopoly'. When att was broken
| up it was truly the only phone carrier for much of the US,
| switching was borderline impossible. You could replace Google
| search in the next 30 seconds.
| chrischen wrote:
| What about the google tax?
| thelastgallon wrote:
| An excerpt from: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/
|
| Amazon binds its sellers over to something called Most Favored
| Nation status. That means that sellers can't offer their goods
| more cheaply than they do on Amazon - even if it costs them
| (lots) less to sell in Target or direct from their websites. This
| means that every time a seller adds a dollar to their Amazon sale
| price, they have to add a dollar to the price of their goods
| everywhere else, too.
|
| After a bunch of state AGs filed lawsuits against Amazon over
| this, the company promised to cut it out.
|
| They lied.
|
| A new filing in California's suit against Amazon reveals that
| sellers live "in constant fear" of retaliation from Amazon if
| they allow their goods to be sold more cheaply elsewhere.
| traviswingo wrote:
| I feel like I've purchased direct from business at much cheaper
| rates than what were listed on Amazon.
|
| Is it possible the loophole here is to provide discount codes
| at checkout for "20% off" on website only, and now magically
| it's cheaper than Amazon?
| jrockway wrote:
| I suppose if ABC LLC makes the devices, and someone sets up
| ABD LLC to sell them on Amazon and ABE LLC to sell them on
| Target.com, ABE LLC and ABC LLC aren't bound to ABD LLC's
| "most favored nation" agreement.
|
| Shell companies are for more than just tax evasion!
| nemo44x wrote:
| Isn't this very common among all resellers? For example if you
| own a hotel and want other websites to sell your availability
| they will only list you if you don't list the same availability
| for less money. They do this in part because people use the
| service to search for hotels and even they find one they want
| they go to other places to see if it's cheaper.
| notatoad wrote:
| This is an antitrust lawsuit filed by the FTC, not an
| accusation of specifically illegal conduct.
|
| They're not saying amazon committed a crime by doing this,
| they're saying that it's evidence of amazon abusing their
| market position to create a monopoly. "most favoured nation"
| status is legal, creating a monopoly isn't.
| jjk166 wrote:
| You have that backwards. Monopolies are perfectly legal, it
| is only establishing and maintaining monopolies by improper
| conduct (ie specific anti-competitive practices) that is
| illegal. MFNs are not per se anticompetitive, but by the
| rule of reason they might be under certain circumstances.
| The FTC would have to prove that this is one such instance
| where MFNs are illegal conduct.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I don't see the problem with this. They don't have to sell on
| Amazon to begin with. Amazon obviously wants their customers to
| have the best price available. Sellers can just go off Amazon
| if they don't like it. If sellers end up raising the price on
| other platforms as a result of this rule, then that says more
| about them than Amazon.
|
| Demanding the lowest price does not harm consumers. Overstock,
| Wayfair, Walmart and others do the same thing. The result is
| the lowest price for a given product on _all_ sites. This is
| unquestionably good for consumers.
|
| If the price is higher then the fault is simply that of the
| seller for raising it. All e-commerce sites want the lowest
| price for their customers. Of course, people don't see nuance
| and just see BigCompany bad.
| brookst wrote:
| I'll take the charitable interpretation and assume you just
| don't understand the mechanics of the policy.
|
| Amazon is saying that sellers _cannot_ offer a fair low price
| to customers on other platforms if the seller can 't also
| offer it on Amazon. This is 1) anticompetitive, 2)
| anticonsumer, and 3) insane.
|
| Consider this test:
|
| - Seller buys a crappy LED bulb from China for $0.80
|
| - Seller is happy to list the bulb on Walmart, Target, etc,
| for $2.00. Net of fees and shipping and stuff they make
| enough money
|
| - Amazon charges $3 in fees. Obviously the seller can't
| afford to sell for $2 on Amazon. They sell for $5 instead.
|
| - However, now the seller _also_ can 't sell for $2 on
| competing sites. Amazon, leveraging its market share, has
| dictated that the seller must price _Amazon 's_ fees into
| pricing on non-Amazon sites, so consumers pay $5 to Target
| for something the seller would have been happy getting $2
| for.
|
| This is insane.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Let's use your example. The sellers should stop selling
| that item on Amazon, and sell their light bulb on Walmart,
| or where-ever. Customers who really need that will go find
| it at Walmart, or where-ever. This strengthens the
| competitors to Amazon, which is bad for Amazon and good for
| the consumer. The consumer also find the lower price that
| they wanted. Alternatively, they buy the alternate product
| on Amazon which would be cheaper than the inflated price
| (per your example). Again, good for the customer. Everyone
| wins in every scenario except for the seller, which is how
| Amazon and every wholesaler operates.
|
| Suppose the FTC wins this case and sellers can put whatever
| price on whatever site. Amazon, like any store wants the
| lowest price. Not to mention there are only some many items
| you can show on the first page of results. They will find
| some other reason to remove these sellers and/or their
| items.
|
| Now maybe there's another case to stop that behavior too.
| The result is that companies are not obligated to let
| sellers on their site. _That_ is insane.
|
| In summary, there will never be a scenario where Amazon
| allows sellers to sell the exact same item for more than
| Amazon's competitors, unless the government forces Amazon
| to let sellers sell whatever on their site.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| You're just wrong, Amazon controls around 35% of all US
| e-commerce. Not being able to sell on Amazon instantly
| removes most of your available customers. The second
| largest is Walmart and it's closer to 7%. Walmart,
| target, whatever, don't add up to Amazons market.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And how much of the stuff that these sellers are just
| cheap Chinese crap that they wouldn't be able to sell at
| all if Amazon didn't exist?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are companies that do not sell on Amazon. I seek
| them out. They will tell you that if their product
| appears on Amazon, it's counterfeit.
|
| It's probably an impossiblity if your business model is
| selling cheap imported Chinese garbage at a profit, but
| that's the businesess you chose. Others have chosen to
| sell quality items on their own terms. Those are the
| businesses I want to reward.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > Amazon controls around 35% of all US e-commerce. Not
| being able to sell on Amazon instantly removes most of
| your available customers
|
| Math doesn't check out. Not to mention that if sellers
| stopped selling on Amazon they wouldn't control so much.
| How exactly is making everyone sell on Amazon going to
| solve anythin?
|
| Sellers should stop using Amazon if they don't like their
| policies, and the issues will correct themselves.
| mecha_ghidorah wrote:
| > Not to mention that if sellers stopped selling on
| Amazon they wouldn't control so much.
|
| This is a problem in terms of organisation. If lots of
| people stop selling on Amazon this would be true. The
| problem is individually each seller is motivated to deal
| with Amazon so long as lots of other sellers are. A mass
| exodus from Amazon would in short order make the Amazon
| store far less relevant, but nobody wants to leave before
| everyone else is doing it because until then it costs
| them
| kube-system wrote:
| The math absolutely does check out, lets say, for an
| addressable market of 100k purchasers:
|
| (and I'll be generous and I'll pretend Walmart has zero
| fees)
|
| Amazon: ($5 selling price - $3 fees - 0.80 COGS) * (100k
| * 35%) = $42,000
|
| Walmart: ($2 selling price - $0 fees - 0.80 COGS) * (100k
| * 7%) = $8,400
|
| And even if they price the same on Walmart as they would
| on Amazon: ($5 selling price - $0 fees - 0.80 COGS) *
| (100k * 7%) = $29,400
|
| See the issue? The problem is that one seller on Amazon
| moving to another platform won't change the fact that
| Amazon has the majority market share. That's how market
| momentum works and it's why we have antitrust laws.
|
| Even with exorbitant fees, they are still where sellers
| _need_ to be. And they are using this market share to
| force sellers into overpricing on other platforms so that
| they maintain this unfair position.
| imchillyb wrote:
| Or, hear me out here, The Federal Trade Commission orders
| a study done and the study corroborates the general
| sentiment here that Amazon is abusing their power in the
| marketplace. So, the FTC then sues Amazon.
|
| Your 'feelings' about how this works only matters to you.
| The US branch of oversight for trade has declared (with a
| lawsuit) that this behavior is unconscionable and either
| is or will be illegal by the time this suit is finished.
|
| You're welcome to dispute the FTC and the crowd here on
| HN, but you need to provide some sort of data to back up
| your claim of: Sellers should just stop using
| Amazon...the issues will correct themselves.
|
| The FTC's suit alleges the exact opposite of what you
| allege. The FTC states that there is harm to the entire
| economy if Amazon is allowed to continue this practice.
|
| Please cite the studies, data, or metrics you used to
| claim '...will correct themselves."
|
| Thanks @endisneigh.
| bryan_w wrote:
| > The Federal Trade Commission orders a study done
|
| > the study corroborates the general sentiment
|
| Seems fishy ... Good thing that even corporations like
| Amazon get a day in court.
| sib wrote:
| And if lots of items became available on other sites, but
| not Amazon (as per the theory being propounded), then
| Amazon would no longer control 35% of all US e-commerce.
| neilparikh wrote:
| This is a classic coordination problem: you need all the
| sellers to leave together so that individual merchants
| don't take a loss. And coordination problems like this
| are one of the main areas government action can help!
| AlanYx wrote:
| Also, I'd imagine that coordination would probably leave
| them vulnerable to their own set of anticompetitive
| allegations (i.e., some variant of cartel behavior/price-
| fixing). To the extent anyone acts, it would probably
| have to be government.
| adolph wrote:
| > They will find some other reason to remove these
| sellers.
|
| I think this speaks to the nut of the problem. Unless
| there is an incentive upstream of the misalignment of
| parties, then any number of lawsuits after the fact will
| have a "war on drugs" level of futility.
|
| What to do then? In an alternative universe perhaps the
| FTC was implemented to improve trade by promoting
| standards, ontologies and authenticity verification that
| lead to greater freedom of trade and less gatekeeping.
| Qwertious wrote:
| If a monopoly can't help but follow its incentives to
| abuse its market power, then you break up the monopoly.
| rlpb wrote:
| > They will find some other reason to remove these
| sellers.
|
| That's be much harder work, though, so regulation might
| well still have the intended effect.
|
| Either their reason will need to be through their seller
| terms and conditions, or it'll have to be done on an
| individual seller basis.
|
| Amazon relies on scale, and therefore standard terms and
| conditions for all sellers that can be scrutinized by
| regulators.
|
| If it's done on an individual seller basis, I don't think
| they'll be able to do it while having the same effect in
| practice.
| kaibee wrote:
| > Customers who really need that will go find it at
| Walmart, or where-ever.
|
| So here's a weird externality. As a decently well off
| tech-worker, I don't care if I'm paying 5$ or 2$ for
| lightbulbs, even if I'm re-lighting my whole house. The
| seller will sell on Amazon, because it is the largest
| market and will set their prices on other markets to
| match Amazon. I'll buy on Amazon, because it isn't worth
| my time to check multiple websites to get the best price
| (especially when SKUs differ and I have multiple other
| items I'm buying, etc). And now people who do need to
| save money, can't also find this lightbulb at a cheaper
| price on competing marketplaces, even if this lightbulb
| is actually the best quality.
| uoaei wrote:
| So you understand your effect in participating in this
| system, but life's too good for you to do anything
| differently. Nice.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > And now people who do need to save money, can't also
| find this lightbulb at a cheaper price on competing
| marketplaces, even if this lightbulb is actually the best
| quality
|
| It's the opposite of what you're saying. Sellers not
| selling particular items on Amazon is good for consumers
| who are price conscious, because if they need that
| particular item they will search for it and find it
| cheaper on another store, strengthening that one and
| hurting Amazon.
|
| And if they don't care they will find cheaper items on
| Amazon. Everyone wins except for the seller, which is
| Amazon's MO.
| kaibee wrote:
| > It's the opposite of what you're saying. Sellers not
| selling particular items on Amazon is good for consumers
| who are price conscious,
|
| Sellers don't just 'not sell this item on Amazon',
| because it is the largest single market. This is like,
| the whole issue in question.
|
| > because if they need that particular item they will
| search for it and find it cheaper on another store,
| strengthening that one and hurting Amazon.
|
| This is the exact thing that isn't happening, because
| Amazon is abusing its market position.
|
| But, even if this was the case and the seller chose to
| sell on a different marketplace and take the Amazon ban,
| then it still wouldn't be as good as having just having
| the item listed on both marketplaces at two different
| prices. Because then I wouldn't be able to buy the best
| lightbulbs in one convenient location.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| A company makes a product - it costs $10 per unit to
| make. To list and sell with Amazon, they are charged $12
| per unit. To make a profit the company adds and
| additional $1 per unit. They sell the product on Amazon
| for $23 per unit.
