151–160 of 438 posts
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How is a power bank different than a battery? Isn't the power bank just several batteries crammed in a casing, with a power-out port?
jschwartzi was talking about power supplies (i.e., devices that transform mains AC power to DC power), not power banks.
ANTITRUST! If Microsoft can get hammered for packaging Internet Explorer with Windows (and probably rightly so, given the market conditions at the time), there is a direct analogy to be made here. Pick what you want to be: if you want to be the greatest goods index and shipment company in the world, fantastic. But you have to accept that you cannot sneak some of your own other-products to the top using that power. In…
No, there is not a direct analogy because Amazon is not a monopoly . They aren't even the largest retailer.
They've simply nailed it and scaled it. In New Zealand a company called TradeMe got there first and successfully fended off Amazon, but that's a minority case.
There are pros (e.g. consumers love it) and cons (e.g. human toll when optimising efficiency without robots) to having Amazon dominate in whatever country, but you can't deny, they get the job done. There isn't really another company competing with them at that level, is there? And that's why I think it's an effective monopoly.
To abuse this wide-reaching power, in making your own stuff rise to the top of world sales, is absolutely a concern and we should honestly be grateful that there are laws and funded agencies giving a shit about this.
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No, there is not a direct analogy because Amazon is not a monopoly . They aren't even the largest retailer.
I feel there's an argument to be made for Amazon having a near-monopoly on online sales and distribution in many countries, even outside America. They've simply nailed it and scaled it. In New Zealand a company called TradeMe got there first and successfully fended off Amazon, but that's a minority case. There are pros (e.g. consumers love it) and cons (e.g. human toll when optimising efficiency without robots) to ha…
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You have a point but I think the fact that grocery stores sell private label goods is the counter-point. Grocery stores re-package goods like rice, beans, paper towels, etc. to compete with their vendors all the time. We call them supermarkets, right? A grocery store is simply a more organized open market. Which is very comparable to Amazon. I think the problem is that they present the results on good faith that "the…
> A grocery store is simply a more organized open market. That’s not true though right? Don’t grocery stores buy the products that are on their shelves and they are reselling them? That’s fundamentally different from a marketplace.
No, not usually. Usually the seller pays the grocery to carry items, and the seller owns the items until sold.
For some products the seller even stocks the items on the shelves.
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Anecdotally I've spoken to people who compete with Amazon private label in electronics and they tell me Amazon doesn't care about quality, and that the factories they were buying from were known to be lower quality. I've also heard the opposite about Anker - that they always get the best quality.
It makes sense- if Anker's batteries start exploding, nobody will buy Anker's batteries again, and that's a significant part of their brand. If Amazon's batteries start exploding, it's not quite the same magnitude. People will still shop at Whole Foods.
"Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products", and the sun is hot
It's too bad that Sears never really got into online. They were once the top catalog retailer, and known for consistent quality, good warranties, and boring products. Somehow they missed the Internet, retiring from catalog operations just as Internet shopping got going.
In the UK there's a company called Argos that worked ENTIRELY as a catalog store. Their physical locations were basically a warehouse with a lobby that had the catalogs and computers where you could look items up and order them. THEY should be a major competitor to Amazon... but according to my UK friends, they're not.
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Amazon used to have the best service, best quality products, and best prices, so practically every HN user loved them. Now they're wavering on all three of those fronts, and I guess that fact really bothers most of us
I'm not disagreeing with the premise that Amazon has issues. But I do not see a similar pattern with other companies and services. Of course, this is anecdotal, but it does seem significantly higher with Amazon itself. It is possibly that most HN users purchase a lot via Amazon? Is it a small but vocal group of HN users that have a grudge because they had an unsuccessful drop shipping operation that was harmed via Am…
Chargers and chemicals that go on your face and inevitably get ingested are obviously some of the most dangerous things to be fake, and Amazon clearly doesn't give the tiniest shit.
I repeat the story around here in hopes of saving someone else (potentially quite a lot!) of grief.
Considering how shopping at Amazon now feels like shopping at an electronics bazaar in Singapore with giant bins of random knock-off products of suspicious quality, tweaking the algo to push name-brand options (even if it's their own name-brand) would be a welcome move to me as a buyer. Obviously it's grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it's an improvement. Otherwise, Amazon feels l…
I'm done with buying stuff from third party sellers on Amazon. If the seller is not amazon.com, I am not buying from Amazon. Fulfilled by Amazon is not good enough. Unfortunately, the only way to get a seller option is to pick an item department. I wonder why they would bury such a useful feature. It should be a box you can tick for the whole site.
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> Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English. It literally is. All these products are cheap stuff that marketers find on aliexpress. They buy them in bulk, stamp a logo on it, import in the US/EU, stock in logistic centers and then sell on Amazon. It's the same stuff, but it comes from an English seller and a warehouse in US/EU. It's exactly the same thing that Amazon does with it…
The one difference is that the Amazon Basics products seem to have a quality bar higher than the other random re-labeled products.