[HN Gopher] Inside Amazon's Secret Operation to Gather Intel on ...
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Inside Amazon's Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals
Author : marban
Score : 167 points
Date : 2024-04-18 12:35 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| reaperman wrote:
| https://archive.is/CHgpq (bit tricky to get to this, the most
| recent capture showed the paywall, had to go to an older capture,
| figured this might not be intuitive for even a lot of HN users)
|
| This "Big River" program seems like a proper use of classic
| "dogfooding" techniques (bastardizing that word to say testing
| your competitor's food, rather than its established meaning for
| eating your own food). It doesn't seem so different from a widget
| company testing and dismantling a competitor's hardware device.
| It's scaled up a lot, but anything related to global logistics
| has to be to get any good info.
|
| The difference perhaps is that hardware is occasionally / often
| (depending on the widget) protected by patents. In logistics it's
| less likely to be (but still possible, especially given the
| existence of "business process" patents). Part of that scale here
| is also how many people they have working on it to get a super
| detailed picture of how their competitors are doing what they do.
|
| I definitely have a cautious reaction about it, but I was
| expecting something that might violate regulations and statutes
| around trade secrets, and I don't see anything that obviously
| does. It's a bit creepy due to the nature of what investigating
| logistics involves, but it doesn't seem improper. There are
| _plenty_ of practices Amazon perpetuates that I do believe are
| improper, but this didn 't immediately strike me as one of them -
| but I'll keep an open mind if other people here make a strong
| case for it.
|
| One of the things I don't think belongs in today's economy is
| someone who runs a platform/marketplace to also compete on that
| platform/marketplace. That is something I strongly criticize
| Amazon for doing.
|
| -------Edit---------
|
| Response to a now-deleted reply: Yes, it's an issue if Big River
| is helping Amazon compete with its competitors, but it wouldn't
| be an issue if Amazon wasn't participating in its own
| marketplace. I'd propose the remedy to be "stop doing the bad
| thing" rather than "stop doing the thing which appears to be
| mostly fine on the surface but also may be dual-purposed to
| assist in doing the bad thing".
|
| Where my own argument falls apart is store-brands for
| supermarkets. I like buying affordable, quality products under
| the HEB, "Great Value" (Wal-Mart), and "Kirkland" (Costco)
| brands. I also don't think it's appropriate to make a law that
| prevents Amazon from doing it while exempt these other companies
| - or else both self-enforcement and enforcement by the government
| both get too difficult. Business managers would rationalize that
| they're more of a "Costco/Kirkland" than an "Amazon/Amazon
| Basics" and no one within the org would be able to push back with
| "No, I cannot do that clearly illegal thing."
|
| So I'm not sure what the right answer should be - whether that's
| Costco needing to divest their Kirkland to a truly independent
| third-party and maybe have a rigorous quality testing program
| they can say "We recommend this brand because we know they meet
| our highest standards at a great price", or if there's some other
| way to regulate it.
|
| There is precedent for the general concept, if not the exact
| implementation I propose. The SEC has a wide range of strictly-
| enforced regulations controlling what companies can do on markets
| they operate (or anyone who acts as a broker-dealer) that it
| mostly created a "de facto" ban on companies which run a
| stock/commodity/FX/etc market from also participating in that
| market. They can afford rules that slice the concept very close
| to the bone because they have very strong, harsh, and vigilant
| enforcement. For the SEC paradigm, see Fair Access Rule,
| Regulation of Broker-Dealers / Duty of Best Execution, Market
| Maker Rules, Anti-Manipulation Rules, and Conflict of Interest
| policies. It's really very illegal for an exchange or a market
| operator to prioritize its transactions or its affiliated
| participants' transactions over those of others.
|
| I'm not sure the FTC/etc can afford that same luxury, as they
| haven't demonstrated an ability to enforce rules aggressively and
| universally.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The issue wouldn't be "business process patents", it'd be trade
| secrets. If Amazon is having to do research via shell companies
| to figure out what those improvements are and copy them, it
| seems like a pretty straightforward argument that they're non-
| public competitive secrets. The misrepresentation is what's
| improper, since the information presumably wouldn't be
| available to Amazon directly.
