Of course they did, and what’s wrong with it? Regular brick and mortar grocery stores do the same thing. It’s called private label.
Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
311–320 of 727 posts
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean. That's what I meant. Upfront in the sense that they compete with their suppliers by having a lot of brands that are hard to distinguish as white-label brands by Target.
To me that is not a problem as long as they are not giving their own products better placement. If 50 brands of cornflakes and in them target has a 10 white-label brands that is not a problem but if all 10 white-label brands are put in front of other brands ie first few in search results then it is a problem.
In all seriousness, not giving your own brands prominent placement would be ignoring the benefits of vertical integration, leaving money on the table, and violating your fiduciary duty to stockholders.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
When your customers say that their product is too niche, they're probably right in a lot of cases. The argument that Amazon can enter every niche and cater to every consumer want is essentially saying that planned economies can actually function. But they can't. Amazon is skimming the highest volume product categories and that's it. They couldn't manage the complexity of branching out into every single long tail prod…
Not highest volume. Highest gross profit (volume * margin). And how would you ever know either of these two (volume, margin) if you were an arbitrary 3rd party? Amazon doesn't need to branch out into every single long tail product to cause severe disruption to a retail sector that is often predicated on low single digit margins.
How does Amazon know margin?
Amazon know volume, Amazon goes to suppliers on alibaba and gives them the quantity they require and then Amazon figures out what margin they'll be making if they sell it at the same or lower price than the original seller.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's not what a platform is. You can always sell your product direct to consumer. You just can't be the intermediary for both your own and other companies' products on the same site.
The software corollary would be that Apple can no longer host GarageBand and Keynote on the App Store, and Google can no longer host GMail or Google Docs on the Play Store.
I think that's a great call-out. It's interesting that we don't see the same problem in app stores -- probably because there's not much profit motive for apps like there is for general retail.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#315Amazon is the worst company when it comes to ethics. They don't even pay taxes. Horrible company.
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm honesty curious what crime this would be. If I rent time on someone else's server, and they look at what I'm doing on that server, what illegal thing has happened?
Huh, WTF?! Your FBI used to railroad random kiddies for messing around with poorly programmed dynamic pages and now you’re arguing there’s nothing wrong if a hosting provider trespasses and mines your private property?!
The rules the FBI/DoJ applies to kids on irc are not the same rules the FBI/DoJ applies to multibilliondollar infrastructure companies and/or trusted military defense contractors (Amazon is both).
Equal protection or application of computer crime law (perhaps, any law) in the USA is a fiction. It would be practically illegal to invent and run a web spider today, for instance, if they didn’t already exist as a concept. (France recently decided this was true for news link aggregation; Google must pay the newspapers for reproducing their headlines. I’m glad hosted RSS readers aren’t outlawed so far, but under these sorts of restrictive legal interpretations you could see how they might be. Google doing AMP, of course, gets a free pass.)
If you don’t believe me about the web spider thing, try making a complete download of Twitter for the purpose of making a tweet search index and see if you get to continue owning your house. (My theory is that Clearview is allowed to do it for Instagram because they’re using the database to provide services to law enforcement/military, so those groups want it to continue to exist free of prosecution.)
Bummer that actively collaborating with violent types like pigs and military seems to be the only way to avoid jail if you want to build large novel data systems with interesting public datasets today. This sort of freedom to experiment with new/neat algorithms over published documents got us Google; today these same companies will get you raided if you dare download/index their data. (Facebook’s idea famously started out scraping public yearbook photos. Try scraping Facebook now.)
one small counterpoint: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
RIP aaronsw
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#317I saw this happening a decade ago, but I had no real proof. I had a profitable Amazon store in 2010. I found niche products that Amazon didn't sell. As soon as I started getting traction on any one product, Amazon would start undercutting me, and my sales would drop to almost zero over the course of a couple of weeks. I had near 100% feedback and I had a single customer complaint that I sold them the wrong product. W…
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Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's not what a platform is. You can always sell your product direct to consumer. You just can't be the intermediary for both your own and other companies' products on the same site.
OK, done. Now you have Amazon Basics' products competing with Amazon Fulfillment's products on Amazon Dotcom's website. Different entities, not even under the same corporate governance.
If they are different entities, how come Amazon Basics can use the same name as the platform? Did Amazon sell the rights to another company to use their brand?
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#319So many comments about, "doesn't everyone know they do this?", and "everyone does this!" I say there should be an explicit difference between "running a platform", and "selling on a platform", and never should the two meet. By "platform" here, and in the context of selling stuff online or IRL, I mainly mean that the store should never compete with their suppliers ... it's madness and unethical. If everyone can get a…
Would this apply to physical platforms as well? E.g. Walmart and Target who also do similar things with similar data
Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the contrary, house brand products are great for consumers. Rather than having to figure out if they can trust a brand for a product category that they really don't care about, they can just buy the house brand knowing that a certain minimum level of quality exists. This is why Amazon Basics products are so popular on Amazon: consumers know that, at the very least, Amazon can be sued, a form of recourse that is no…
This is me. I bought an AmazonBasics product initially, a phone cable, thinking it would be crap. It wasn't. So I bought another one, a set of HDMI cables. They weren't crap either! Then I bought AmazonBasics wash cloths as a joke. They were quite nice! Now I find myself shopping around the AmazonBasics section first . I still find it amusing in a "Spaceballs, the flamethrower!" kind of way.
Where IS the AmazonBasics section? Is there a way to restrict searches to only Amazon white label products?