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Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

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Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#81

Post by dirkg »

knd775 wrote: post #52
JohnFen wrote: post #14

> Amazon’s aim is to cut costs and focus wholesale purchasing on major brands like Procter & Gamble, Sony and Lego, the people said. That will ensure the company has adequate supplies of must-have merchandise and help it compete with the likes of Walmart, Target and Best Buy. That would cut out most of my purchases from Amazon. It makes no sense to buy stuff from Amazon that I can get from my local big-box retailer,…

Did you read the full article? They aren't dropping other brands/sellers from the platform. They just aren't going to buying from them anymore. Currently, they buy from some high volume brands directly and then sell the products themselves. They are going to stop doing this with smaller brands, who will now need act as sellers on the platform.

Their definition of 'smaller' is If I'm not buying from Amazon I have no reason to shop there. Its just another marketplace and I like ebay a lot more for that.

Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#82

Post by dirkg »

knd775 wrote: post #72
JohnFen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I read and understood the full article. The thing is that I won't do business with Marketplace sellers -- that place is a snake pit full of badness. I only buy items from Amazon that are fulfilled by Amazon. If Amazon isn't holding the inventory and fulfilling the order themselves, then I'm not interested. I'll be going to eBay instead.

Third-party sellers still generally ship their items to Amazon warehouses to be sold. Orders for these items are still "Fulfilled by Amazon". Nothing in this article changes that.

FBA is very very different from being sold by Amazon. Its a cancerous scheme that charges ridiculously high 15% fees for the privilege of being listed on Amazon.

Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#83

Post by smelendez »

the_watcher wrote: post #74
_red wrote: post #39

No one ever talks about eBay anymore....but when are we going to collectively realize that they are the best of the "big tech" companies? They've stayed remarkable true to their mission, haven't entered politics (ironic given previous CEO), and continued to offer a good service. Since the commingling of inventory is now so prevalent at Amazon, I find myself using eBay more and more.

Peter Thiel was never CEO of eBay. He was CEO of PayPal until eBay pruchased it, at which point he left the company to found Clarium Capital and Palantir. EDIT: While the above statement is correct, I'm an idiot and totally forgot that a former eBay CEO ran for governor of California and remains active in politics.

I thought that was either a reference to Meg Whitman, who has run for office, or Pierre Omidyar, who funded First Look Media, parent of The Intercept.

Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#84

Post by criddell »

rootusrootus wrote: post #57
_red wrote: post #39

No one ever talks about eBay anymore....but when are we going to collectively realize that they are the best of the "big tech" companies? They've stayed remarkable true to their mission, haven't entered politics (ironic given previous CEO), and continued to offer a good service. Since the commingling of inventory is now so prevalent at Amazon, I find myself using eBay more and more.

I still use eBay once in a while, but many times they're more expensive than Amazon and the shipping is much slower. I'm not totally sold.

If eBay started a prime-type program where I could pay one fee for "free" 2-day shipping all year long, I'd buy more items from there. Until they do, Amazon is just easier and more reliable and that's more important than price.

Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#85

Post by chiefalchemist »

IDK, sounds (mostly?) like a CYA move. That is, the Counterfeit Apocalypse was coming, but this helps them dodge that. I would think similar for all the bogus reviews and rating. I can hear it now, "Oh. Those? Those aren't __our__ products. We only list them."

I hate to sound like a cynic, but me thinks Amazon's legal team cooked this up, or at least had a heavy hand in it.

Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#86

Post by JohnFen »

rootusrootus wrote: post #75
JohnFen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not particularly price-sensitive (that is, I'm not going to spend any time or energy finding the lowest possible price for something -- I'll just go with the first reasonable price I see). You may differ on this, and that's totally fair. However, this: > And after you're accustomed to 1-2 day shipping from Amazon, waiting a couple weeks for an eBay shipment is a non-starter. Ignores the fact that (at least for th…

I'm definitely biased more in favor of convenience and shipping speed. But to take a recent example, I just bought something last week on eBay, and regular shipping was free, or I could upgrade to USPS Priority Mail for $9.99. For a $32 boxed set of DVDs, this triggers my rip-off sensor, even if it's not enough to really matter. And it wouldn't be two-day shipping, just priority mail. Good but not the same. I like eB…

> they definitely have the one-click-and-you-have-it-tomorrow game nailed.

There's no question about that.

But personally, this isn't a big deal for me. That's one of the reasons that I've really taken to "Amazon Day" for shipping -- I rarely need something the next day, and am entirely happy to wait up to a week for my Amazon order in exchange for only having one shipment per week.

My cutoff for "too long" tends to be a week or two, depending.

Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#87

Post by mdorazio »

dang wrote: post #49
mdorazio wrote: post #9

To bypass the pay/nag wall: https://outline.com/9mHK5d Important to note that this "purge" is only for wholesale suppliers, not for marketplace sellers like the title implies. Amazon is basically only going to purchase products for resale from large suppliers, and will shove the rest into the normal marketplace operations where they have to compete with everyone else on actually selling and shipping their products di…

Ok, we can get wholesale for you in the title above.

Perfect, thanks.

Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#88

Post by binarysolo »

cptaj wrote: post #25
Analemma_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many business don't have a choice. A lot of the time, the choice is "sell on Amazon" or "don't sell". That's what monopsony is, and it's why Amazon needs to be broken up.

This is completely true. We used to do some development work for a client in florida. They sold all kinds of batteries on amazon. One day, a single dispute brought their whole business down. They had a whole warehouse of employees and they all got fucked because some temp employee somewhere in the world half-read a dispute while hungover from the night before and clicked a button. No appeals, no recourse. Your entire…

These guys need to hire an Amazon reinstatement specialist - they're like $2k-10k a pop and basically help suspended guys get back to Amazon.

It's nontrivial to get the business back but the main barrier is playing Amazon's game, writing the doc exactly the way they want it, and being super vigilant once you're on probation.

Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#89

Post by nacs »

bredren wrote: post #65
_red wrote: post #39

No one ever talks about eBay anymore....but when are we going to collectively realize that they are the best of the "big tech" companies? They've stayed remarkable true to their mission, haven't entered politics (ironic given previous CEO), and continued to offer a good service. Since the commingling of inventory is now so prevalent at Amazon, I find myself using eBay more and more.

The best big tech company? Maybe presently people have no major beefs with the organization. But there have been more than enough negative actions by this company in the past including: Suing craigslist (and losing) for breach of fiduciary duty because it wouldn't exploit its users enough. This was knowing that the shares were acquired in conflict with the ownership and mission of craigslist. eBay tried to get inside…

Also, they own Paypal which itself has tons of issues (it had them before the purchase and apparently those issues continue as regular HN posts show).

Re: Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers

#90

Post by droussel »

criddell wrote: post #80
JohnFen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Important to note that this "purge" is only for wholesale suppliers, not for marketplace sellers like the title implies. Yes, but I avoid the marketplace sellers. I've been burned too often with those -- if I'm going to roll the dice on that sort of thing, I'm better off with eBay.

I wish Amazon would let me set a flag to only return results for things sold by Amazon themselves.

100% that. The only way to filter on the seller is to dig to the deepest category level, which is not ideal.
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