| reaperman wrote:
| I don't think that's a straightforward argument. It's
| certainly not a completely unreasonable argument, but if
| Amazon can determine these things from using the publicly-
| facing services the way they're intended to be used, then
| it's quite reasonable to argue those competitive advantages
| are not "non-public".
|
| I generally view trade secrets through a very conservative
| lens, >90% of the time, if it smells like a trade secret
| violation, I firmly believe that it very much _is_ a
| violation. Most people think I usually take this too far for
| their liking. So I 'm already biased towards thinking this
| could be a violation, and I'm still concluding that it
| probably isn't. (Though trying to ever guess what the verdict
| of a USA vs. FAAMG case, or whether the USA will even pursue
| the case, is about as fruitful as reading tea leaves).
| lazide wrote:
| It is a big question - if you upload your code + keys to
| AWS infrastructure, are you really protecting them enough
| to be able to claim trade secret protection? Especially if
| you're knowingly a competitor to Amazon in some other way?
|
| I could see it going either way in court.
| reaperman wrote:
| That's a different bar than the one most relevant to this
| article. No one in the general public could access your
| data on AWS the same way Amazon could. But Amazon can use
| other logistics platforms the same way that the general
| public would and get all this information about how those
| platforms operate.
|
| The bar you're talking about is more "How much do you
| have to protect data you give to a third party, such that
| it still remains a trade secret from that third party?"
|
| Currently, all of AWS is covered by the blanket statement
| here[0]:
|
| > _As a customer, you own your customer content, and you
| select which AWS services can process, store, and host
| your customer content. We do not access or use your
| customer content for any purpose without your agreement._
|
| That should provide a good caliber of ammunition for
| trade-secrets claims against Amazon if they violate this,
| because not only can the rest of the public not access
| your data on AWS, you have every reasonable belief that
| Amazon is not allowed to either.
|
| I can't find any resources that suggest this policy is
| any different for their AI API's. Microsoft Azure also
| has strong protections around their branded offerings of
| OpenAI GPT-3/4 API's.
|
| 0: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/
| lazide wrote:
| Yup, I just thought this was an interesting tangent. I
| suspect overall you're right, however...
|
| That statement from AWS is a contractual agreement (not
| even that explicitly, but implicitly it is), not a
| verifiable 'physical' protection.
|
| Trade secret protection requires a pretty high bar of
| actual reasonable protection.
|
| For example, Coca-Cola's secret recipe, and KFC's 'secret
| blend of 11 herbs and spices' both have to actually be
| physically locked in a vault (or similar), and the list
| of people with access to them have to be very limited to
| get actual trade secret protection.
|
| If they made everyone in the company sign a contract
| saying they'd keep it secret, but then distributed it on
| index cards to everyone involved in the process, they'd
| have no actual trade secret protection, since they'd have
| taken insufficient steps to keep it an actual secret.
|
| Same if they left the vault door open and gave tours
| where people could reach over and see what was on it.
|
| So if it turned out that a bunch of folks on the EC2 team
| had the ability to dump cores on any running EC2
| instance, and some did so and got said trade secret,
| could the customer say they did the equivalent of putting
| it in a vault and someone broke into it - or they did the
| equivalent of putting it in index cards, and it leaked?
|
| Same with payload information at S3 edge API servers.
|
| I'm imagining it would boil down to how reasonable it
| would be to expect Amazon to actually follow their
| agreements here in all situations, and how reasonable it
| would be to expect the technology to actually work as
| advertised, even if it was a competitor or something?
|
| I don't know of any case law testing this yet.
|
| [https://www.wipo.int/tradesecrets/en/tradesecrets_faqs.h
| tml]
|
| Said company could of course still sue Amazon for
| economic damages presumably, but also the ToS of AWS
| restricts the size of such claims to be well below what
| the company would likely want to pursue if the trade
| secret was actually valuable.
|
| And there would be none of the criminal penalties
| involved in trade secret prosecutions, which is really
| why people want it.
|
| There is a big difference between civil court and jail
| time.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| > pursue if the trade secret was actually valuable.