|
| Online retailer Foo also has a store, and provide the
| same services that Amazon for their online shop at $5 per
| unit. The online retailer adds a profit of $2 per unit.
| Total price $17 per unit. Retailer Foo is more $
| efficient for those services as a result customers price
| compare. Foo is rewarded for their effi with higher
| volume, manufacturer is rewarded with higher profit and
| consumer is rewarded with lower prices. Enforcing market
| competition led to all 3 parties involved being rewarded.
| Retailer Foo over time grows a larger customer base as
| people learn to price compare with them and forces Amazon
| to stop rent seeking.
|
| But the above doesn't happen in the real world. Amazon
| enforces that the retailer lower their price on Amazon to
| $17, while still collecting $12 per unit. The company now
| can sell on foo, but only by selling on Amazon at a loss.
| They can't afford that amount of loss from Amazon and
| stay in business. So Amazon avoids competition. They
| can't pull their product from Amazon because not enough
| customers vist Foo retailer yet to make up the volume.
|
| So in the end Foo retailer is more dollar efficient, but
| is prevented from growing and benefiting the marketplace.
| Amazon leverages its outside market size to avoid
| competition. Market participants preventing competition
| is against the benefits of capitalism and harms the
| consumer. So, it benefits the consumer to ensure Amazon
| has to actually compete with the more efficient
| competitor and stop rent selling behavior.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| > Demanding the lowest price does not harm consumers.
|
| Amazon demands that sellers _increase_ their prices on
| selling platforms with lower overhead. A demand to _increase
| prices_ does harm consumers.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| it is about the desire to control things that are non of your
| business.
| mjsweet wrote:
| From what I understand, it's not that simple. Sellers need
| the sheer volume of Amazon to compete. There is also the risk
| of Amazon duplicating their product and continuing to sell it
| on their platform... or their competitors filling the void.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If your product doesn't have any value that can be
| protected by copyright, patent and you haven't built any
| type of affinity with customers, isn't it by definition
| just another commoditized product?
| jhbadger wrote:
| Well, here's a real example. About a decade ago there was
| a simple video conferencing system called Nautilus. A
| simple LCD screen that let you call other people with the
| device and talk to them, not having to bother with
| computers or smartphones. The sort of thing that is good
| for talking with elderly relatives who may not be very
| computer or phone savvy. I bought one (from Amazon) for
| myself and my elderly parents. It worked well, but a few
| years later Amazon came out with their Echo Show products
| which are basically the same thing, which killed the
| Nautilus. I'm sure it was covered by patents and what
| not, but you can't protect the idea. Amazon obviously saw
| that it sold reasonably well and used its power as both a
| marketplace and a technology company to undercut their
| own seller.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Really? That's your example? Everyone and their mother
| has a video conferencing solution and the idea has been
| around as something to aspire to since the 60s with the
| Jetsons .
|
| Do you agree with the look and feel lawsuit that Apple
| had against MS? Or think that Roku, Amazon, Google , etc
| did something untoward because they came after Apple with
| set top boxes?
| Prickle wrote:
| Fortunately or unfortunately, that is something that is
| easy to research. ie: Amazon Basics
|
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-
| produ...
|
| > thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents
| examined by Reuters - including emails, strategy papers
| and business plans - show the company ran a systematic
| campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search
| results to boost its own product lines in India, one of
| the company's largest growth markets.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Again have you heard of the Kirkland's brand? Have you
| been to a CVS and seen the knockoffs? Literally every
| single major retailer has house brands that compete with
| third parties.
| Prickle wrote:
| Your "What about Kirkland" -ism is irrelevant.
|
| A big company can stall a copyright lawsuit for as long
| as it wants. Small companies cannot win against a large
| compamy like Amazon in court.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-1986-07-14-fi-19337-...
|
| Especially when they can just twist the court system
| however they wish.
|
| Small victories like the chain wrench lawsuit against
| Sears happen. But they are rare.
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-bionic-wrench-
| sea...
|
| Your response shows that you did no read the article.
| They specifically show cases where Amazon copied sizes:
|
| > Among the victims of the strategy: a popular shirt
| brand in India, John Miller, which is owned by a company
| whose chief executive is Kishore Biyani, known as the
| country's "retail king." Amazon decided to "follow the
| measurements of" John Miller shirts down to the neck
| circumference and sleeve length, the document states.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Well, for historical accuracy, Roku was first in regard
| to streaming devices you hooked up to your TV. Apple and
| the rest copied _them_. And it is pretty much obvious
| that Microsoft copied Apple (and yes, you can argue that
| Apple in turn copied PARC). But what makes Amazon copying
| things different is that they are a marketplace for other
| people 's products and a maker of products themselves.
| That has an intrinsic conflict of interest.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The first AppleTV was released in 2007. The first Roku in
| 2008.
|
| As far as Amazon copying others as a marketplace owner,
| ever heard of the Kirkland's brand? Store brands have
| been around forever.
| freetime2 wrote:
| "A simple LCD screen that let you call other people with
| the device and talk to them" sounds like a commoditized
| product to me.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes, anyone here can go out and find an ODM from China to
| anufacturer them, send a custom version of AOSP to the
| ODM, slap their brand on it and sell it on Amazon.
| endisneigh wrote:
| So what? That's how e-commerce works. Why should Amazon be
| obligated to fill their store with higher priced items
| compared to their competitors? No one is going to visit a
| store where every item could be purchased cheaper somewhere
| else. This is exactly why price match is a thing, because
| they don't want their costumers soliciting different stores
| to begin with.
|
| The move that Amazon's price be no higher than offered
| elsewhere is the most pro-consumer move possible. Hilarious
| people are complaining about it. Any second-order effects
| of this are on the actual seller, not Amazon.
| EliRivers wrote:
| _The move that Amazon 's price be no higher than offered
| elsewhere is the most pro-consumer move possible._
|
| Yet here we are with sellers WANTING to sell their items
| at a lower price on places other than Amazon, but if they
| do, they'll go out of business. That doesn't sound pro-
| consumer.
|
| I'm a consumer. I'd like to be able to buy items for the
| lowest price the seller wants to offer me. That's not
| happening in some cases because if they do, Amazon will
| exclude them and they'll go out of business. Yeah,
| definitely not pro-consumer. Pro-amazon, sure.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Would Amazon be obligated to list the items regardless?
| Otherwise just dropping pricing conditions would only
| help those sellers that Amazon has enough interest to
| list regardless - for some products the "equilibrium"
| might not be great.
| mjsweet wrote:
| The market should decide. That's commerce.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Yes, exactly. These sellers should and can just leave
| Amazon if they have a problem with it.
| mjsweet wrote:
| No, they should be able to set their own pricing as they
| see fit.
| endisneigh wrote:
| They are able to do so, but Amazon is not obligated to
| have them on their platform if they aren't providing the
| best price to their customers.
| mjsweet wrote:
| Amazon is a product search engine and should be treated
| as such. Vendors must have the freedom to set pricing on
| any platform as they see fit. If all product search
| engines and ecommerce platforms behaved in this
| anticompetitive behaviour then what would we have? A
| weird commercial landscape that lacks flexibility... in
| the end the consumer looses because free market forces
| are not in play.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Amazon is not a product search engine, so the rest of
| your post is irrelevant. They are a store and describe
| themselves as such. You cannot find products on Amazon
| that are not for sale by them or sellers who agree to
| their rules, an actual product search engine would allow
| this.
| mjsweet wrote:
| Good luck with that! Amazon is the most powerful product
| search engine available. I love it and use it almost
| every day. Amazon will spend a lot of money trying to
| convince the feds they are otherwise... no amount of
| lobbying, PR pieces, paid ops and persistent commenting
| on boards like this one will stop valid questions being
| asked in hearings. It's only a matter of time sorry.
| kibwen wrote:
| I don't even know where to begin with this comment. Do
| you know what anticompetitive behavior is? Do you know
| how markets are supposed to work? Amazon is leveraging
| their position in the market to unfairly disadvantage
| their competitors, thereby distorting the market,
| decreasing its efficiency, and increasing end prices for
| consumers everywhere. Market-distorting behavior like
| this is why antitrust regulation is necessary to keep
| markets functioning efficiently.
| passwordoops wrote:
| [flagged]
| endisneigh wrote:
| Yes, anyone who disagrees with you is a shill, lol.
| ziml77 wrote:
| [flagged]
| endisneigh wrote:
| Yes, anyone who posts a lot must be getting paid for
| them.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Everything you're stating is false. Amazon is trying to
| do right by its customers, and they are not obligated to
| let sellers not give their customers the best price
| available. Sellers are not obligated to sell on Amazon.
|
| Your conclusion that this increases end pries for
| consumers has nothing to do with Amazon, but the sellers
| themselves.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| Amazon was already told not to do this for anti-trust
| reasons, and they promised to oblige. Unless the
| government, Amazon, and the general public are all
| incorrect about what constitutes monopolistic behavior,
| you are. The idea that Amazon is openly defying pro-
| consumer laws to do right by its customers is absurd.
| woooooo wrote:
| Some would say that the way commerce works is sellers can
| sell anywhere at any price that a buyer wants to pay.
| endisneigh wrote:
| That's not how commerce works. Commerce works by
| following the rules of places that you are trying to sell
| at. You can't sell anything anywhere.
| ARussell wrote:
| And Amazon needs to follow the rules and laws of the
| place that IT'S trying to sell at.
| endisneigh wrote:
| And which law dictates a company must allow people or
| sellers on its platform?
| ARussell wrote:
| I'm not GP. I didn't make that argument. I agree that
| Amazon is not obliged to allow just anyone on their
| platform. Sellers must abide by the rules that Amazon
| sets in place. At the same time, Amazon must abide by the
| laws of the locations at which it wants to sell. So if a
| state says that they cannot force a seller to keep their
| lowest price on Amazon, then that's the way it is.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > So if a state says that they cannot force a seller to
| keep their lowest price on Amazon, then that's the way it
| is.
|
| Yes, but at the end of the day Amazon to remove the
| seller for any reason, so even if the FTC succeeds here,
| Amazon will simply purge those sellers who are not
| offering the best price, even if not explicitly stated.
|
| There is no reality where Amazon allows their site to be
| inundated with higher priced goods compared to
| competitors.
| brewdad wrote:
| Why not? If I'm willing to pay Amazon $6 for an item I
| could get for $5 at Walmart, why wouldn't Amazon want to
| make that sale?
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| it would be sensible to require a reason for refusing to
| do business with someone. Normally it wouldn't be but if
| you are a repeat offender it seems a sensible requirement
| endisneigh wrote:
| Unless it's a protected class you can refuse to do
| business with anyone for any reason. Plenty of supreme
| court cases on this.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| certainly, you can write anything on the form. Any reason
| is not without? I do doubt you can refuse one foo for
| being fooish but not the other. Now multiply by 10 000
| and pretend you are explaining it to the judge in a
| context where you've been convicted multiple times.
| ARussell wrote:
| Perhaps you are right, and also then again perhaps those
| companies find that they have cause to file a lawsuit.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| There has been a a standard of "no duty to deal" forever.
| No company is forced to do business with anyone.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| with astronomic fines (for the customers to pay)
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| this might come if the shop is large enough
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| rules partially set by government
| woooooo wrote:
| Sure. The rules at the place you're trying to sell.
|
| Dictating how you sell elsewhere is a clear step beyond
| that.
| endisneigh wrote:
| They are not dictating how they sell elsewhere. They are
| saying they need to offer the best price on _their_ site.
| It is easy to detect whether or not they actually are,
| and sellers are simply being called out.
|
| There is no obligation to sell on Amazon, nor a
| requirement for them to raise prices on other platforms.
| They could simply offer the lowest price everywhere. The
| result? Lower prices for Amazon customers. If they raise
| the price, then that's the seller's fault, not Amazon.
| sb8244 wrote:
| You...understand how you can't have one without the
| other, right?
| OGWhales wrote:
| > There is no obligation to sell on Amazon
|
| While true, this ignores the important point that Amazon
| is only able to do this anti-competitive practice due to
| their market dominance that effectively forces many
| sellers to sell on Amazon.
|
| > nor a requirement for them to raise prices on other
| platforms.
|
| That is what this whole thing is about. Sellers that sell
| on Amazon aren't allowed to sell for lower prices on
| other platforms that are cheaper to sell on.
|
| If Amazon was able to offer lower prices for its
| customers by offering sellers a marketplace with lower
| costs compared to competitors that would be great.
