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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

#121

Post by trufflepig »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #112
erik_seaberg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they at least enforce that Anker products actually came from Anker and not some scammer who's happy to burn my apartment down?

No. It should hopefully be well known by now that Amazon "commingles" all inventory of a given item. You can never be sure if you'll get a well-made counterfeit on the "marketplace". Even if you PICK WHICH SELLER you get whatever's in the bin that the overworked amazon warehouse sub-sub-sub-contracted employee quickly plucks.

is true for big ticket items like apple products and laptops

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

#122

Post by sodiumfree »

theturtletalks wrote: post #107
derefr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and most suppliers do FBA which tacks on a more expensive shipping charge than you would have otherwise with USPS. That assumes equivalent costs in other parts of your operation. But with FBA, isn't Amazon doing your stock-keeping for you? You can avoid paying for warehouse space if Amazon is your warehouse.

Amazon does make you pay to use the warehouse space. If your inventory is not selling, they start charging you for housing the inventory. Their ideal scenario is to force sellers to send inventory that matches sales so warehousing is optimized.

I thought we paid for warehousing regardless. Though I think there are situations where if your selling inventory is turning over quickly, they may waive warehousing fees. The incentive is definitely there to manage inventory at optimal levels.

If your inventory sits too long in their warehouse, the fees go from "regular" storage fees to "long-term" storage fees. Those fees are much higher, which incentivizes the seller to put the stuff on sale to blow it out of their warehouses, or you can have the inventory sent back to you.

Also, fees vary by category and season. Around the holidays, you'll see them making a push to increase long-term storage fees to make way for the stuff that will actually sell, and on categories which are hot for the holidays, you might see them providing incentives with lower storage fees.

I'm not the primary person that deals with Amazon FBA, but he sits next to me. Don't take what I'm saying as the gospel, but this is based on somewhat second hand experiencing and reading some of the emails that come through. My partner pays more attention to those details.

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

#123

Post by SomeOldThrow »

_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.

> They've stayed remarkable true to their mission, haven't entered politics (ironic given previous CEO), and continued to offer a good service.

Well, aside from forcing you to use paypal and go through their mediation process. I'll never spend a cent on ebay again, or sell there—credit cards are the only way to shield yourself from bad purchases (that and buying in person).

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

#124

Post by ikeboy »

theturtletalks wrote: post #120
ikeboy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FBA is cheaper than USPS is almost all cases. Once you throw in the fact that FBA fees included pick and pack which you'd otherwise have to pay for yourself, it's quite rare to find items more cost effective to ship directly than to use FBA. Primarily it's either very small items that can be shipped with flats, or very large items where dimensional weight comes into play.

This is a good point, but Amazon tacks on even more fees if you want to fulfill those orders outside of Amazon. We used to sell small electronics on Amazon and other channels which used to cost $2.60 to ship USPS. We signed up for FBA and they charged $5.95 to fulfill each order. Even if picking and packing costs $1-$2, you still make more profit shipping it yourself. We used to have 3 workers fulfill 150 orders a da…

Yes, MCF is not competitive with other 3pls or in-house. It's a convenience charge.

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

#125

Post by sodiumfree »

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.

Well, then you'd miss out on a lot of great products from third-party sellers, and with this latest push that is the subject of this article, you'd see less and less showing up.

...and you can do this after you do a search and see results and get to where you have additional filtering options. I'm guilty of using "Show only Prime offers" or whatever that one is called. After becoming a seller that does FBA and seller-fulfilled, I use that filter less. There are great small businesses that still ship very fast, and at competitive prices and since I'm one now, I feel their pain and want to support them too. I can also be patient on a lot of my shipments and don't require 2-day shipping.

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

#126

Post by smeyer »

GarrisonPrime wrote: post #114
smeyer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they own Paypal They spun Paypal off into an independent company in 2015.

Yes, technically the are separate. But given how tightly the systems remain integrated, it appears that was just for show.

>given how tightly the systems remain integrated

Ebay is moving away from its tight integration with Paypal and has a deal with a new payment processor (Adyen) after it's current paypal deal ends in 2020. Between that and the fact that they're two public companies with separate freely traded ownership, it's hard for me to buy the argument that the spin off was "just for show".

https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/ebay-to-intermediate-pa...

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

#127

Post by secabeen »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #85

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.

I wonder if they'll give all these small sellers the co-mingle option. If they switch to a model where the original vendor pays the extra to not co-mingle, it might indeed address the counterfeit copy. (Buy at MSRP from the original vendor, and be assured that it's genuine, or buy a discount version from another vendor, and take what you get.)

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

#128

Post by secabeen »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #112
erik_seaberg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they at least enforce that Anker products actually came from Anker and not some scammer who's happy to burn my apartment down?

No. It should hopefully be well known by now that Amazon "commingles" all inventory of a given item. You can never be sure if you'll get a well-made counterfeit on the "marketplace". Even if you PICK WHICH SELLER you get whatever's in the bin that the overworked amazon warehouse sub-sub-sub-contracted employee quickly plucks.

Sellers can choose to not co-mingle, but then they have to put a separate UPC code on the item.

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

#129

Post by whoisjuan »

Goronmon wrote: post #27

So Amazon is going harder into the marketplace side of things, turning Amazon from an online retailer into another version of eBay? This doesn't sound like a positive move for me, but I guess that doesn't necessarily means its bad for Amazon's profitability if other people don't mind rolling the dice on random products by relatively unknown sellers and manufacturers.

The article doesn't say that at all. It says that they are going to stop sourcing from small wholesalers and buy directly from consumer brands, essentially bypassing other parties and enabling a factory to shipping center channel. If anything is syaing the complete opposite of what you stated in your comment.

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

#130

Post by JohnFen »

sodiumfree wrote: post #125
criddell wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, then you'd miss out on a lot of great products from third-party sellers, and with this latest push that is the subject of this article, you'd see less and less showing up. ...and you can do this after you do a search and see results and get to where you have additional filtering options. I'm guilty of using "Show only Prime offers" or whatever that one is called. After becoming a seller that does FBA and seller…

> There are great small businesses that still ship very fast, and at competitive prices and since I'm one now

The problem is that there are also a lot of scumbags doing the same thing, and it's impossible to tell the great small businesses from the scammers. I've been burned by that a few times, and it's why I don't buy anything from Amazon unless Amazon is fulfilling the order (where I have at least some recourse).

If I'm buying directly from small sellers, I'm either using their website directly or I'm doing it on eBay.

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