|
| If the trade secret is not valuable (more precisely, if
| economic advantage is not gained or maintained by the
| continued secrecy of the intellectual property) then I
| believe that you will find it is not eligible for
| protection.
| lazide wrote:
| Yup, in this case I think the question would be 'more
| valuable than the amount the company has paid AWS or
| not'. I'm vaguely recalling that is what damages are
| capped to in the TOS, but I might be off my rocker.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| That could be their way to try and create a contractual
| provision that works the function of the economic loss
| doctrine; not a bizarre provision. It is a very
| interesting question to someone who is a student of both
| cryptography and extremely slimy corporate entities.
|
| Edit: checked your history and I doubt there's much need
| to explain this to anyone in this part of the thread,
| really. :)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Coca cola make millions of liters of the stuff every day,
| there must be so many people involved in actually making
| it that safeguarding the recipe doesn't really matter?
| With all the people involved in that process.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The point is that these services aren't publicly available.
| You access them by signing an agreement with e.g. Walmart,
| which are only available if you meet certain criteria like
| the sales volume mentioned in the article.
|
| I agree that I wouldn't want to try a trade secret argument
| in court though.
| YPPH wrote:
| _An internal crisis-management paper gave advice on what to say
| if discovered._
|
| What the internal crisis-management paper did not give advice on
| is what to say if the "advice on what to say if discovered" was
| discovered.
| philwelch wrote:
| I would propose issuing a passive-aggressive press release
| titled, "Inside the Wall Street Journal's Secret Operation to
| Gather Intel on Amazon".
| ryandrake wrote:
| Isn't this kind of the first clue that you're working on
| something unethical? Writing a doc about what to do if you're
| caught? Doesn't sound like activity that I would be proud to
| put on my resume.
| abadpoli wrote:
| Pretty much any big project at a big company is going to have
| a "guidelines on what to say if the press or someone asks you
| about your work" document. It's mandatory training at most
| companies. I've never been on a project that didn't, and none
| of them are things I would consider even close to unethical.
|
| This team sounds interesting but I get the feeling the WSJ is
| trying hard to make it seem like some sort of clandestine spy
| operation. This practice isn't uncommon... I've worked at
| airlines and they sometimes have people fly on a competitor
| airline and they don't broadcast broadly "hey united flight
| attendant!! I work at American Airlines!" but it isn't
| because they're trying to be a spy.
|
| The subsidiary is literally called "big river" (Amazon is a
| big river), the employees of Big River listed amazon as their
| employer on LinkedIn, and it took a simple google search to
| see the owner of Big River was Amazon... they weren't exactly
| trying hard to hide it. A spy operation this was not.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| "What to say if the moon lander crashes and the astronaut
| dies", "what to say if Trump starts spouting nonsense about
| your project faster than you can refute it", etc.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's all sorts of good and bad reasons for a project to
| not announce itself. The more well planned of those will have
| a plan for what to do when the project is noticed.
|
| I've heard that part of Amazon project planning includes pre-
| writing press releases, so why would this project not do the
| same?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| The real question is what they hid in emails marked as client
| attorney privileged to avoid discovery. This is a common
| practice in big tech companies, where employees are advised
| strongly (and reprimanded) to include attorneys in every
| communication that is even slightly sensitive, to avoid
| scrutiny from regulators or plaintiffs. See this article from
| Ars, titled " Google routinely hides emails from litigation by
| CCing attorneys, DOJ alleges": https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2022/03/google-routinely...
|
| Whatever is being revealed here is probably NOT as bad as it
| gets in reality.
| 23B1 wrote:
| Would rather DOJ go after AMZN and their peers than Livenation.
|
| Priorities vs. pandering.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| Isn't Amazon already being sued by the FTC?
| reaperman wrote:
| Yes, in a way that's likely specifically relevant to the root
| comment in this chain. However, that same root comment is not
| super-relevant to the posted article.
| aorloff wrote:
| Amazon should be investigated for anticompetitive practice around
| the Amazon Warrants Program where they force vendors to give
| Amazon equity to keep doing business
| swozey wrote:
| That ended on a bit of a cliff hanger. Did I miss it? How/why
| were these communications leaked? Most of it reads like
| investigative journalism, as in looking up business addresses and
| employee linkedin etc. but a lot of it is clearly coming from
| someone internal.