| Instead, they abuse their market dominance to prevent any
| competitors from offering lower prices by being more cost
| efficient for sellers. This is extremely nasty as it
| effectively prevents any competitors to Amazon from
| building a market share since consumers will have no
| price incentive to switch and sellers will not want to
| switch due to the smaller market share on those
| competitors' platforms.
|
| It could not be more clear that this is anti-competitive
| behavior achieved through abuse of a dominate market
| position.
| [deleted]
| r053bud wrote:
| [flagged]
| Jensson wrote:
| It is none of Amazons business what prices they put when they
| list their wares on other services, the only reason they care
| is that they want to crush the competition.
|
| Dictating how retailers can interact with your competitors is
| anti-competitive. Dictating what prices they can offer when
| they put up listings is a part of that, it is anti-
| competitive.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Overstock & Wayfair scan + compare identical & similar
| listings at Amazon and other sites, and will message
| sellers if their price is not the better price.
|
| It's annoyingly a pretty standard practice. And they will
| see through the "different SKU" trick simply by comparing
| the product images.
| gbear605 wrote:
| Isn't the solution to just ban all of the companies from
| doing it? More companies than just Amazon can be anti-
| competitive.
| gorbypark wrote:
| I think that's a good solution in this case (ban it for
| everyone), but remember that there are different rules
| for companies who are found to have monopolies in a
| specific market. Something a monopolist does could be
| illegal while being completely legal for their
| competitors (who don't have a monopoly).
| proamdev123 wrote:
| > It is none of Amazons business what prices they put when
| they list their wares on other services...
|
| It is _literally_ Amazon's business to offer pricing at
| equal to or better than their competitors.
|
| > ...the only reason they care is that they want to crush
| the competition.
|
| Every company wants to beat their competition, and many
| (most?) want to "crush" their competition. Don't you think
| Target wants to crush Amazon? Don't you think Google wants
| to crush Apple in smartphone sales? Don't you think a local
| retailer would love to crush Amazon for products in their
| niche?
|
| The only question here is whether Amazon is doing this in
| an abusive way and/or a way that negatively impacts
| consumers.
|
| We'll find out in the trial...
| LunaSea wrote:
| > It is literally Amazon's business to offer pricing at
| equal to or better than their competitors.
|
| For their own products they can.
|
| For third-party items, Amazon is free to lower their
| margin.
| endisneigh wrote:
| [flagged]
| dwallin wrote:
| It's not pro-consumer in any way. If the seller can
| profitably list it for a given price on a given platform,
| competition will almost certainly drive their price down
| to that level. The only time a policy like this becomes
| significant is if another platform, or the sellers own
| platform, can offer the product for _cheaper_ than Amazon
| (eg. maybe they can ship straight from the factory), in
| which case this policy would force them to _raise_ their
| prices, while simultaneously removing potential
| competitive pressure on Amazon.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Your assumption here is that they have to sell on Amazon
| to begin with, which they do not. There are plenty of
| products that you cannot buy on Amazon, so your entire
| post is ridiculous as it shows again, you don't need
| Amazon to succeed to begin with.
| dwallin wrote:
| You are a seller. Amazon makes up 40% of your sales. You
| have your own first party website where you can
| profitably offer your product for 5% less and still make
| an additional 10% profit but it only makes up 5% of your
| sales currently.
|
| What's your move in this position?
|
| You can't just imagine all companies as perfect
| frictionless spherical interchangeable cows. In reality
| companies as large as Amazon can have significant market
| distorting effect, while much smaller companies might
| have to choose between their principles and going out of
| business.
| endisneigh wrote:
| You can lower the product for 5% on both your site and on
| Amazon. Since Amazon makes up the plurality of your sales
| you gain more sales both there and on your site. Everyone
| wins except for you, and such is the life of race-to-the-
| bottom e-commerce sales.
|
| What I'm describing is already what happens, by the way.
| Look at Anker for an example.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Everyone wins except for you
|
| Which is why your scenario here wont happen. Thanks for
| clarifying so well why your argument "there is no
| consumer harm" is bullshit, what you said here means you
| know that what Amazon does here increases prices.
| endisneigh wrote:
| The consumer is Amazon's end customer, not the seller.
| Amazon sellers can and do take a loss to sell on Amazon,
| and ultimately the seller's fate is of no concern to
| Amazon. Again, they don't have to sell on Amazon to begin
| with. I buy plenty of bike parts, for example directly on
| their site and they're not even offered to Amazon to
| begin with.
| dwallin wrote:
| Great, you gain more sales and immediately go out of
| business since you were already pricing your product near
| cost.
|
| Prices then rise back up as your nearest competitor was
| smart enough to not lower price below their cost.
|
| Or do you somehow believe that price competition
| currently only exists everywhere EXCEPT on Amazon's
| platform?
| bryan_w wrote:
| > What's your move in this position?
|
| What about taking out an ad to let people know where to
| buy your cheaper item? People didn't know walmart.com
| existed until a tv ad told them. Doesn't seem
| unreasonable to take some of the saving from not selling
| on Amazon and use it for services the platform was
| providing (discoverability).
|
| Nothing changes until it changes.
| wallaBBB wrote:
| You can repeat that comment here as many times as you
| want but it will not make it a valid one. Amazon is
| practically a monopoly, and they have reached that
| position by often selling goods below COG prices,
| incurring losses but outliving the competition. Now
| without a competitive marketplace for quite a lot of
| stuff they can dictate the prices at a loss for everyone
| except them. If somebody was to challenge them with lower
| prices they can just repeat the cycle. They simply do not
| have proper competition for a lot of stuff and they are
| abusing it.
| jfdbcv wrote:
| No, it's an extremely valid point. Government antitrust
| policy has been heavily shaped by Robert Bork's "The
| Antitrust Paradox" which proposes that antitrust law
| should only focus on consumer welfare rather than market
| structure or number of competitors.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Amazon isn't a monopoly by any definition. There are
| plenty of places to buy things. Repeating it over and
| over again won't change reality. Feel free to bookmark
| this and come back to it 10 years from now. Amazon won't
| be broken up, either.
|
| Customers are so lazy they want the government do
| everything for them. If you don't like Amazon, close the
| tab and go to eBay.com or Walmart.com. It's very easy,
| and can be done in seconds. This isn't like telecom
| monopolies where you can't actually switch.
| Jensson wrote:
| For b2c monopolies matters, for b2b it is enough to be a
| dominant player to engage on a lot of harmful anti-
| competitive practices. This is a b2b situation that harms
| consumers, in that situation it doesn't matter that there
| are competitors, what matters is how much power Amazon
| has over vendors.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I disagree. Demanding the lowest price does not harm
| consumers. Overstock, Wayfair, Walmart and others do the
| same thing. The result is the lowest price for a given
| product on _all_ sites. This is unquestionably good for
| consumers.
| speff wrote:
| This is very short sighted. Lower prices inevitably come
| at a cost to quality. Normally this is corrected for in
| physical stores (you can see if something looks cheap),
| but it's not so easy with online shops. So yea,
| everything's cheap now because Amazon/Walmart/Temu and
| the like drove prices into the ground, but it's also all
| garbage. And the quality alternatives? Mostly gone
| because consumers flocked to cheap products.
| Jensson wrote:
| Most disagrees with you here, including those who makes
| the laws and the courts.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > Most disagrees with you here, including those who makes
| the laws and the courts.
|
| Downvotes don't mean anything. Most of the folks on here
| have no idea how e-commerce works. Amazon will win. It's
| simple to see - them losing would imply they are
| obligated to feature higher prices, which is clearly
| worse for customers and inherently at odds with what the
| FTC is supposedly trying to accomplish.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| To be clear, you disagree because you fundamentally don't
| understand what's going on. I'll explain it to you.
|
| A company makes a product - it costs $10 per unit to
| make. To list and sell with Amazon, they are charged $12
| per unit. To make a profit the company adds and
| additional $1 per unit. They sell the product on Amazon
| for $23 per unit.
|
| Online retailer Foo also has a store, and provide the
| same services that Amazon for their online shop at $5 per
| unit. The online retailer adds a profit of $2 per unit.
| Total price $17 per unit. Retailer Foo is more $
| efficient for those services as a result customers price
| compare. Foo is rewarded for their effi with higher
| volume, manufacturer is rewarded with higher profit and
| consumer is rewarded with lower prices. Enforcing market
| competition led to all 3 parties involved being rewarded.
| Retailer Foo over time grows a larger customer base as
| people learn to price compare with them and forces Amazon
| to stop rent seeking.
|
| But the above doesn't happen in the real world. Amazon
| enforces that the retailer lower their price on Amazon to
| $17, while still collecting $12 per unit. The company now
| can sell on foo, but only by selling on Amazon at a loss.
| They can't afford that amount of loss from Amazon and
| stay in business. So Amazon avoids competition. They
| can't pull their product from Amazon because not enough
| customers vist Foo retailer yet to make up the volume.
|
| So in the end Foo retailer is more dollar efficient, but
| is prevented from growing and benefiting the marketplace.
| Amazon leverages its outside market size to avoid
| competition. Market participants preventing competition
| is against the benefits of capitalism and harms the
| consumer. So, it benefits the consumer to ensure Amazon
| has to actually compete with the more efficient
| competitor and stop rent selling behavior.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I do understand, but what you're describing is bad for
| Amazon's customers, as you note yourself.
|
| Furthermore, again, no one is obligated to sell with
| Amazon. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of
| sellers who do not sell their stuff on Amazon. It's not
| some requirement to do business in the 21st century.
|
| In any case, we can come back to this case a year from
| now, and we can pretend to be shocked when nothing
| meaningful happens to Amazon.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| I think you're looking at the short term and small scale
| instead of the long term and large / societal scale.
|
| Yes I'm the short term Amazon's customers don't get the
| discount they could get om Foo retail. Bit then they
| become Foo retailer customers and they benefit. Too many
| things optimize for the small scale.
|
| Similarly Amazon's upon losing customers to Foo retailer
| has to become more efficient overall (or reduce its rent
| seeking fee) to stop losing customers. So now all of
| Amazon's customers for that product benefit, even those
| that didn't move. And potentially even those customers
| for other Amazon products.
|
| This is the purpose of capitalism - marker competition.
| Nobody wins with laisse-fair capitalism except rent
| seekers. Society benefits from market competition in
| capitalism and this is pushing for it.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You must be aware that producers can sell their own
| product and not be dependent on neither Amazon, nor any
| other middle man.
|
| If I make light bulbs and sell them to customers through
| my own channels - exactly who is the rent seeker?
|
| In my industry there are actors that are as dominant as
| Amazon are in retail, but there's also a huge part of the
| industry who just sell directly to the customer. It's
| your own choice. If you don't accept Amazon's terms, you
| don't have to do business with them. And vice versa.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That's a nasty way of arguing against his or her point.
| And "most" in this comment thread seem to have no idea of
| how sales and economics work. But go ahead, make a
| government Amazon like everybody is suggesting here. It's
| not like it's been done before? Government controlled
| production and distribution of goods, seems like a fresh
| new idea...
| eganist wrote:
| > Amazon isn't a monopoly by any definition.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/monopoly "For instance,
| the term monopoly may be referring to instances where:
| [...] There are many buyers or sellers, but one actor has
| enough market share to dictate prices (near monopolies)"
|
| ---
|
| I'm not replying to anything you might reply with because
| the rest of your comments in this thread have clearly
| been in bad faith. But this was one of the few smoking
| gun comments betraying _either_ a biased position you
| hold _or_ your lack of background on the topic, so it was
| easy enough to just post a link to an authoritative
| source + definition and just move on.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Amazon isn't a monopoly by any definition
|
| If it has "significant and durable market power" [0], it
| is by the _only_ definition that matters.
|
| [0] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-
| guidance/gui...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I will say that I used to buy stuff from AMZN all the
| time and now I hardly ever do.
|
| For me the last straw was when Amazon Prime deliveries
| stopped arriving in two days despite being claimed to
| arrive in two. It made a difference because in two days
| it could be a hassle to drive to the store but in five
| days I can easily find the time.
|
| Not long after that, Prime service became officially five
| days at my location while Amazon was shouting to the
| rooftops that other people were getting one day. Around
| this time it seemed every other retailer was trying to
| impress me with fulfillment and often shipping is free if
| you buy $200 of camera equipment or $80 worth of games,
| even when it isn't it isn't very expensive but it is
| _always_ faster than AMZN, I even get Ebay packages from
| Japan faster than AMZN gets me packages from the next
| state.
|
| There was also the rising problem that the quality of the
| listings was going down on AMZN; I'm not so concerned
| that the $24 product is crowding out the $17 product but
| rather that there are so many junk products that crowd
| out good products. On top of that there are many product
| listings that make no sense at all and it all adds up to
| a stressful process of sifting through a lot of junk and
| then not knowing if some absolute garbage is going to
| show up at my door.
