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Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

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Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#361

Post by Analemma_ »

tegansnyder wrote: post #301
nateburke wrote: post #266

About 10 years ago I met the head of IT for B&H cameras in NYC. Among many things, he was in charge of the hosting for their online store. After he complained about dealing with physical servers, I asked him if he had ever considered using AWS ec2 for the website, and he replied that his boss refused because he believed that Amazon would pull data on B&H products and use it to compete more effectively. I'm not sure t…

Its my understanding a some of the large bricks and mortar retailers also stray away from hosting on AWS for these same reasons.

I think that’s less about being afraid that Amazon will steal their data, and more that they don’t want to give any money to an entity already steamrolling them

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#362

Post by CerealFounder »

sacks2k wrote: post #171

I 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…

It's pretty anti-competitive that a company can operate a marketplace and sell on the same marketplace. It would seem like an obvious law to enact.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#363

Post by graeme »

sharemywin wrote: post #225
graeme wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every retail store does this.

To me this a form of bundling and should probably be illegal.

You would forbid the entire existing system of retail? Do you have an example of any country that operates this way?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#364

Post by toohotatopic »

MiroF wrote: post #289
toohotatopic wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget the other big competitors. Sun pushed OpenOffice to cut MS's profits from Office Google and MS are pushing into the Cloud to reduce Amazon's influence Amazon is creating its own ad network and offering Twitch to reign in Google Walmart is slowly creating its own global online shopping platform to compete with Amazon Should Amazon ever have no competitor, monopoly regulations would kick in. But usually, all…

Price's law is of questionable empirical validity, it's more like a useful guideline/urban legend. On the other hand, there is substantial economic research demonstrating the harms of monopolies, including vertical ones. I'm a bit confused. Are you claiming that because of Price's law, Amazon doesn't actually benefit from it's monopoly position?

Almost. I think that Amazon cannot hold a monopoly position in all markets because its size would be so big that a smaller competitor could compete.

As a consequence, there will be an optimal size where Amazon is serving many markets, most likely the most profitable ones, thus massively benefiting [ * ], but they leave every other market open.

Depending on the future, this is not necessarily a bad position because low interest rates could seed plenty of startups which means that competitors could operate below break even points.

The question is: will Amazon ever reach that position or will its competitors make sure that all its profitable markets will dry up and its growth will be limited?

[*] Actually, not Amazon is profiting because the value of that dominant position would be priced into Amazon shares in advance. Amazon would just execute its dominant position that its investors had foreseen.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#365

Post by slowwwclap »

sacks2k wrote: post #171

I 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…

I recently (pre-COVID19) sold all my Amazon and replaced it with Apple due to these issues. I feel Apple Pay, and the fast followers, will drive shopping to more platforms than Amazon by reducing friction for customers of independent websites (supported by USPS, UPS, Fedex... which Amazon has decided not to compete with anymore). With the Amazon COVID19 shipping delays, I’ve established many new shopping relationships online, and I hope that is the experience for many others, changing the market. The CEO of Shopify gives great talks about the important of this, so I do support that platform at this point.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#367

Post by adrianmonk »

darkerside wrote: post #345
TimSchumann wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The is absolutely no veil between the hypervisor and the guest virtual machines. Not in the EBS either. This is 100% true. To do any useful computation on your data (read, what you're using all AWS for) they have to have 100% visibility into your data. > If they say they won't read your data, better trust them. If you don't, stay away from their datacenters. That's it, right there. All of this is based on Trust in…

This is a similar level of trust that you give to banks not to seize your money, or to your bodyguard not to do you physical harm. Stealing data from a customer paying for hosting would be _very_ different, and much more scandalous, than identifying trends on a competitive marketplace and taking advantage of them by launching competing products.

Or your commercial landlord to not send the cleaning staff to rummage around in your filing cabinets. Which, while it could happen, is something that people don't really seem to get concerned about.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#368

Post by exolymph »

econcon wrote: post #331
sacks2k wrote: post #171

I 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…

Same happens to us but we split sales to Shopify. Any idea if Shopify does same? It seems their ambitions keeps growing, they started charging percentage of revenue instead of flat subscription.

Get worried when they start owning the customer relationship (or trying to). Already low-key happening in payments.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#369

Post by _vdpp »

omniscient_oce wrote: post #134
annoyingnoob wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is not great for the consumer. It lowers the bar for everyone. What I find mostly on Amazon in the past year or so is cheaper imported versions of decent products. The decent products are hard to find or I have to look outside of Amazon. They've pushed out the quality and replaced it with higher profit junk. Its kind of the same thing with Home Depot. I used to be able to buy quality hardware from a local st…

I tried to look for a decent priced backpack on Amazon a few months ago but there are a gazillion listings for what appears to be the same backpack, only the names differ. I ended up just buying it straight from Aliexpress from where it undoubtedly has been sourced from one of the same (or single?) factories. There's basically cheap-as-chips level products, and then 'high-grade' which is still dubious at times whethe…

Even worse, assuming the high-grade brand is better to begin with - are you buying the real thing, or a counterfeit?

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#370

Post by sneak »

aleksaxyz wrote: post #356
sneak wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is just a special case of “online communication”. It’s illegal for the phone company to arbitrarily suspend your service for what (legal things) you say over the phone. It’s legal for Twitter or Amazon or Etsy or Twitch or Discord or YouTube. I recently got suspended by Twitter after using it daily for 12 years and in addition to not being able to send new tweets or DMs (or do data backup/takeout), I als…

Can I see the laws that affect phone companies and free speech? That's an interesting observation, and does parallel Twitter/YouTube/etc, so I'd like to see the wording for it.

I think that the relevant laws are those related to the phone/cable companies being public utilities (and thus explicit, by-design, state-permitted monopolies or duopolies). They aren’t allowed to wiretap them (because communications privacy was a bigger deal to legislators pre-internet) and have to provide service to all comers (ostensibly in exchange for being a monopoly-by-design).

From my limited understanding, this regulation forcing them to offer service (as a utility) to 100% of the market is coordinated on a state-by-state basis by the public service/public utilities commission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utilities_commission

(Fun fact, I learned this at a young age because my dad ran a paging/voicemail service out of the basement of our single family, suburban residential home when I was about 10. We were the only house on the block with dozens of trunk lines coming into our little bungalow; but by law they had to do it if you ordered it. Try that today with internet access from a cable company, ha! It’s all but impossible due to TOS to run an internet business at a residential address now. Hosting for-profit services with the internet you pay for or reselling the service in any way means you get instantly unplugged.)

Sorry I don’t have a direct link to the all-comers bit of PUC/PSC regulation, but this should give you a starting point for research.

The not-allowed-to-tap-phones bit is a federal law:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511

It’s sort of insane how provider-wiretapped has been the all-encompassing default for almost all of the largest DM/1-to-1 communications systems in the world: SMS, WeChat, Facebook, VK, Instagram, Gmail. WhatsApp and iMessage are outliers in this regard. Almost all popular new entrants like Slack and Discord are provider-tapped, too.

This is a relatively recent development in our society’s relationship with electronic communications. Reading content by the provider used to be illegal as fuck.

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