|
| So this is still going on? None of these vendors kicked them off
| their marketplaces? Is everyone just now finding out about this?
|
| Having them go to conferences and pose as other vendors is.. kind
| of gross. I wouldn't appreciate having to do that at all.
|
| > Globally, in total, Big River gained access to rival
| marketplaces including Alibaba, Etsy, Real.de, Wish and Rakuten,
| among many other platforms. In 2019, the team set a goal to get
| onto 13 additional new marketplaces, according to an internal
| company document.
| makerdiety wrote:
| So, can we now safely say that it is inappropriate to upload and
| execute the code to our artificial general intelligences on
| Amazon Web Services? Even encryption there won't work, because
| important and secret source code shouldn't be running on
| something like Amazon's cloud servers.
|
| So, what's an artificial general intelligence gonna do? Where
| would be a good place for it to hide and run its source code that
| needs protection from prying eyes and human alignment motivated
| modification?
| reaperman wrote:
| There's nothing in this particular article which suggests that
| Amazon would aim to violate any contractual agreements you make
| with them against hoovering up your AWS data to compete with
| you. If you use services which don't include any protections
| against that, then I'd expect those services to use your data
| against you if you posed a threat to their business.
|
| Perhaps there could be a legal requirement that this type of
| protection be mandated, I'm not entirely sure what the downside
| would be, besides yet more regulatory bloat.
| makerdiety wrote:
| It is indeed reasonable to interpret Amazon's Big River
| project as being not anything indicative of clandestine
| malware or something. But something unprecedented like
| artificial general intelligence is very likely to pose a
| threat to giant enterprises and businesses. A significant
| threat actually.
|
| So maybe super-intelligence would press lobbied government
| regulation into a protective service for its source code?
|
| Maybe there's already source code protecting regulation
| primed and ready for the super-intelligence's arrival? Like
| ethical rules that commercial entities must follow.
| reaperman wrote:
| Big River isn't about software so I don't understand the
| connections you're making.
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Everyone just now realizing Amazon plays dirty? They're not the
| shining example of corporate ethical behavior we thought?
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| Just imagine how long it would take the public to realize such
| dirty play by alibaba.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| I'm shocked that a company subscribes to the means justify the
| ends approach to problem solving!
| j45 wrote:
| Secret Operation?
|
| The cloud is someone else's computer.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I don't want to be that guy, but every single business has a
| "Competitve Intel" department. They generally fall under PM or
| PMM.
|
| Their activities range from comparing datasheets to digging into
| pricing to actually playing with competitors software after
| buying a license via a shell or a partner (very common practice
| done by startups)
| verall wrote:
| Project Management Management?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Product Marketing Management
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Any kind of intelligence gathering is a natural consequence of
| size. For companies, it starts at the startup stage with
| researching target market / competition / existing solutions in
| search of a PMF.
|
| Later on companies do more extensive research before launching
| product lines. At this stage people doing research are still
| pretty close to the product being launched.
|
| As companies get larger, product launch costs and separation
| between execs and people who do work grows. At this point there
| is extensive review before execs write the big checks. A lot of
| times it's outside consulting.
|
| At Amazons scale and their quarterly KPI pushing it's not that
| much of a stretch that they will have a dedicated org which
| scours internet for any and all intelligence techniques that
| would give them an edge.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| You're forgetting promo packets and yearly ratings. When
| you're desperate to show success for either climbing the
| career ladder or keep your high paying job, some people start
| flirting with ethical & legal boundaries.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| There's even a rather long Wikipedia article on such competitor
| information gathering and analysis:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_intelligence.