|
| So I went from buying something on AMZN probably several
| times a week to now less than once a month... I canceled
| my Prime subscription because I couldn't have any self
| respect if I was paying a subscription for something that
| was worse than average as opposed to better than average.
| And boy is it annoying to shop on AMZN now. The only
| thing you have to click more times than to cancel AMZN
| Prime is to order something from AMZN without signing up
| for a free trial of Prime.
| locallost wrote:
| It's pro consumer to pay more than you would've because
| one company in an allegedly free market decides what the
| price is allowed to be.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| Amazon is abusing it's monopoly power to hurt
| competition, when Amazon is the only place to certain
| things, consumer cost will go up.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > when Amazon is the only place to certain things
|
| No seller is obligated to sell on Amazon to begin with,
| so this entire premise is false.
| smoldesu wrote:
| "No manufacturer is obligated to buy Standard Oil or
| Carnegie steel, so this entire premise is false."
| endisneigh wrote:
| Yes, because there are not literally thousands of
| e-commerce stores out there. Amazon is the only one. UPS,
| USPS and FedEx don't exist either. You must use Prime to
| transport your stuff.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Look, with this reasoning there is _literally no world_
| in which Amazon can be implicated for monopoly abuse of
| power. Apparently, having _any_ other option (even if it
| is damaged by monopoly abuse) is good enough for you.
|
| Clearly the FTC disagrees with your logic, and I'm glad
| they do. FedEx, UPS and USPS should be sued too if they
| did what Amazon is doing.
| endisneigh wrote:
| The FTC disagrees, but they will lose, as they've lost
| before.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's definitely not just the FTC. 3 years ago, the
| European commission launched an investigation for the
| _same thing_ : https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorne
| r/detail/en/ip_20_...
|
| If the FTC doesn't get them, rest easy. At least Europe
| knows how to keep their market on a leash.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| I assume you're not familiar with Walmart or how they
| operate?
| Jensson wrote:
| How is Amazon forcing them to raise prices on other
| platforms pro consumer? The only one who benefits from
| this arrangement is Amazon, everyone else including the
| consumer just loses out.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Amazon is not forcing them to raise prices on other
| platforms? Amazon is telling their sellers that they must
| offer the best price on their platform. That does not
| _necessarily_ mean they have to raise prices on other
| platforms.
| belltaco wrote:
| If another ecommerce platform wants to compete on price
| to encourage customers to shop there, they cannot. Any
| discounts will only go to the seller's bottomline. How is
| that helping customers?
| endisneigh wrote:
| Amazon wants its customers to have the _lowest available
| price_. Their rule ensures that. It 's very simple.
| dwallin wrote:
| Clearly you are not a believer in free markets, because
| by the theory of free markets these prices would
| naturally arrive at the lowest possible price all on
| their own.
|
| You are right that this policy is very simple, it's very
| clear both mathematically and logically. Companies cannot
| lower their prices lower than their costs. If costs are
| variable across platforms but prices are fixed to a
| single value than this will de-facto result in INCREASED
| prices. If this policy causes someone to leave a
| platform, that STILL doesn't result in prices any lower
| than they would absent the rule.
|
| In fact, the sheer existence of the rule is a clear
| statement from Amazon that they believe they have
| significant and durable market pricing power, since if
| they didn't, this policy would clearly lead to sellers
| and buyers leaving their platform.
| abduhl wrote:
| What you are advocating for here is the opposite of a
| free market. Two independent parties contracting with
| each other and agreeing to a most favored nation clause
| without government intervention is a free market: either
| party may choose to leave the relationship. The
| government stepping in restrict parties' ability to
| contract as they see fit is a restraint on the market.
|
| In a free market sellers will leave the Amazon ecosystem
| and move to a platform with less restrictive agreements,
| resulting in lower consumer prices (albeit with less
| availability). That's exactly what GP is arguing.
| Obviously GP believes in a free market.
|
| Amazon's belief in their own market power is irrelevant.
| Jensson wrote:
| > That does not necessarily mean they have to raise
| prices on other platforms.
|
| It does, since losing sales on Amazon costs them more
| than raising the price on other platforms then that is
| what they will do, since companies are motivated by
| profit. Amazon knows this, that as a dominant market
| player if they add this rules the vendors will have to
| abide it since they will lose more from not using Amazon.
|
| This is how anti-competitive practices works and why we
| have laws against them.
| endisneigh wrote:
| What you're saying doesn't make any sense. They could
| also just lower prices on other platforms - good for the
| customer. They can and should continue to lower prices,
| also good for the customer, until it is no longer
| profitable for them.
|
| If they decide to raise prices, then that has more to do
| with the seller than Amazon.
| EGreg wrote:
| To be fair, every single wholesaler operates this way.
|
| I have personalky spoken to wholesalers who sell widgets X
| (lighters etc) to retail stores.
|
| If the retail stores undercut everyone else and drop the
| price below MSRP, they will exclude them in the future.
| There is centralized price control even though the
| retailers are free to do what they want.
|
| That is done by auto dealers and anyone else who does MSRP.
| The difference is that they are still competing in that
| product category. Amazon on the other hand is a platform
| that stands BEHIND them. This leads to an emergent price
| cartel, just like in the propu lica piece on NYC real
| estate:
|
| https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=385
| oogali wrote:
| To shine a little more light, what you're referring to is
| called a minimum advertised price policy, or MAPP.
|
| And as you've stated, it's done by anyone who publishes a
| MSRP.
|
| https://www.deltafaucet.com/for-professionals/product-
| resour...
|
| https://assets.ctfassets.net/zlhl2y58oyef/3wENIXr7qvqyOoV
| D6R...
|
| https://www.pricespider.com/Blog/map-policy-faqs/
| sib wrote:
| It's exactly their business. Amazon is going to use the
| limited "shelf space" to promote and highlight those
| products which are most likely to sell (and to generate
| best margins). If a product is for sale for less elsewhere,
| it's less likely to do so, so why should Amazon waste the
| "shelf space"?
|
| This is no different than what non-e-commerce stores (such
| as Walmart) have been doing for years.
| Retric wrote:
| Amazon doesn't need to promote every single item they
| sell and it would be meaningless for them to do so. They
| have a long tail of items which rarely sell and only show
| up on very specific queries disproving any kind of
| limited shelf space argument.
|
| As a simple practical manner a small manufacturer can
| more cheaply sell products at their factory than the
| overhead of selling through Amazon or anywhere else. You
| often see this where mid sized brewery offers beer kegs
| more cheaply on location.
|
| Amazon's policy simply increases prices without any
| benefit to consumers or the overall economy.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| So, to be clear, you have no problem with Amazon writing
| their own laws and collecting their own taxes? Because that
| is what they are effectively doing.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Every company has the right to set the terms and fees to
| use them. A "tax" is something you are mandated to pay. I
| get plenty of crap advertised to me on FB that you can't
| find on Amazon.
| endisneigh wrote:
| If sellers were obligated to sell on Amazon that would be
| the case, but it's not, is it? Ironically, people
| complaining about this are exacerbating the issue. If
| sellers who actually cared left Amazon it would loosen
| Amazon's dominance in e-commerce.
| stouset wrote:
| Sellers _are_ in effect obligated to sell on Amazon,
| because the alternative is "go out of business". That's
| the whole goddamn point of FTC intervention.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| I've often seen the complaint that developers think the
| law is purely strategic, like a computer, and if they can
| find a technicality then the law must follow through.
|
| But that's not how this works.
|
| It's technically true that fiber has competition if
| another ISP is offering dialup in the same area. No one
| in their right mind would agree that's actually a
| competitor in anything but name.
|
| And so it is here.
|
| If not selling on Amazon is an existential risk for your
| company, Amazon is effectively a monopoly, and THAT is
| what the law cares about.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| They're obligated to by the grip Amazon already has on
| the e-commerce market. Letting Amazon make anti-
| competitive moves that increase their grip will only
| worsen the situation.
| endisneigh wrote:
| This grip you're describing only exists because they
| don't leave, and nothing is stopping them. Again, no one
| is forcing people to sell on Amazon. They could use
| Shopify or sell on eBay.
|
| People act as if you have to sell on Amazon. You don't.
| That assumption and expectation is why Amazon is dominant
| to begin with. Sellers should leave if they don't like
| it, and that will naturally soften Amazon dominance.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Listen, maybe you've never heard about antitrust law, but
| using one's dominant market position to maintain
| dominance in the market to the injury of consumers is
| pretty much the exact definition of an antitrust
| violation in the US. So write your local congressman
| complaining that antitrust law is restricting your
| ability to lick Jeff Bezo's boots, or run away to the
| Rockies somewhere and start a radically laissez faire
| community where everyone's asking about John Galt, but as
| the law stands in this country, it's illegal, and that's
| a good thing.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Just maybe some people don't think that the government
| having more power and control is a good thing?
|
| 37% is not a monopoly. If you have a differentiate
| product, you can set up your own website through Shopify
| or any number of places.
|
| And if you haven't been paying attention, the FTC has
| been laughed out of court for the last five years every
| time it has gone after BigTech
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| What possible complaint could you have about government
| overreach that doesn't equally apply to corporations?
| Antitrust law is the only thing standing between us and a
| corpohellscape "America, an Alphabet Company".
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Government has the power of the state to force their
| wills on people. Please tell me a scenario where an
| adtech company will gain the ability to take away my
| rights and property the way the government can?
|
| The government has a "monopoly on the legal use of
| force".
|
| Look no further than Florida to see what an overzealous
| government can do when you disagree with them or the
| police that raided a newspaper office because they
| reported on police corruption.
|
| I'm much more worried about when the police are behind me
| because "I don't look like I belong" in my own
| neighborhood than the Google car mapping my street.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Companies can use anti-competitive behavior to curtail
| your rights in all sorts of ways. Look at America's
| storied history with company towns. Free speech doesn't
| get you very far when being blacklisted from the company
| store means you starve, or your company scrip that you've
| been being paid in is no longer accepted to keep you
| housed, or they pay the Pinkertons to beat you senseless
| for using the word "Union". The reason we don't have that
| anymore (well, except for that last one _Amazon_ ) is
| government regulation.
|
| The government at least has the obligation to _appear_ as
| if it 's beholden to your will and rights. Corporations
| have no such qualms.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So please tell me a realistic scenario where Google goes
| from an adtech company to one that can take away my
| freedoms and shoot me with impunity?
|
| Also please tell me a scenario where Amazon takes over
| all retail?
|
| If you haven't been paying attention, the justice system
| and political parties gerrymandering hasn't even been
| trying to act like they are behaving fairly.
|
| The governor of Florida has actively been punishing
| companies both big and small that have been speaking out
| against him.
| [deleted]
| anonymousab wrote:
| > and nothing is stopping them.
|
| Imminent collapse and bankruptcy when they leave due to
| Amazon's dominant market position. That you can set up a
| shop anywhere does not mean anything when all of your
| potential customers are only going to the Amazon digital
| strip mall.
| cedilla wrote:
| It does the opposite - it prevents the price going lower than
| cost plus Amazon fees.
|
| Amazon is not exactly cheap for sellers, so the price has to
| go up everywhere.
| pnutjam wrote:
| I read that, on average, Amazon collects 50% of the cost in
| fees; from sellers.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And how much do you think traditional retail marks up
| prices from wholesale to retail?
| pnutjam wrote:
| Why is that relevant?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Because Amazon is a retail company and the amount that
| Amazon charges is not much different than the cost
| overhead of getting any product through the channel.
| pnutjam wrote:
| so my (theoretical) company that optimizes to keep these
| costs lower shouldn't be able to compete on those fees?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Sure, if all you care about is money, then you can
| already go on Amazon and choose alternate vendors that
| are available at a lower price with slower shipping.
| pnutjam wrote:
| So you don't even know what the article is discussing.
| Amazon is killing competition and increasing costs to
| consumers.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I happen to know exactly what I'm talking about - you
| right now can look for an item on Amazon and see "this
| product is available at a lower price with <slower
| shipping>"
|
| You right now can set up a site on Shopify and sell your
| goods.
|
| If you are selling a differentiate product instead of
| cheap crap imported (or drop shipped) from China, you can
| create demand without going through Amazon.
|
| For instance, I was specifically looking for Samsonite
| zipper less luggage because I trusted that brand and it
| wasn't available on Amazon. They chose not to sell on
| Amazon and I bought it directly
| pnutjam wrote:
| -- I happen to know exactly what I'm talking about - you
| right now can look for an item on Amazon and see "this
| product is available at a lower price with <slower
| shipping>" Sure, on Amazon. Not other platforms.
