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Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

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Re: Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

#81

Post by roymurdock »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #54
roymurdock wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cost savings/increased efficiency is the name of the game, and first world regulations are costs SV can ignore. sometimes the quasi employees suffer the burden (but get increased flexibility), sometimes the consumer suffers (lower price but increased variance in quality of goods/service)

> cost savings/increased efficiency is the name of the game I'd say "socializing losses, privatizing gains" is the name of the game. Those popular disruptive startups dump plenty of externalities on everyone around them. Don't think for a moment that anyone there is increasing efficiency for the sake of increasing efficiency globally; it's just disrupting the society and hoping money pours through the cracks.

nah i wouldn't go that far, banking employees and shareholders of recapitalized companies in 2007/2008 privatized gains and socialized losses when they were mostly bailed out with taxpayer money/federal reserve credibility instead of going under, but uber/airbnb/aws are pure efficiency plays. they increase the utilization of (what used to be) private cars, real estate, and servers respectively. there are trade offs between renting and buying, and we are moving more towards a rental economy mostly because it's more efficient in many cases to just rent what you need when you need it (opex) rather than spending big on a depreciating asset (capex)

Re: Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

#82

Post by bdcravens »

strictnein wrote: post #15
rootusrootus wrote: post #13

As proof that I am clearly not qualified to run a nearly trillion-dollar company, I offer this advice to Amazon -- ditch the marketplace. No more third party sellers. I have been a reliable Amazon Prime consumer for years, but I have begun making purchases elsewhere because I can not even trust "Ships from and sold by Amazon" any more. At the very least, quite intermingling stock. And at this point you're going to ha…

And the prices on some of the stuff is just weird, with a lot of the Amazon provided stuff now stuck behind Amazon Prime Pantry. I used to order a lot of our daily household stuff from Amazon: cleaners, dish soap, detergent, etc. So much of that stuff now is priced just horribly. $4 for a bottle from Amazon, but it's just from Prime Pantry so you have to order a bunch of stuff or be stuck with a high shipping cost. I…

I think a lot of people were using Prime to small quantity low-margin items, and they were losing on shipping costs.

Re: Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

#83

Post by darksaints »

rootusrootus wrote: post #13

As proof that I am clearly not qualified to run a nearly trillion-dollar company, I offer this advice to Amazon -- ditch the marketplace. No more third party sellers. I have been a reliable Amazon Prime consumer for years, but I have begun making purchases elsewhere because I can not even trust "Ships from and sold by Amazon" any more. At the very least, quite intermingling stock. And at this point you're going to ha…

I think Amazon dug themselves into a hole with this one. The Amazon Marketplace is the biggest liability to their brand reputation, but now it is also a big revenue driver. It would be in the long term interest of Amazon to ditch it, or severely clamp down on authorized marketplace participants. But Amazon is now in a sticky situation because the stock price, which they rely on for many reasons, is heavily dependent on revenue growth.

AMZN's ridiculous P/E ratios aren't really ridiculous when you think about it. Everybody knows Amazon pumps most of its free cash flow back into the business, which increases their growth rates at the expense of current earnings. The prices they are getting for the stock are just the result of a market betting on the future profit potential of Amazon when the growth stops or slows to normal levels. High prices imply that investors see huge amounts of growth potential, and if you extrapolate out what that P/E means, it shows that AMZN investors see Amazon growing 10x larger (or more) than it currently is.

But now Amazon has this huge liability of the Marketplace, and in order to cut it out they have to cut back their revenues by a substantial amount. And a revenue slowdown or decline signals to investors that growth is slowing. Needless to say, the anticipated future value of Amazon will cut quite drastically with a hit to revenues.

Compounding the problem is the fact that so much of their compensation comes in the form of RSUs, which are new issues. This is a great growth strategy, because it reduces their dependence on free cash flow for compensation, allowing it to be used for investment. BUT, any hit to their stock price will require drastic increases in RSU grants in order to maintain personnel, further exacerbating a drop in stock prices through dilution.

I don't envy the person who has to solve this problem.

Re: Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

#84

Post by InGodsName »

GhostVII wrote: post #41
bloopernova wrote: post #4

My (anecdotal) experience with dodgy sellers was this: I bought something that didn't work correctly, I left a review. The seller contacted me and offered money direct to paypal, bypassing Amazon. They did so by attaching an image with the offer to the ticket. I wasn't comfortable with that kind of interaction, so I informed Amazon. Lots of copious apologies from Amazon, and I assume the company was "fired". But the…

How much money were they offering? I definitely would have taken it, and then re-posted the same review a day later.