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| > to actually playing with competitors software after buying a
| license via a shell or a partner (very common practice done by
| startups)
|
| It can go further than that, it's not exactly unheard of for
| companies to actively reverse engineer competitors software to
| try figure out its secret sauce.
|
| Examples I'm aware of specifically being looked at as
| "competitive intel" in the industry I work in are stuff like
| antivirus or IDS signatures, WAF rules, and vulnerability check
| rules/scripts for scanning tools.
|
| It's not a bad thing either - I've had to reverse engineer
| checks/rules used by commercial vulnerability scanners to
| figure out why certain scanning tools kept having false
| positives.
| ygjb wrote:
| It goes further than "not unheard of". Clean room design (one
| team reverse engineers a product, then writes product
| specifications, then a new team implements a compatible
| product) is an established business practice to replicate a
| product while avoiding liability for copyright infringement.
| costanzaDynasty wrote:
| Every time IBM's name gets mentioned the FAANG-bangers bring up
| the Holocaust and with good reason. But the more that comes out,
| the more we see just how dirty and evil modern big tech as a
| whole is. It's just the tip of the iceberg.
|
| Beware those telling you what you want to hear.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| How naive is everyone thinking that businesses are benevolent
| and really care about some cause? Maybe a private firm can make
| more conscious decisions, but the reality is the market puts
| pressure on everyone's behavior.
|
| Business's sole purpose is to make money. Everything else is
| window dressing.
| tithe wrote:
| Busted:
|
| Japanese business entity search of "bitsukuribasabisuziyapan"
| ("Big River Services Japan") via Japan's National Tax Agency --
| https://www.houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp/henkorireki-johoto.html?...
| -- shows the following address for this entity: Dong Jing Du Mu
| Hei Qu Xia Mu Hei 1Ding Mu 8Fan 1Hao .
|
| A quick search for this address shows this page -- https://bb-
| building.net/tokyo/deta/1506.html -- which surprise, is the
| Amazon Japan HQ.
|
| Interestingly, the address was later changed to a more low-
| profile building, which doesn't list any corporate tenant.
| mkumar10 wrote:
| Does Japan National Tax Agency also let you see other details -
| like parent company of the entity, or any other information?
| That's provided in countries like India or Vietnam in their
| corporate ministries/departments
| tithe wrote:
| To my knowledge, the NTA does not list directors or
| ownership.
|
| METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) has a portal
| to potentially display that information, but for private
| companies it may be missing, and thus the results may be no
| better than NTA's records: https://info.gbiz.go.jp/
|
| Public entities (which Big River Services Japan is not) can
| be searched through the JPX (Tokyo Stock Exchange):
| https://www2.jpx.co.jp/tseHpFront/CGK020010Action.do
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Lmao nice name. Are we gonna get "Internet Movie Corporation"
| from Netflix?
| jrockway wrote:
| Is this a problem? This sounds like ordinary business development
| / product management. Let's say I started a cloud provider. A
| customer comes to me and says "we need something like BigQuery".
| The first thing I'd do is sign up for BigQuery and try it out,
| right?
|
| If you're making an online marketplace, you probably want to try
| using other peoples' online marketplaces. Make sure you're not
| missing something obvious. Implement their good ideas, rework
| their bad ideas. That's competition.
| tyingq wrote:
| The analogy isn't perfect. It's somewhere in-between what
| you're describing, and say...getting a job on Google's BigQuery
| team to gather intel.
| jrockway wrote:
| It's not quite an employer/employee relationship, just a
| partnership. So this is kind of like starting your own video
| streaming website while being a Twitch Partner. I don't know
| if the T&C prohibit that, but they would probably be
| difficult to enforce.
|
| I feel like the courts would take a dim view of "if you ever
| sell a trinket on our platform, you are banned for life from
| ever working on e-commerce", but I guess you don't know until
| you try.
| HillRat wrote:
| As far as competitive intelligence goes, this is pretty small
| stakes. In the industrial space it's pretty standard for major
| companies to create shell companies that buy up competitors'
| equipment and do full clean-room teardowns that result in
| engineering reports handed off to the designers back in the
| parent company. One can certainly argue as to whether this is
| dirty pool or not, but it's standard practice and everyone's
| factored it in as part of competition.
| jonhohle wrote:
| This is just an anecdote, but it's over a decade old, so I don't
| think I'm giving away any secret sauce.