|
| I'm not going to bother explaining further, but thanks
| for confirming you don't understand the issue. It's not
| my job to educate you.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Hasn't WalMart been doing the same thing for decades, but in
| bricks & mortar retailing?
| taeric wrote:
| Yes, which is why searching "most favored nation clause"
| turns up legal advice on how to set that up in a good way.
|
| Note, there is still a valid question on whether or not
| companies with enough exposure should be held to higher
| standards. Consider, we hold pro players to tighter
| requirements than we do local leagues. They both have
| basically the same rules, of course, but not fully identical.
| And enforcement is, of course, largely at the discretion of
| the agencies enforcing them.
|
| The last is obnoxious, if you view the entire field as a
| homogeneous thing. And I do get the impression that there is
| something more going on in this case. That said, it is not
| abnormal to rank ROI on what gets enforced. I wish it was
| framed directly in those terms, though.
| golemotron wrote:
| The US is strong on the doctrine that the law applies
| equally to people (legal entities) regardless of size /
| market cap. I don't think we'll ever see something like the
| EU's law that targets only large internet companies. It
| might even not fly on equal protection grounds.
|
| I think that in either Finland or Iceland people receive
| traffic fines that are a percentage of their income. They
| would never fly in the US.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think we're OK with laws like: "don't form a monopoly,"
| which applies equally to everyone (but doesn't come up
| often for most people!)
| taeric wrote:
| That is why I didn't say it applies differently. I said
| it is enforced on a ranking that is based on ROI. And...
| it really has to be.
|
| There are almost certainly low key levels of bad
| practices in small shops. But it would cost more and take
| more out of the economy to enforce them than it is to
| just not care.
|
| Now, that bar is rising, of course. Things that used to
| not matter years ago are easily enforced today.
| abduhl wrote:
| So your view is that we should enforce extremely strict
| laws arbitrarily and capriciously based on however the
| particular regulator or prosecutor feels about a given
| entity?
|
| I can't imagine how this could be abused.
| taeric wrote:
| If you've ever been on the interstate system, then you
| are basically with me. Literally it would be trivial in
| today's world to have a hookup on your car to check your
| speed against the local signage on a somewhat real time
| basis. Sounds absurd, but there is a pretty good chance
| every long haul truck you see out there is doing exactly
| that.
|
| Similarly, mens rea is a thing. Such that statutory
| enforcement of rules is often a regressive policy that
| isn't necessarily a good idea.
| abduhl wrote:
| I think most people who have driven on the interstate are
| quite aware that police arbitrarily pull people over for
| many things given the vast number of laws that are
| continuously broken by all drivers. I do not think a
| regime where you're always breaking a law and can be
| pulled over just for driving while black is a good
| example when advocating for prosecutorial discretion. I'd
| prefer a system that doesn't result in being subject to a
| regulatory action or prosecution because I was doing
| business while black.
| taeric wrote:
| Ah, agreed. And if you take the worst possible
| interpretation of my post I can see how you get there.
|
| My point was that many rules get enforced on a cost
| benefit based system. Especially in business where
| enforcement is necessarily an expensive undertaking.
| Ideally, part of enforcement will include evolution of
| the rules so that people don't grow into a situation
| where what they are doing is suddenly illegal. That said,
| many of the rules we are looking at here are more along
| the lines of "you left interstate driving and are now in
| a city." That is, the landscape and situation pretty much
| has to factor into the rules. Is why you would be an
| asshole for worrying about the kid's lemonade stand down
| the corner. Any grandstanding on how the rules apply
| universally is... well, just not useful.
| abduhl wrote:
| My interpretation isn't the worst possible
| interpretation, it's the realistic interpretation based
| on how permitting discretionary application of the law
| actually works in practice. Your view is fine in theory
| but fails (and not just fails theoretically - it has
| failed and continues to fail actually) in practice.
| Advocating for your theoretical ideal when we know it
| fails in practice is... well, just not useful.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm largely acknowledging that that is where we are. And
| not too concerned about that for many rules. But, and I
| said so in the initial post, expect that more and more
| will get enforced both as you get bigger, and as we get
| better at enforcing them.
|
| That is to say, I also expect clarification and evolution
| of the rules during this enforcement action. Such that I
| would be most happy to have some of these arrangement
| flat out illegal. That said, https://www.ftc.gov/advice-
| guidance/competition-guidance/gui... was linked on Matt
| Levine's email today. And... "Our company monitors
| competitors' ads, and we sometimes offer to match special
| discounts or sales incentives for consumers. Is this a
| problem?" is answered with a no. Such that, this is a
| tough field to litigate right now.
|
| And, what is it you are advocating for? That we only have
| rules that we can universally enforce? That would require
| that we know all of the ways that they can be broken from
| the beginning, so that we can encode those in law.
| kube-system wrote:
| The US has a lot of laws that apply differently based on
| a company's size... the Civil Rights Act, FMLA, GINA,
| PDA, ACA, etc.
|
| Maybe the US doesn't have a lot of laws that specifically
| target large organizations, but they have a _ton_ that
| specifically exempt small ones.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This sort of practice is not as uncommon as one might assume.
|
| It is extremely common for manufacturers to set a minimum
| advertised price (MAP) on the products they sell to retailers.
| This is done to keep the cost of, say, luxury goods above a
| certain value, or to ensure that even if demand falls off for a
| product, the product is sold from official channels at a price
| point that covers the raw-materials-plus-labor cost so the
| manufacturer isn't fundamentally selling at a loss. These
| agreements are generally enforced by both contract and tit-for-
| tat... Sometimes there are contractually-encoded penalties for
| going under-MAP, but sometimes the agreement is more "off the
| books..." If Amazon decides those Gucci purses are just taking
| up warehouse space and slashes their price to clear them, they
| can do that... If they don't want to have any Gucci purses to
| sell next year through official channels.
|
| Why is this behavior legal for manufacturers but maybe not for
| Amazon? I can see no other reason than the law is path-
| dependent and arbitrary. "Fair trade" is a concept we invent as
| we go.
|
| (Incidentally... As a consumer, it's useful to remember MAP
| exists when you hear whispers of "don't buy from unauthorized
| resellers." Sometimes the goods you get from those channels are
| shady, but sometimes they're exactly the same as the official-
| goods channels, shoveled into the back channel by an official
| retailer to clear warehouse space and reported to the
| manufacturer as 'damaged, lost' to preserve the MAP kayfabe).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Why is this behavior legal for manufacturers but maybe not
| for Amazon? I can see no other reason than the law is path-
| dependent and arbitrary.
|
| Market share => market power => different regulations.
|
| (Of course, I would personally prefer to ban this behavior
| across the board; I just wanted to _also_ point out that
| treating Amazon differently could plausibly be reasonable)
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| It is interesting to note that the US government often requires
| the same kinds of MFN terms, even though it is usually much
| more expensive to do business with the government than the
| private sector. There are many ways of constructively working
| around MFN requirements but it creates collateral damage. For
| example, the practice of having very high prices that are
| steeply discounted for most customers is often an artifact of
| having the US government as one of your customers. For
| software, it is common to create a new product/service that is
| trivially different in some way so that you can justify a new
| SKU that is only sold to the government.
|
| Amazon's practice is bad because it anchors pricing to their
| mandated cost structure. That the US government engages in
| similar practices should at least raise questions, because it
| has the same effect on the marketplace.
| jfghi wrote:
| Not the time or place for whataboutism
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Why not? If it's good enough for the government, why isn't
| it good enough for the company they are going after?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It's bad for both. But this thread is specifically about
| Amazon.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| It isn't "whataboutism". If the government's position is
| that MFN terms for vendors are fundamentally anti-
| competitive and bad for consumers, which I agree with, then
| it raises questions about any organization or sector of the
| economy that widely requires MFN terms. It discredits the
| FTC when the US government routinely engages in the same
| market malpractice that they are accusing Amazon of but are
| disinterested in changing their own contracting behavior.
| It doesn't become less bad because it is the government
| doing it to vendors instead of Amazon.
|
| This "rules for thee but not for me" behavior is why trust
| in government institutions has been eroding. It is
| difficult to give good and necessary actions the aura of
| legitimacy required for democratic institutions to function
| when the hypocrisy is obvious.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > the practice of having very high prices that are steeply
| discounted for most customers is often an artifact of having
| the US government as one of your customers
|
| That's one of the main cases of sticker shock in the
| healthcare industrial complex. Price a cancer treatment that
| would still be profitable at $10k/month at $125k/mo and offer
| sweetheart discounts to insurance companies (and treat self-
| pay patients as charity case writeoffs).
| da_chicken wrote:
| There's several problems with that.
|
| It's true that the US government does make those demands, but
| it's very important to note that the US government
| organization is not a reseller of goods. It is almost
| exclusively a consumer. It is not in direct competition in
| the same marketplace with private industry outside of a few
| select industries (e.g., USPS, limited healthcare).
|
| Next, MFN tariffs kind of by definition only affect
| international commerce. For Amazon, a 100% domestic
| manufacturer producing goods would need to comply.
|
| Finally, MFN is something _defined by WTO treaty_. If you
| have to abide by MFN when importing goods into the US, it 's
| almost certainly because your nation is also a WTO member.
| Because almost all of them are. The General Agreement on
| Tariffs and Trade _requires_ WTO members to extend MFN
| treatment to like products of other WTO members. It 's
| literally the the first article of the treaty agreement. [0]
|
| [0]:
| https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/gatt47_01_e.htm
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| You are confusing unrelated things. As used here, "MFN"
| refers to a common type of term found in standard business
| contracts that have nothing to do with the WTO or the
| government. This discussion is about Amazon's use of MFN
| terms when contracting with ordinary domestic businesses.
| da_chicken wrote:
| That's not what _you_ used the term for. If there is
| conflating going on, it started with _your_ post.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Nothing I wrote suggests your interpretation. The US
| government uses MFN terms in domestic vendor contracts in
| the same way Amazon does. This was plainly obvious in
| context, since the term was introduced in relation to
| Amazon. It has nothing to do with international trade and
| nothing I wrote implied that, "MFN" is a standard term if
| art in ordinary vendor contracts.
|
| You are the only person that introduced the notion that
| this had anything to do with the WTO, international
| treaties, etc.
| lanza wrote:
| > A new filing in California's suit against Amazon reveals that
| sellers live "in constant fear" of retaliation from Amazon if
| they allow their goods to be sold more cheaply elsewhere.
|
| Tangential, but out of context quotes used in your sentence
| makes me think you're lying no matter what you're saying. Or
| else you would have kept it in context and used the whole
| quote.
|
| Not to defend Amazon in the slightest. Just tired of seeing
| Breitbert quality clickbait OOC quotes everywhere.
| timmaxw wrote:
| This writeup has a lot more details:
| https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-antitrust-lawsuit-cuts-to...
|
| DC AG Karl Racine filed a lawsuit over this in May 2021. The
| judge threw it out, supposedly for lack of evidence that it
| actually raised prices: https://www.jurist.org/news/2022/03/dc-
| trial-court-dismisses... I can't find details; it's unclear
| what the evidence or lack thereof was.
|
| CA AG Rob Bonta filed another lawsuit over the same issue in
| Sept 2022. Some juicy quotes here (although only one side of
| the story): https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-
| general-bont... The CA lawsuit is set to go to trial in 2026.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| I know that sometimes these lawsuits can take awhile but
| scheduling something 3 years away seems excessive. It feels
| like discovery can take months, but years feels like a very
| long time here especially since this is something that is
| actively still ongoing and damaging to the victims
| ct0 wrote:
| Just change the SKU of the product so they are "different". Big
| box stores do it all the time to reduce the probability of
| price matching.
| jprete wrote:
| Amazon is not a court of law and need not be bound by this
| technicality.
| lazide wrote:
| Courts also are not bound by technicalities like this
| typically!
| Zigurd wrote:
| While it may not be as simple as changing a SKU, Amazon is
| chock full of products made in the same factory, many with
| identical product images, sold under different brands at
| different prices, and many of the "brands" are the output
| of name-generators.
|
| That actually adds to the problem: If you put effort and
| money into brand recognition you need to provide best
| prices on amazon, but Amazon is easier to game if your
| brand is xyxxy12345.
| oblio wrote:
| More than that... there's probably no real recourse. For
| the same reason you mentioned.
| EGreg wrote:
| The real solution is an open source Amazon. What happened
| to Magento? Does it have any traction?
|
| Why sell on Amazon instead of your own site? Can't
| competitors to FBA spring up that have great logistics?
