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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

#151

Post by notatoad »

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.

for any anker product i can find on amazon, there is only one seller - ankerdirect - selling on FBA. it's difficult to commingle products when they're all coming from the same seller.

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

#152

Post by rajmann »

baybal2 wrote: post #47
partiallypro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any more information on this? And do you think there is not more market elasticity in the US? It also seems this only effects wholesalers, not the traditional resalers.

You know that Alibaba have T-mall? It was their original take on "direct upscale retail brands" online mall. They were a late comes after JD had some early success, and followed by countless clones. T-mall was losing money big time, and none of bigger Taobao merchants wanted to move, moreover new Taobao brand stores were beginning to eat into T-mall. So, at around 2016 Alibaba decided to "give them a nudge" with rack…

Then what Amazon is doing here is reverse of what Alibaba/Tmall/Taobao tried. Amazon is pushing smaller brands(<$10M) from being a wholesaler to become a 3rd party seller. but Alibaba tried to push brands from being a 3p seller to a wholesaler. This may be because Taobao wasn't charging 3rd party sellers as much as Amazon, because Taobao was in direct competition with ebay. Also I guess Taobao doesn't have something similar to Fullfillment_by_Amazon, and it does direct shipment from seller to buyer.

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

#153

Post by bredren »

vonmoltke wrote: post #135
bredren wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Suing craigslist (and losing) for breach of fiduciary duty because it wouldn't exploit its users enough. The lawsuit had nothing to do with "exploiting users". It was about Newmark and Buckmaster's attempt to dilute eBay's shares. A lawsuit eBay won .

The fiduciary duty was to eBay. Which means eBay wanted craigslist to make more money, either through ads, data sales or both. Craigslist is so comparably benevolent, any additional revenue would have exploited its users.

The lawsuit also involved reversing the staggered board elections craigslist put in place specifically to prevent eBay from gaining access to confidential material.

Both the share dilution and board procedural change were done in response to ebay’s surprise launch of an attempted direct competitor to craigslist.

Both sides claimed victory, and eBay did not end up influencing Craigslist in any way. So it is hard to paint it as much of a victory. [1]

And whatever you think of craigslists slow, stodgy UX and feature set, it is hard to imagine if eBay had gained control having some positive impact on the site’s destiny apart from some comparably exploitive direction.

Ebay wanted first to make money off craigslist, and failing that to get info that would allow their competing biz to do so.

[1] https://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2010/09/10/did-ebay-really...

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

#154

Post by jessaustin »

secabeen wrote: post #128
kevin_b_er wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having done that, can they be sure that another seller won't try to horn in on the new UPC code?

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #20
mikehollinger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... blockchain for product quality? :-) Yeah, I'd like to be able to be able to look into / find who's a member of the bazaar and just fencing products, versus who's selling their own items directly. For example - I wouldn't buy speakers from some random reseller. I'd buy 'em from the original manufacturer, or the handful of "known" resellers that we all know like the big box stores.

This was discussed in depth on HN a while back about why blockchain doesn't really work well for supply chain management: https://blog.smartdec.net/you-do-not-need-blockchain-eight-p...

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by AFascistWorld »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #145
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…

> To bypass the pay/nag wall Why Outline over the Internet Archive [1]? The Archive is a non-profit with a decent privacy policy and identifiable leadership. Outline is an anonymous entity of unknown organisation with unknown motives. [1] https://archive.org

Just clear your cache and cookies.

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

#157

Post by AFascistWorld »

baybal2 wrote: post #47
partiallypro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have any more information on this? And do you think there is not more market elasticity in the US? It also seems this only effects wholesalers, not the traditional resalers.

You know that Alibaba have T-mall? It was their original take on "direct upscale retail brands" online mall. They were a late comes after JD had some early success, and followed by countless clones. T-mall was losing money big time, and none of bigger Taobao merchants wanted to move, moreover new Taobao brand stores were beginning to eat into T-mall. So, at around 2016 Alibaba decided to "give them a nudge" with rack…

This is a load of total bull, you sound like you never went into this industry and don't know how Alibaba makes money and how much.

Especially this line:

>T-mall was losing money big time

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

#158

Post by thirdsun »

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…

And that is exactly why they should have built their own shop and used it as their primary storefront. With services like Shopify or Squarespace it's not rocket science these days and you could still use Amazon, eBay or other marketplaces as additional sales channels. It's almost reckless and short-sighted not to maintain a truly owned store - don't put all your eggs in one basket.

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

#159

Post by baybal2 »

AFascistWorld wrote: post #157
baybal2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that Alibaba have T-mall? It was their original take on "direct upscale retail brands" online mall. They were a late comes after JD had some early success, and followed by countless clones. T-mall was losing money big time, and none of bigger Taobao merchants wanted to move, moreover new Taobao brand stores were beginning to eat into T-mall. So, at around 2016 Alibaba decided to "give them a nudge" with rack…

This is a load of total bull, you sound like you never went into this industry and don't know how Alibaba makes money and how much. Especially this line: >T-mall was losing money big time

Man, Alibaba was a company on my list of prospective employers for years, and I personally knew not so few people there. I certainly know what I talk.

For the first few years, T-mall was effectively running at near 0 profit, when they (unsuccessfully) tried to catch up with JD.

Please substantiate your commentary

Some more background: https://www.tlgcommerce.com.hk/blog/why-brands-are-leaving-t...

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

#160

Post by liotier »

_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.

> [eBay] stayed remarkable true to their mission

Having used eBay since its early days, I stopped when they lost their focus on auctions and became just another platform. Now I have to bother with market research to set a fixed price - much more hassle than auctioning at zero Euros and letting the market find the optimum price (only works in liquid categories though). I understand that the mass market finds auctions bewildering and prefers fixed price... I'm still disappointed.

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