|
| When I worked on Prime we were trying to build a program to get
| the top 100 items that someone would want within an hour
| fulfillable in large metro areas (e.g. milk, batteries, toilet
| paper, whatever you frequently run to the store for because you
| need it now and it can't wait).
|
| To determine what those items were, contractors were hired to go
| inventory Walmarts. One day it was reported that on the end caps
| of a particular Walmart were clipboards with all of the inventory
| in that particular isle. The contractor photo's each page and was
| never questioned and it cut down on research time significantly.
| gruez wrote:
| >To determine what those items were, contractors were hired to
| go inventory Walmarts
|
| How would this work? Is the assumption that more items on
| shelves = more sales volume? What if some items have less items
| on shelves but are restocked more regularly?
| maxbond wrote:
| [ES: Speculation]
|
| If you're sampling at or above the Nyquist rate, so
| presumably twice a day, you'll be able to capture changes in
| inventory. If you are also recording dates on boxes, you
| should be able to distinguish between sales and waste. Eg,
| you recorded an item as expiring tomorrow, and the next day
| it expires in 3 months - it probably got thrown away without
| being purchased. (Though this probably wouldn't work with
| things they can change dates on, like bakery items. It's a
| health code violation but a ubiquitous one.)
| maxbond wrote:
| It occurs to me that the refrigerators around the outside
| where high turnover items like milk and butter are kept are
| designed with a back door in the warehouse area so that
| they can be stocked throughout the day, so you would
| probably need to get more creative to accurately inventory
| the milk.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Used to work at a F500 that dealt with Walmart a lot
|
| Walmart said, explicitly and unambiguously, absolutely none of
| their data was to go on or anywhere near AWS. They believed
| they had credible concerns about data security and absolutely
| required Azure or GCP or other providers.
|
| We had a lot of MS SQL Enterprise licenses so bundling those
| with Azure was cost effective enough, and that was that.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah I'm kinda surprised our company is all in on Microsoft
| cloud services. Because we compete with them in some areas.
|
| If Amazon does such things why not MS? I mean they have our
| everything.
| mgdev wrote:
| Nothing new. Amazon's (now discontinued) browser extension [1]
| was, among other things, used to get competitive price
| information w/o being hit by crawling restrictions.
|
| [1]:https://www.tomsguide.com/news/amazon-is-killing-one-of-
| its-...
| cj wrote:
| Now I understand why Capital One pushes their chrome extension
| [0] so hard every time I login my account.
|
| Just took a peak at the TOS for the extension [1] and yep,
| they're collecting a selling price data. It's crazy that by
| installing the chrome extension, "you are authorizing and
| directing [Capital One]" to scrape pricing data yet nothing
| about that is mentioned on the chrome extension page.
|
| > 8. Product and Loyalty Account Information. You understand
| and acknowledge that, through your use of the Services, you are
| authorizing and directing us to act on your behalf to collect,
| use, share, and store information from third-party Merchants
| and loyalty program providers for which you demonstrate
| interest during your activities on the Internet. This
| information includes, but is not limited to, product
| descriptions, pricing and shipping information, coupons and
| other discounts, and loyalty program credits or other purchase
| incentives earned in order to retain and share that information
| with Merchants and other users of the Services to perform and
| improve the Services. We may use this information to improve
| the Services, including by sharing the price information and
| coupon codes with third parties, but Capital One Shopping won't
| specifically identify you to third parties when we share such
| information with them.
|
| [0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/capital-one-
| shoppin...
|
| [1] https://capitaloneshopping.com/our-terms/terms-of-service
| I_AM_A_SMURF wrote:
| It doesn't make it better, but most internet-related services
| are like that. They either spy on you or use you to spy on
| others. To me that's a clear indication that the tech sector
| is under-scrutinized and under-regulated.
| olliej wrote:
| In fairness to Amazon, Google was also doing that - by scanning
| everyone's receipts in gmail. I recall that coming up a few
| years (a decade?) ago, and was why companies like amazon no
| longer include useful information directly in emails - it's so
| great when a critical communication service is operated by an
| advertising company.