| Are there any? Can anyone link me to them?
| justinator wrote:
| Magento was badly designed- infinite levels of
| directories. Good luck on upgrade. There's plenty of self
| hosted online stores. That's hardly the problem.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| I did a single contract for a Magento site and decided
| never again.
|
| It was like a group of Java developers decided to write
| PHP code and it was horrific. I would estimate 80% of the
| classes in that codebase didn't have any implementing
| code in them.
|
| Literally the only thing I liked about Magento was it's
| ability to outline everything that was being rendered to
| make it easier for you to identify the changes to
| templates you needed to make.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| This is a classic programmer response. The problem is not
| Amazon's software, it's their marketing, distribution
| network, huge audience that searches for products
| exclusively via Amazon, "free" and very fast Prime
| deliveries, etc. That doesn't all happen via simply open
| sourcing some code.
| EGreg wrote:
| [flagged]
| pierat wrote:
| I vouched for this and un-flagged it.
|
| I find most of your content here to not have any good
| follow-through.
|
| Amazon isn't just some software on a few servers. It's a
| whole vertical enterprise. Suggesting that some front-end
| and back-end servers can take the place of warehouses,
| delivery people, fleets of machines (served by AWS no
| less), payment companies, 3rd party billing is just
| laughable, and shows the naivete of a sw engineer.
|
| However, that last paragraph is terrible and absolutely
| true...
|
| > Otherwise, at best, you are just reduced to begging
| Daddy Government to force these corporations to break up.
| How well did that work for Ma Bell? The pieces were still
| a cartel, still charged $3 a minute. What the government
| couldn't do in a decade, open source technology and open
| protocols did in a few short years ... VoIP dropped the
| price to practically nothing. Now we have
| videoconferencing all over the world. Because once we
| decoupled the software (AOL, MSN, etc.) from the
| infrastructure via open protocols, the infra providers
| became a dumb pipes competing in a free market.
|
| I remember Ma Bell. Charged stupid prices for long
| distance, but was a good service. And then, the splitup
| happened. Did we get better services? Nope. We just got
| dozens of smaller monopolies all engaging in the EXACT
| SAME SCAMS that Ma Bell was broken up for.
|
| It was when we started pushing data around and got away
| from POTS lines did we finally break the stranglehold of
| the baby bells. Even DSL has been basically thrown away,
| given how little the RBOCs dont want to advance and grow.
| Monopolies are like that.
| EGreg wrote:
| Thanks for un-flagging. How does one become an admin on
| this site, anyway? I've been active since 2008 but still
| get dinged for stuff, not sure for what in advance.
|
| Yep, I think we are in agreement. My point is that for
| many decades, the government was barely able to make the
| prices drop. And then open protocols like VoIP did it in
| a couple years.
|
| I am a libertarian and believe that good open-source
| software and open protocols cause the centralized
| services to face a free market of incumbents. Much of the
| vertically integrated systems can be unbundled.
|
| Another great example is how the Web (HTTP was the open
| protocol) disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe etc. Or how
| Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta. How Apache
| and NGiNX disrupted IIS. And so on.
|
| Basically, we need standardized, open protocols. Maybe
| one day OpenStreetMap and Mastodon and BlueSky will
| disrupt their centralized alternatives. In any case, the
| first step is to have open source software and
| federation. I'm not saying it's the _only_ thing that
| needs to happen, but FBA and many other services can be
| done "sharded" per-product. We can do the same for other
| marketplaces, like Uber, Fiverr, etc.
| oblio wrote:
| > VoIP dropped the price to practically nothing. Now we
| have videoconferencing all over the world.
|
| Cool example you chose there. 99% of VoIP is actually
| closed source, proprietary solutions.
|
| WhatsApp, Facetime, Skype, Telegram, Google Whatever,
| Slack, Teams, ...
| 303uru wrote:
| The basis of this entire case is that you can open your
| own shop and Amazon disallows you form competing with
| their monopoly. There are plenty of open source options
| to open a web shop. That part is almost laughably easy.
| kimbernator wrote:
| It's trivial to create a website (frontend and backend)
| that offers similar functionality to Amazon. There's
| nothing special about their software platform.
|
| You can't open-source marketing and the insane delivery
| network Amazon has. Those, among other things, are the
| reason they are successful. They could release all of
| their software completely open source and literally
| nothing would change.
| boredpeter wrote:
| You can't open source it but the government could
| nationalize it and make it a benefit to small businesses
| everywhere without the anti competitive profit seeking
| motives of a private business controlling it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The original commented suggested that an open source
| Amazon was the "real solution." Open sourcing Amazon's
| software and then nationalizing their distribution
| network is a very different suggestion!
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Expropriation is the first step to destroying the thing.
| There no reason for unbelievably good customer service if
| you get paid by taxpayers regardless of outcome.
| lapphi wrote:
| The employees at my local usps are pretty good at their
| jobs. But they are all Korean ladies.
| [deleted]
| JohnMakin wrote:
| The infrastructure of a large ecommerce website is
| extraordinarily complex as well, as well as issues that
| arise with warehousing tech.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're talking about the infrastructure for a specific
| seller, which in itself is by no means trivial.
|
| What you want here is an open source replacement for
| Amazon's product search that will find products from
| multiple independent sellers. The hard part is probably
| how to curate it; you want to allow legitimate small
| sellers without allowing the thing to be filled with
| scams. But Amazon hasn't done a very good job here
| either, so maybe it's not a high bar.
|
| And then a payments system which is something in the
| nature of GNU Taler.
|
| Amazon's logistics is an advantage, but is it an
| advantage that can overcome the need to pay them a vig
| instead of having the product shipped directly from the
| manufacturer? Lots of people willing to wait a week for
| shipping if the price is 10% lower.
| hef19898 wrote:
| No need to open source. Just to pick some examples to
| build something similar to Amazon's fulfillment part as
| it was like 6 years ago:
|
| Shopify as the front end
|
| CargoWise for transportation, warehousing and everything
| logistics
|
| Which leaves some of the more sophistiticated stuff like
| demand ballancing across the network, but that is doable
| by either developing something in-house or throwing an
| ERP system into tue mix.
|
| All available off the shelf as we speak. There are other
| reason why nobody manages to seriously challenge Amazon.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| How do you get people to visit your site or use your app?
| jen20 wrote:
| What does "open source Amazon" even mean?
| belter wrote:
| Every Prime member gets commit access...
| endisneigh wrote:
| Sellers want Amazon's audience
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| which is easy to compete with for a government platform.
|
| in a lot of countries it would save a lot of money if the
| tax office had direct access to the product and purchase
| database. Thousands of people could move to more useful
| jobs.
| EGreg wrote:
| That's the same trap that TikTok influencers and others
| fall into.
|
| You are sold "the dream" by showing top sellers /
| influencers / etc. and told you can be like them. Kevin
| O'Leary became a meme for promoting this bullshit:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuqemytQ5QA
|
| In fact, even the top influencers can be deplatformed in
| an instant, and their speech is controlled. And same with
| Amazon. But the thing is that the people you never hear
| about, the "middle class", are far more controlled and
| the "long tail" produces all that free content that
| basically gets almost new views / buys but all that free
| sharecropper content is then used to train AI models or
| provide proof of large available inventory / product /
| content BY THE PLATFORM that pits them all against each
| other in a zero-sum game.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/117oh1m/the_uppe
| r_c...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Kevin O 'Leary became a meme for promoting this
| bullshit:_
|
| The women is Amanda Lang,[1] and the two were a 'duo' for
| many years with a business/finance reporting show. I'm
| not sure how she managed to put up with him for so long.
| :)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Lang
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You don't just "spring" up to owning a nationwide network
| of distribution centers and 1M+ employees. It takes
| decades of work.
| EGreg wrote:
| That's the thing people don't get about making
| competitors to Facebook, Twitter, and other centralized
| platforms as well.
|
| You don't need to boil the ocean in order to serve a
| single community. For example, Facebook started in
| Harvard and its value to everyone in Harvard was based on
| how many people _in Harvard_ used it, not how many people
| in the world used it.
|
| Similarly, if a single product vendor and their customers
| form a community, then a free market of fulfillment
| companies can spring up to stock that specific product,
| and then partner with the delivery companies (who have
| their own networks) to deliver the package. You might say
| that the delivery infrastructure is a cartel, but they're
| open to everyone and Amazon has been relying on them
| until finally spinning out their own. Same goes for CPU
| chips that Apple relies on etc.
|
| Look at IPFS for example, competing with AWS for storage.
| It is growing every year and now powers 1% of all storage
| worldwide! And there is a free market.
|
| Whereas these platforms are all centrally controlled by
| some billionaire (Zuck, Musk, Bezos) and his crew. You
| don't need to have their scale because you don't need to
| serve ALL COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD on day one. If you
| have an open source software like Wordpress or Magento,
| you can serve your customers with web hosting instead of
| Shopify or Amazon. Now the only question is, who would do
| fulfilment.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Similarly, if a single product vendor and their
| customers form a community, then a free market of
| fulfillment companies can spring up to stock that
| specific product, and then partner with the delivery
| companies (who have their own networks) to deliver the
| package.
|
| One thing that gets overlooked in this is returns.
|
| One of the big draws of Amazon is easy returns.
|
| Whenever you have decentralized fulfillment centers,
| returns become a huge pain, because the fulfillment
| center that is happy to take your money and ship you the
| product, doesn't want the liability of dealing with
| returns.
| buffington wrote:
| Amazon has also optimized returns (for itself) by making
| its sellers eat the cost of those returns, one way or
| another. That's not all that controversial, but when you
| consider what Amazon recommends people buy, it becomes
| obvious that they have no problem recommending garbage
| because they don't care if it gets returned. They won't
| eat that cost. They get the profit from the sale, then
| let everyone else work it out.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| When Facebook was founded there was no Facebook. Now
| there is a Facebook.
|
| When there's a better alternative customers are less
| likely to try out your new, less good idea.
|
| Can you give an example of someone serious using IPFS
| instead of S3? I don't really get what "all storage
| worldwide" means.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Except there was a Facebook and it was called MySpace.
| Facebook won because people enjoyed using it better.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| yes, but the bar for better was much lower back then. if
| you released the original Facebook today it would be so
| obviously so much worse than the competitors it wouldn't
| get any traction.
| EGreg wrote:
| When FB was founded there were: MySpace
| Friendster Whimit - Russians online (LOL)
|
| and many other small examples. There was still AOL, MSN,
| etc. There was a time when they ruled.
|
| The only reason that FB, Google and yes Amazon were even
| able to launch, is because the open permissionless web
| disrupted AOL, MSN etc. Imagine them allowing Amazon to
| launch on top of them. They'd cannibalize them just like
| Amazon cannibalizes sellers.
| oblio wrote:
| All of those had 10% of Facebook's current users, at
| best, and probably 1% of their spare cash.
|
| Scale matters. You seem to be a programmer, you should
| know that.
|
| Quantity has a quality all its own.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You are correct, but note that one very key edge that
| Amazon used to as a competitive edge is no longer
| available to new entrants in the business. For the first
| 15 to 20 years of Amazon, they were able to be cheaper
| than their competitors due to the fact that sales tax
| only had to be collected in states where they had a
| nexus.
|
| This gave them a pricing advantage which drove more
| customers to them which they intelligently plowed back
| into the business in building out their own network, no
| small feat of course.
|
| A newer competitor would no longer have access to that
| simple sales tax advantage, and so would have to find
| something else to compel customers with. Barring that,
| Amazon/Walmart/Costco/Target/Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy
| are tough to compete with because they already offer rock
| bottom pricing and they don't have to invest in a ton of
| new infrastructure for logistics.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| Not to mention the advantage of having investors willing
| to burn billions for a decade+ until you got into a
| dominant market position to finally become profitable.
| Not always easy to get access to that.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Ought to be bound by an actual court, though.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| And also _increase_ the shrinkflation.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Big box stores have a lot more leverage than a small seller
| on Amazon, who'll just get the "that violates our policies,
| we're nuking your business, no appeals" treatment.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Amazon are notorious among writers for nuking the accounts
| of Kindle Unlimited authors _who have had their book
| pirated._
|
| Apparently this violates the content monopoly KU is
| supposed to have.
| [deleted]
| crazygringo wrote:
| What I've commonly seen is that the manufacturer offers a
| store-wide 20% or 30% off coupon, as a temporary promo and/or
| for email signup.
|
| So the item price matches Amazon's, but you pay less in the
| end, if you're even remotely paying attention.
|
| At least for the $200-300 items I've seen (like
| dehumidifiers, fancy computer accessories).