I think PayPal will freeze your account if you do this.

Re: Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

#85

Post by ChuckMcM »

I think the gist of the article was "Hey we're working on fixing the problems." but my experience with Amazon is that they aren't working hard enough. The question is when does it show up in their bottom line (and stock price) and when does Walmart start advertising "100% fully verified products on our web site."

Re: Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

#86

Post by seiferteric »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #54
roymurdock wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cost savings/increased efficiency is the name of the game, and first world regulations are costs SV can ignore. sometimes the quasi employees suffer the burden (but get increased flexibility), sometimes the consumer suffers (lower price but increased variance in quality of goods/service)

> cost savings/increased efficiency is the name of the game I'd say "socializing losses, privatizing gains" is the name of the game. Those popular disruptive startups dump plenty of externalities on everyone around them. Don't think for a moment that anyone there is increasing efficiency for the sake of increasing efficiency globally; it's just disrupting the society and hoping money pours through the cracks.

That phrase always made sense to me in the context of banks for example who basically expected to be bailed out if they fail a la 2008, but how does it apply here? How is uber socializing losses?

Re: Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

#88

Post by 52-6F-62 »

roymurdock wrote: post #76
cookingrobot wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of that seems right, but I don’t agree with the Uber example. Ride sharing has been a much more convenient and reliable service than taxis, and with less fraud (broken meters or credit card machines) and less discrimination (actually willing to drive me to the neighborhood I want). And with Uber I have a record of who drove me where. This seems pretty different from being picked up by a random person on the stre…

problem with uber from a customer perspective is if you are a single woman taking a ride, the drivers are not full time cab employees that can possibly be fired/lose their cab medallion/permits. some women i know are considering switching to licensed cabs due to the harassment they get from uber drivers with no good mechanism to report and avoid those drivers aside from never traveling alone. as a guy, i've only had…

> as a guy, i've only had good experiences (except for the opaque surge pricing which always feels extortionate)

Totally off the main topic here, but I'm also a guy and I've had one ride that was a little hair-raising. I wasn't harassed, mind.

I was riding with two girls (downtown Toronto) in an Uber and the driver was clearly on speed. He was extremely chatty, actually quite friendly, but very frantic. Took many last-second turns, wrong way down one-way streets and driving over curbs to get out of the way of cars on said one-way streets. It was nuts.

That said, all other rides I've had have been just fine. Often better than my experiences with Toronto cabs. There's no cash benefit for them taking the "scenic route" or "making wrong turns" which I've had less-scrupulous cabbies do to drive up the fare. That's a feature I appreciate. But I just make myself deal with transit since removing the app— their privacy measures didn't instill much confidence in me.

Re: Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

#89

Post by 52-6F-62 »

fbelzile wrote: post #73
rchaud wrote: post #24

One of the first things I remember about moving to a rich country was the absence of knockoff products sold in retail stores. It seemed amazing to me that companies would deal only with authorized distributors. These days, I feel like I'm in a twilight zone where 'wealth creation' is happening by putting a fresh face on 3rd-world country business models. First it was Uber with the "hire a random guy off the street to…

> Now it's Amazon selling bootleg crap at scale. What's their excuse? Some variant of "move fast, break things", no doubt. Competing with Alibaba. Amazon seems to have decided to increase product variety (through increasing foreign based stores) at the cost of losing quality control.

This definitely appears to be the case. I'll say one thing in Amazon's defence however— their customer service is fantastic in my experience.

Re: Amazon, Amid Crackdown on Seller Scams, Fires Employees Over Data Leak

#90

Post by reaperducer »

seiferteric wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cost savings/increased efficiency is the name of the game I'd say "socializing losses, privatizing gains" is the name of the game. Those popular disruptive startups dump plenty of externalities on everyone around them. Don't think for a moment that anyone there is increasing efficiency for the sake of increasing efficiency globally; it's just disrupting the society and hoping money pours through the cracks.

That phrase always made sense to me in the context of banks for example who basically expected to be bailed out if they fail a la 2008, but how does it apply here? How is uber socializing losses?

By pushing the burden of operating and maintaining a taxi fleet onto its drivers, rather than making it a cost of doing business like a real taxi fleet.
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