|
| [edit: fixed some clunky formatting]
| olliej wrote:
| The standard headline text rule of capitalizing each word had me
| read this as Intel (the company) and I was really confused :D
|
| Now that out of the way: is this really novel or weird? I don't
| work in sales/marketing/market research but isn't step 1 of such
| literally "how much do our competitors charge for competing
| products?"?
|
| I don't see how this would be "secret" if presumably every
| company just assumes that this is happening? It would seem
| stranger if they weren't? (The only obvious "secret" would be you
| don't know exactly which customers/users are just doing price
| research)
| gruez wrote:
| The "secret operation" in question seems to be
|
| 1. get a bunch of inventory somehow (eg. from liquidation sales
| or from wholesale clubs)
|
| 2. register as third-party sellers on marketplaces like ebay,
| shopify, walmart, and amazon using a shell company
|
| 3. get information (sales volume? pricing? ux?) from doing
| business on such marketplaces
|
| If this is what they're doing I don't find their "secret
| operation" to be "play[ing] dirty", or "anti-competitive" as some
| commenters have described. The only potentially objectionable
| part would be using a false/misleading name, but I don't see how
| this is fundamentally different than going to your competitor's
| stores plainclothed and checking what their prices/foot traffic
| are. As long as there isn't a restraining order/injunction
| specifically preventing them from doing such a thing, it seems
| fine by me. Moreover unless the marketplaces required an NDA they
| could have also conceivably gotten the same information from
| actual third party sellers.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| It's not even a false name if they've incorporated that way.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Secret?
|
| Walmart knew this years ago. HN thread on this from 2017
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14602836
| gwern wrote:
| The article says Walmart said it didn't know when they told
| Walmart.
| refulgentis wrote:
| ? That's a thread about Walmart telling vendors they can't use
| AWS, not a long article explicating Amazon selling merchandise
| on Walmart.com.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I've heard that Walmart and Amazon also use various unethical
| means to scrape the websites of competitors to get pricing
| information and adjust their own items' pricing accordingly. This
| feels a lot like the algorithmic price fixing that is now being
| scrutinized in the rental industry. I wonder if more attention
| should be paid to how these companies compete with each other,
| leaving aside the numerous other controversies around how they
| treat sellers, how they abuse sales data of manufacturers to
| compete with them with house brands, and their plain market power
| from size.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| small business retail in the San Francisco Bay Area has all but
| disappeared, it seems.. it apparently split during covid-19
| lockdown into two -- "mega corporates" and "we just steal it
| and sell it at the local casual street market" .. with most
| things in between closing shop.. to be more complete, liquor
| stores with some retail items, and gas station chain stores
| still exist ..
| mattmaroon wrote:
| What's unethical about scraping data from a public website?
| 1-6 wrote:
| Another more acceptable way of saying it is that they're doing
| their due diligence.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| This seems completely normal to me. They're getting only
| information that any Walmart seller could see.
|
| When I worked for Sam's Club in my youth, which is owned by
| Walmart, we would send people into other local membership
| warehouses to check their prices on things, and they would send
| them to us. It got to the point where we knew BJ's guy and they
| knew ours.
|
| Who cares? When you run a business, you just assume that you're
| competitors will figure out every little bit of information they
| can about you, and you will do it to them.
|
| And this is actually good for the health of the system in
| general, from a consumer standpoint. You want all of the
| businesses you interact with to be as efficient as possible
| because that's what lowers prices the most for you.
|
| This is completely expected, uninteresting, and a giant nothing
| burger
| wbl wrote:
| It hurts consumers. If you had two gas stations next to each
| other and they can see each other's signs their pricing will
| not be competitive because of tacit collusion vs if they can't
| see the price but consumers can.
| niccl wrote:
| https://archive.is/t8fAB
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've lived through all the days of "evil Walmart is an
| unstoppable monopoly taking over the world and eliminating all
| competition" and now I'm seeing "poor abused Walmart is being
| beat up by their ruthless competitor".
|
| Apparently monopoly is not the natural end game of free markets?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Works where archive.is is blocked:
|
| https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=1334487526038&w=d0SgTI-r7X...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Amazon has rivals?
|
| Here in Spain they're pretty much the only game in town these
| days when it comes to e-commerce.
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