| dylan604 wrote:
| The weekly sales flyers that stores offer was/is another
| way around this as well. Some of them have coupons to
| specific items that are not allowed to have sales prices
| lower than the MSRP. Very few people are as draconian about
| their prices as Apple, but others sure wannabe.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > Some of them have coupons to specific items that are
| not allowed to have sales prices lower than the MSRP.
|
| That's actually kinda disappointing. I'd always assumed
| those flyers were pieces of trash (at best, something I'd
| need to put in a recycling bin) which I don't want but
| now I'll be more tempted to take them when offered on the
| chance that I otherwise accidentally avoid the sales
| price.
|
| It's still good to know that such coupons are likely just
| attempts by the retailer to circumvent the
| manufacturer's... ahem _suggested_ price.
| lozenge wrote:
| Coupons are a longstanding price discrimination
| technique. If somebody doesn't want to pay full price,
| you might still get their custom with a voucher. You
| don't want to make the discount too easy to find though,
| as you will miss out on revenue from people who were
| willing to pay full price.
| dylan604 wrote:
| ProTip: at some stores, employees are allowed to give
| discounts as well. i have 2 anecdotes from HomeDepot:
|
| Since none of their lumber should ever be in the same
| building as the word "straight", I made a joke to a
| nearby employee that we should get a discount at how
| warped the wood was. He very seriously told me to
| separate the warped wood on my cart, and he'd mark them
| down. Got to the register, and they were marked down 40%.
|
| Second instance was after spending time chatting with an
| employee in the appliances department, he pulled out a
| pre-printed, handcut piece of paper from his apron
| pocket, wrote 10% on it with his sharpie, and i got 10%
| off at the register.
|
| Oh, and of course the Guitar Center stories of "you're a
| cool dude, and since I like you, let me knock of X%" are
| infamous
| granzymes wrote:
| According to the FTC's lawsuit, Amazon no longer binds its
| sellers with a Most Favored Nation clause. Instead, Amazon now
| will refuse to promote an offer in its "buy box" space if it
| detects a lower price for that good on another website.
|
| The FTC alleges that this simply reconstitutes the MFA since
| most sales on Amazon take place from the buy box. Amazon
| responds that it is within its rights to not promote
| uncompetitive offers that make its site look bad for not having
| the lowest available price.
| imtringued wrote:
| >uncompetitive offers that make its site look bad for not
| having the lowest available price.
|
| Those costs are Amazon specific... Way to shoot oneself in
| the foot.
|
| Why should Amazon get to offload their own uncompetitiveness
| onto sellers?
| dgb23 wrote:
| This argument seems sound.
|
| Amazon is not a neutral entity or a public space. It's a
| private platform with its own interests that are very often
| in conflict with sellers.
|
| There is this weird cultural expectation of platforms and
| platform-like applications (social media, multiplayer video
| games, online stores, proprietary libraries/engines, even
| entertainment media "universes" and franchises etc.).
| Participants and consumers seem to think that these platforms
| are somehow public spaces that they partially own, or at
| least they act that way.
|
| But you only own what you actually own.
|
| There are legal instruments and structures that actually let
| you partially own things and/or grant you rights so you can
| act on these kinds of expectations: coops, open source and
| other such licenses etc.
|
| When internet culture and commerce wants to mature, then
| maybe we should start focusing more on building on _legally_
| trustworthy foundations.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Except when you corner the entire market and use your
| position to stifle competition. Then it doesn't matter what
| you 'own'; you are breaking the law.
| fyrn_ wrote:
| That's nice, but the reality is that Amazon has almost 90%
| control of e-commerce. They have huge monopoly power, and
| laws exist to protect consumers from that. Is it the ideal
| way to build a society? No, But the government should still
| step in when it happens.
| nearbuy wrote:
| They have about a 38% market share of e-commerce in the
| US, far ahead of any competitors, but also far from 90%.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-
| of-t...
| mcguire wrote:
| (The next leading market share is Walmart's 6.3%.)
| abduhl wrote:
| 90% by what metric?
| [deleted]
| fyrn_ wrote:
| I actually misread fig. 14 from the article which was the
| set of top market participants. So it has a 90% share of
| the ecommerce of those top 5, not the whole market.
| Honestly feel the article intended that misreading
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I wonder if the shrink wrap T&Cs on allowed web usage,
| combined with lawsuits could help.
|
| "By using this site, you agree you are not an agent of
| Amazon. You also agree that you will not use pricing
| information except as allowed herein."
| helen___keller wrote:
| Does anyone have examples of popular / name brand products
| that are pushed down in ranking due to this? I would love to
| see for myself how this looks in practice
| granzymes wrote:
| Here's one of the examples that the FTC cites in its
| complaint (at page 27):
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Pilot-Retractable-Rollerball-Extra-
| Re...
|
| Compare it to this listing for a very similar product:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Pilot-Retractable-Rollerball-
| Ultra-0-...
|
| You'll see that in the FTC's example, you need to click to
| see more buying details and that at the time of this
| comment the lowest price is $14.28 with free shipping (on
| October 12th for my location).
|
| In the other example, the "buy box" highlights the best
| offer of $9.99 with free shipping (on October 5th for my
| location).
| AlanYx wrote:
| That first example is eye-opening for me. I always
| thought that when Amazon doesn't show a buy button on the
| product page, it's because that product is not currently
| available to be shipped from Amazon.
| granzymes wrote:
| That's one possibility! But Amazon also hides the buy box
| when the only offers are not what Amazon considers
| "competitive" because it hurts their brand if consumers
| see shitty deals.
|
| In this example, the pens with the buy box are 50%
| cheaper and have much faster shipping.
| AlanYx wrote:
| They're not the same pens though (extra fine v. ultra
| fine).
|
| I can understand why the FTC is concerned. This has the
| potential to be worse for competition than MFN
| agreements, because it forces any supplier whose products
| might end up on Amazon to police its entire distribution
| network for minimum pricing.* It also forces suppliers to
| crack down on (legal, authentic) grey market imports,
| even if those are never sold on Amazon, or risk losing
| the ability to effectively sell on Amazon.
|
| * Moreover, that minimum pricing has to be sufficiently
| high to account for Amazon's cost structure, even if
| other competing vendors are more efficient.
| granzymes wrote:
| I was offering the comparison because those two pens
| _should_ be priced within a few cents of eachother (the
| difference is the tip width and ironically "extra fine"
| is more expensive). If the products were the same then
| there would only be one product page and the $9.99 offer
| would be the highlighted deal.
|
| The fact that one product has the buy box at $9.99 and
| 1-day shipping and the other product does _not_ have the
| buy box at $14.28 and 8-day shipping lets us infer that
| $14.28 is not a competitive price for these pens and
| there may be a cheaper price elsewhere (likely closer to
| $9.99).
| taeric wrote:
| You seem to be thinking that manufacturing costs alone
| dictate the product cost. Demand and volume in
| circulation are also part of what determines costs,
| though. That is, your first assertion that they should be
| within cents of each other is clearly wrong.
|
| It doesn't let us infer that there is a cheaper cost
| somewhere, it lets us infer that Amazon has a low
| confidence that someone will buy it. That or they have
| such a low inventory of it that they are not confident
| showing it on the buy box without more engagement from
| the users.
|
| To be clear, I'm ok with the idea that this is getting
| investigated. I have low confidence of finding smoking
| gun reasons to punish sellers on this. I am far more
| confident that Amazon is optimizing to convert sales.
| granzymes wrote:
| Actually, in this case I am cheating because I already
| know that this SKU is offered for a lower price with
| faster shipping from Walmart. I suspect that listing is
| what triggered the loss of the buy box.
| taeric wrote:
| But that is a non-sequitur. Literally, in that that
| doesn't necessarily follow. We literally don't know why
| the buy box doesn't have it here and I could guess at a
| few other reasons. Most likely, I'd guess that the
| cheapest option not being Prime factors in to it more so
| than external offers being cheaper.
| granzymes wrote:
| You're right, shipping speed likely also factors into it
| in addition to cost (that's why I also mentioned the
| shipping speed). If Amazon can't deliver within its 2-day
| Prime guarantee it is less likely to promote the offer.
|
| Of course, without access to Amazon's systems I can't say
| for sure why any individual listing is or is not
| promoted. I'm just making an educated guess based on what
| the FTC put in its complaint.
| taeric wrote:
| Totally fair, and I think this is the kind of thing they
| could/should make rules around having a good audit
| mechanism for regulators to check.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Thanks! I had misunderstood what "buy box" is
|
| As a consumer I definitely avoid products with no buy
| box. I thought it was only related to Amazon fulfillment
| (which in turn I use as a proxy for being likely to
| receive the product on time and undamaged)
| _jal wrote:
| That's funny. I _only_ buy things from Amazon that are
| not shipped by Amazon.
|
| Their logistics are utter garbage for me - part of it is
| an urban setting with nowhere to leave things, part of it
| is that they don't give a shit, and leave things.
| putlake wrote:
| This is a good point and your comment below (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37768419 ) highlights it
| well. What people don't realize is that this is in the
| interest of the consumer. I used to work at Amazon (although
| not on any of these teams) so that's probably why I know that
| "see all buying options" means the price is not competitive.
| As a consumer I value this.
|
| Amazon scours the web to make sure their products are
| competitively priced. So if a Western Digital external hard
| drive is $99 on NewEgg, then Amazon wants to sell it for $99
| or lower. If it's a 1P product (i.e., Amazon is the seller),
| they can easily price match in real time. But if it is a 3P
| (third party seller) product then Amazon cannot take that
| action unilaterally take that action since it is the seller
| setting the price. So the best they can do to protect their
| customer in real time when their crawlers detect a lower
| price elsewhere is to hide the buy box behind the "see all
| buying options" button.
|
| I'm sure when this feature was rolled out, Amazon's sales
| must have dropped. They are taking that short term hit in
| order to protect customer trust in the long term.
| lozenge wrote:
| How does an extra click help the customer? Unless the
| customer used to work at Amazon and specifically knows that
| "see all buying options" means "scour the internet to find
| a better price, it should be easy this time".
| jjk166 wrote:
| They aren't hiding the better priced items behind an
| extra click, they are hiding the worse priced items. If
| you buy something listed in the "see all buying options"
| it means that you are spending more than you have to, as
| you will likely be able to find it for less elsewhere,
| whereas the normally presented items are the ones Amazon
| is selling for the same or less than elsewhere.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Amazon responds that it is within its rights to not promote
| uncompetitive offers
|
| Sounds to me like Amazon has found a loophole in the law. It
| agrees to list anything for sale, with no anti competitive
| conditions, but then only recommends customers buy things
| that it believes are in the customers best interests.
|
| The FTC will struggle to argue that is illegal. Amazon can't
| be compelled to recommend stuff. (free speech etc). Also,
| what they recommend _is_ in the consumers immediate best
| interests.
|
| It will be hard for the court to argue that amazon should
| start recommending more expensive items to consumers, just to
| push consumers into looking for a cheaper platform.
| Guvante wrote:
| Say Amazon offers three items all equivalent: one is priced
| at $9 and two are priced at $9.50 all are Prime.
|
| If the vendor for the $9 offers it for $8.50 elsewhere and
| Amazon starts focusing on a $9.50 offer is that "better for
| the consumer"?
|
| If the $9 doesn't exist and there are two vendors at the
| $9.50 price and one has a higher review history but offers
| it lower elsewhere is Amazon making things better by
| focusing on the other one?
| granzymes wrote:
| The "buy box" is a product-level feature, not a seller-
| level feature. On any given product page, there may be
| multiple sellers with offers (one for $9, two for $9.50).
| The $9 offer would be prominently displayed in the buy
| box and the other two would be in the "other offers"
| section.
|
| If another site starts selling the same product for $8.50
| (regardless of who the seller is), Amazon may hide the
| buy box and put all the offers in the "other offers"
| section to avoid advertising an offer that isn't the best
| price available online.
|
| Consumers price compare across sites, and Amazon wants to
| maintain its reputation for low prices (and in truly
| egregious cases prevent sellers on Amazon from price
| gouging).
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| Amazons fees are making the offer uncompetitive thus Amazon
| is actually not competitive meaning that they're relying on
| their monopoly position to maintain market dominance
| instead of competition which they evidently cannot do.
| mcguire wrote:
| Could you explain how this is in the customers' interests?
| granzymes wrote:
| >It will be hard for the court to argue that amazon should
| start recommending more expensive items to consumers, just
| to push consumers into looking for a cheaper platform.
|
| Yes, 100% this. That's why I said that this lawsuit has a
| major remedy problem. Even if the court agrees this is
| anticompetitive, how do you fix it?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37767994
| femto113 wrote:
| The insurmountable problem is that the practical
| interests of "consumers shopping on Amazon" don't
| actually align with the abstract interests of "consumers
| in general" that the government is purporting to defend.
| On Amazon we want to find the right item (search,
| description, reviews), have strong confidence in the
| inventory and shipping promises (fulfilled by Amazon) and
| have reasonable confidence we're not getting screwed on
| price including shipping (Buybox, Prime eligible etc). If
| you chop those things apart it becomes essentially
| impossible to offer the overall experience that consumers
| clearly prefer.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The cause of this is that it should be an anti-trust
| violation for any wholesaler or manufacturer to dictate
| _retail_ prices to the retailer. They agree on the
| wholesale price because that 's what they're negotiating
| with one another, then the retailer chooses the retail
| price in their store.
|
| Now if Amazon wants the MFN clause, no problem -- but
| it's the wholesale price they can't sell to someone else
| below, not the retail price. If Amazon wants the lowest
| retail price, that's up to them.
| wh0knows wrote:
| Amazon isn't recommending "more expensive" items to
| consumers, it's offering different products. It should be
| recommending the best product for the user at the price
| it can offer the product at.
|
| The fact that the product exists $1 cheaper on another
| site does not make it not the best recommendation for the
| customer's need. If I search "tablet" are you saying I
| should be recommended a cheap off brand tablet promoted
| to me because Amazon has the cheapest price or an iPad
| even though I can buy an iPad on apple.com for $10
| cheaper?
| granzymes wrote:
| >The fact that the product exists $1 cheaper on another
| site does not make it not the best recommendation for the
| customer's need. If I search "tablet" are you saying I
| should be recommended a cheap off brand tablet promoted
| to me because Amazon has the cheapest price or an iPad
| even though I can buy an iPad on apple.com for $10
| cheaper?
|
| I think you are misunderstanding the issue. Amazon is
| selectively determining to show the "buy box" on a
| specific product page based on whether the prices for
| that SKU on Amazon are competitive with prices for the
| same SKU on other websites.
|
| In your example, Amazon might not have a buy box for a
| given iPad model if the same model was available on
| apple.com for less. The presence of cheaper non-iPad
| tablets would not impact the iPad buy box.
| piannucci wrote:
| I haven't studied antitrust policy in ages, but IIRC one
| aspect of this in the past has been to forbid the
| monopolist from peeking at their competitors' prices.
| [deleted]
| buffington wrote:
| > what they recommend is in the consumers immediate best
| interests.
|
| How? Amazon routinely recommends products to me that are
| objectively inferior compared to other products. For
| example, I just searched for "peak design travel tripod"
| and the number one result, which is also marked with
| "Overall Pick", is a tripod made by a company with the name
| of KINGJUEEQUESTER that looks like it's made out of
| cardboard tubes, but at least comes with a free 21 piece
| lens filter set and selfie stick for $18.99. And it has
| 3000+ 5 star reviews that are almost nearly identical.
| "Edward Von McTavish: The KINGJUEEQUESTER tripod arrived.
| It is of the most impressive quality. The Leg Lock feature
| fulfills my needs. I recommend for you."
|
| The thing I'm actually searching for isn't even on the
| first page of results. It's on page two, under "More
| Results" and has a title of "Peak Design Travel Tripod
| (Carbon Fiber)" and is priced at $599.95 (the same price
| you'll find on Peak Design's site).
|
| How is it that showing me anything other than what I
| searched for supports me as a consumer?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > Sounds to me like Amazon has found a loophole in the law.
|
| No, not necessarily. This is just what companies always do.
| As long as it looks like they're "trying" to comply, they
| don't get in big trouble. In the meantime, they get to make
| microadjustments to their policy and find out _exactly_ how
| far they have to comply until they 're legally in the
| clear.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > That means that sellers can't offer their goods more cheaply
| than they do on Amazon - even if it costs them (lots) less to
| sell in Target or direct from their websites.
|
| Is there a way to get around this by having the list price
| higher than Amazon but run specials for most weeks of the year
| that undercut Amazon? Could that only be a viable strategy if
| Target is the final merchant but not on the manufacturer's
| website?
| dmix wrote:
| This is explained in the OP article linked here...
|
| Although I guess not everyone actually reads the articles so
| reiterating in the comments is useful.
|
| > Still, why can't a third-party seller offer a lower price
| outside of Amazon? Good question! That's where the scheme gets
| very clever. Originally, Amazon imposed contracts, as the FTC
| noted, "barring all sellers from offering their goods for lower
| prices anywhere else." But Europeans, and Senator Richard
| Blumenthal, complained about these price parity agreements, so
| Amazon dropped its explicit contractual requirements in 2019.
|
| > However, this change was a farce. The firm simply did through
| code what it couldn't do through contract. "Amazon," claims the
| FTC, "has implemented an algorithm for the express purpose of
| deterring other online stores from offering lower prices.
|
| > Today, Amazon tells sellers that if it detects a lower price
| for their products on any other online store, they will be
| punished, which is to say, their ability to get their products
| onto a place on the Amazon website where customers click will
| go away. The net effect, as Amazon itself wrote, is that
| "prices will go up."
| platz wrote:
| Why rely in a promise. what happened to the lawsuits?
| AlanYx wrote:
| I'm curious... how far does Amazon's MFN policy extend?
|
| For example, let's say I independently decide to import an item
| from company X and sell it _only_ on a Shopify site for a lower
| price than company X 's items listed on Amazon. Will Amazon
| exert pressure on company X to stop shipments to me or impose a
| minimum sale price policy simply because company X's products
| are available elsewhere cheaper than on Amazon?
| rqtwteye wrote:
| While they are at it they should also go after the credit card
| companies. They have managed to extract a 2-3% tax on most retail
| transactions. There is really no reason why the fees should be
| that high in the age of electronic transactions.
| jononomo wrote:
| Also, ATM fees should be capped at 1% of the money withdrawn.
| And I've noticed lately that I'm getting hit by two ATM fees --
| one from the ATM machine, and another from my bank, which is
| more than twice as much as the ATM machine's fee. I end up
| paying $3.50 to withdraw money from an ATM.
| thfuran wrote:
| We should cap the fees. France has fees of something like 0.25%
| due to regulation.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| They also need to be required to act more in line like telco
| common carriers. The payment processors have too much say in
| what they will and wont allow to be transacted on their
| networks which has nothing to do with financial risk or
| legality.
| thfuran wrote:
| Absolutely, as loathe as I am to suggest that anything
| should be more like American telcos.
| elforce002 wrote:
| They need to break Microsoft too. These 2 are too big and have a
| chokehold on many areas.
| happytiger wrote:
| In order to effectively break up Amazon someone needs to deliver
| a trusted e-commerce layer for payments and delivery that rivals
| it _and_ their delivery side.
|
| People buy from them because it's incredibly easy to check out,
| and because it's incredibly reliable for delivery and most
| importantly they are the verb for e-commerce on the Internet:
| they own "buy online" as a brand and that's a hard thing to
| compete with even if it gets broken up like ma Bell. Those three
| elements are very hard side problems you have to overcome to
| build a competitor.
|
| Shopify is well on their way to delivering an easy checkout
| experience that could be aggregated to create a competitor of
| sorts, but delivery remains the hard side problem -- the network
| of warehouses and reliable short term delivery windows you can
| count on. This aggregates demand and enables centralized
| payments, but you end up essentially replicating Amazons delivery
| system eventually to gain efficiency or remaining vulnerable
| until someone comes and takes you out with shipping rates.
|
| It's also the Craigslist problem all over again as well, because
| every small category of Amazon is an ocean to a competitor and
| each needs to solve all three hard side problems, so peeling off
| each division and improving the experience to consumers is a
| colossal task that wouldn't create the same potential for
| efficiencies of scale or would end up advancing the possibility
| of winner take all relocation of the exact same issues.
|
| I really do think Amazon needs to be broken up to create more
| competition, because the alternative seems like it would look a
| lot like the Costco scene from Idiocracy. That's not a healthy
| end-result.
|
| Also IMO Jet.com was the last upstart of any seriousness and they
| got taken out by Walmart, and that's another angle anyone who
| breaks up Amazon has got to think about.
|
| And _then_ their is their oil and gas pipeline in the form of
| AWS, which is a strategic barrier all itself and allows Amazon to
| have insane scale that's _entirely paid for_ by entirely
| different customers. They can effectively operate for free on
| their own cloud.
|
| They have layer upon layer of network type advantages that have
| to be unbundled if they are to be broken up, and unless it's done
| profoundly well, they're going to remain 1100 lb gorillas.
|
| I could probably organize these thoughts better and more
| concisely but don't have time at the moment, but this is what
| immediately comes to mind.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Maybe it's because I don't live in the 2% of the land area
| where 30% of people are dogpiled (if like 5% of you moved
| someplace else the Republican party would be gone, baby,
| gone...) but in my area AMZN deliveries are always UPS or USPS
| or FedEx delivered so insofar as AMZN deliveries are reliable
| it is because those systems are reliable. (I've seen an AMZN
| delivery truck driving around in a particular neighborhood
| between home and the office but it has never stopped at my
| place so far as I know.)
|
| In my area AMZN deliveries are 5 days which is nothing special
| compared to the 1-3 day deliveries I frequently get from Wal-
| Mart, Best Buy, and every other online store. In fact, I
| regularly order stuff from _Japan_ on Ebay that arrives faster
| than AMZN deliveries. (As Flavor Flav would say: "I ordered
| from Amazon Prime a long time ago, Amazon Prime is a joke in
| 'yo town")
|
| I hear a lot of zip codes that have huge AMZN warehouses in
| them have 5 day delivery too but if you are Jim Cramer or a
| Congressman or something they have to have you believing AMZN
| is a little better than average as opposed to a little worse.
| If they had slow shipping in Hollywood you'd see sitcoms making
| jokes about slow Prime deliveries.
|
| As for payments isn't AMZN just having Mastercard, Visa, and
| American express do all the heavy lifting?
|
| As for easy checkout, checkout has very few clicks on Ebay. I
| check out from stores like Best Buy, Adorama, etc. and they all
| are pretty easy, in fact they don't make me click 4 times
| saying "NO I REALLY DON'T WANT TO SIGN UP FOR A FREE TRIAL OF
| AMAZON PRIME".
|
| Product listings on AMZN already look like a scene from
| Idiocracy; often I see the same bullshit listing spammed
| hundreds of times, listings that are word salad and make so
| sense at all (and that AMZN doesn't want to investigate unless
| you bought it.) I am not worried that AMZN is privileging a
| $5.99 product over a $3.75 product, I find it highly stressful
| to filter through product listings that are obviously 75% bogus
| and call into question if I can trust any of them.
|
| ---
|
| Maybe if you live in Manhattan they send a bicycle messenger
| backwards in time to deliver you packages as soon as you order
| them but from my viewpoint as someone who lives four hours away
| from a big warehouse in PA, AMZN is the Dollar General of
| e-Commerce and the retailer of last resort which I'll only
| order from if I can't find the item elsewhere. So far as I can
| tell Amazon Prime is a big Jedi mind trick that makes people
| think it is all OK because they want to watch _Rings of Power_
| that bad or maybe that _Xanth_ series that AMZN bought the
| rights to but will stay in development hell forever because it
| 's just too squicky.
| KingLancelot wrote:
| [dead]
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| I fear a negative decision against Amazon so much more than other
| big tech. Amazon's offering is so far and beyond all their
| competition, I'd hate for the government to kill any future
| innovation they have.
| hyeonwho22 wrote:
| Their 'offering' is totally artificial. Prices are low because
| suppiers aren't permitted to offer lower prices elsewhere. They
| have a history of blatantly abusing their monopoly position.
| The law even includes personal criminal liabilities for CEOs in
| these cases.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| The FTC is going to lose this case like they have lost others.
|
| They are suing someone with the power of a government. Whether it
| is "right" or not, the legal case needs to be incredibly strong
| and airtight to make it through court, and a loss looks really
| bad. It signals that other companies can be even _more_
| anticompetitive because they know the FTC will lose against the
| biggest fish in court.
| seydor wrote:
| > a loss looks really bad
|
| To whom? it's not like they will lose customers. It's better to
| try than not to try
| umeshunni wrote:
| > a loss looks really bad > To whom?
|
| To the FTC led by Lina Khan, and supported/appointed by the
| Dems, in an election year.
|
| Also, the FTC's warning will start being ignored by companies
| if they have a track record of crying wolf:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/lina-khan-is-taking-on-the-
| worl...
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