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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

#471

Post by theturtletalks »

chrischen wrote: post #469
theturtletalks wrote: post #455

This is the exact reason why Shopify grew rapidly. Sellers knew they needed a platform where they own the data and could abstract the operations outside of Amazon seller dashboard. People also forget that Amazon doesn't have to pay to advertise its own products, but 3rd party sellers do. This immediately puts you at a disadvantage if you want your product at the top since you pay seller commission and advertising fee…

Amazon does have to pay. It is an opportunity cost to them.

Sure, another seller could take their spot and they are potentially losing that ad money, but with their strategy, they can price out anyone since they don't pay seller commissions either.

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

#472

Post by friendlybus »

choward wrote: post #447
CodeCube wrote: post #290

So 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…

App stores are the same thing since most companies with app stores have their own apps. They can decide when the right time is to build their own version of something that's popular and promote it in their app store.

Microsoft was trying to do this and it led to antitrust cases. The browser wars ended with windows forced open to multiple default browsers.

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

#473

Post by 3pt14159 »

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…

Hold up one second. Is this something that they're actually open to doing? Surely part of their ToS isn't about stealing data on their physical infrastructure to enable other aspects of their business. Right? Has any data centre ever done this?

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

#474

Post by kortilla »

ngneer wrote: post #387
TimSchumann wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with any of what you've said. I just think that many people are ignorant of that being the case with Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc because they assume 'Well Technology must have solved that'. Then again, compared to the average bear, maybe I'm unusually circumspect when it comes to all of those things.

Technology alone cannot solve the use of technology to promote interests of parties in a zero sum game.

The promise of homomorphic encryption is to allow cloud computing without giving your data away.

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

#476

Post by qaq »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #438
qaq wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This amazes me it's so much easier at that scale to deal with 6-10 boxes vs all the crap that comes with AWS. Don't want to deal with managing them there are companies that will do it for you and you will have an actual on call people that are accountable to you. Unless you are doing 6+ figures a month in AWS spend have fun trying to have same level of service.

I’m a big believer in use cases that fit on-prem solutions like that. But you’re dreaming if you think a 6-10 box operation is going to come close to the same service levels as AWS, and if you want to replicate the developer experiences that you can achieve on AWS, you’re going to have to devote a lot of resource to it. Whether scaling works well on-prem depends entirely on your scaling requirements. If you have burs…

I am not only not dreaming I've being running workloads like that for a long time. Both in cloud and colo. If it's my money sanity or ass on the line colo is my strong pref. I def. do not want to replicate developer experience of AWS in Colo as AWS has s ton more moving pieces which are black boxes and have arbitrary limits. Scaling is a disingenuous point for most e-commerce apps as you generally have RDBMS that do not scale horizontally so cloud or no cloud your bottleneck is the same. The price point at which say Spanner would outperform a cluster of RDBMS on high end boxes is way south of 100K/month and no of the shelf e-commerce software would support it anyway.

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

#477

Post by RandomBacon »

joyj2nd wrote: post #352
TimSchumann wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know what is a pretty good competitor? Competitor on what vector? Speaking from a US-centric viewpoint here, but my thoughts; * Distribution & Warehousing - Walmart & Costco * Sales & Advertising - Google & Facebook A few notable online storefronts that are independent and I use frequently are B&H Photovideo and Newegg. Realistically though the options I listed above are the only companies I see having the scal…

Yes, sorry, I meant from a buyer perspective. As a side node: I am actually thinking of buying a tiny bankrupt travel equipment company. Friends advised against it because of "Amazon essentials". I would not sell on Amazon but it is a strong argument. Maybe someone has some words of wisdom regarding to this.

> bankrupt

What do they have that you want, or what do you think you're going to do differently?

Why did it go bankrupt?

If they claim it's only bankrupt because of COVID-19, then it must not have been very profitable (if at all) if they didn't have enough money to weather out at least 3 months. So I recommend not accepting that explanation.

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

#478

Post by missedthecue »

Tostino wrote: post #446
saadalem wrote: post #440

Those were the dirtiest business tactics of Amazon Nobody can beat Amazon’s margin. Amazon “invites” you to sell on their marketplace. You hustle. You innovate. You test the market. You risk your time and money. Until FINALLY you nail it! After weeks or months of hard work you finally find the right product at the right price… SUCCESS! You start making money! Everything is amazing… But “someone” has been watching you…

It's almost like there should probably be some oversight on one of the most powerful entities on the planet to stop these anti-competitive practices.

Is it really in the spirit of anti competitive laws if the consumer wins?

This is more like one business owner (FBA seller) trying to sic the authorities on their competition (Amazon Basics) in order to keep a competitive advantage. This seems more anti competitive than what Amazon is doing

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

#479

Post by stcredzero »

StillBored wrote: post #323
stcredzero wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies are already offering discounts for using their apps while in car. I was debating on whether I should include mention of these apps. Here's the thing about that: The data available to these apps is nothing compared to the data available to Tesla. Tesla can figure out how often you get close to bumping into something, exactly how far, how fast you were going, and what the lighting/weather conditions…

All the things you name are available to a phone app as well. Particularly, if it has enough penetration to be in the vehicles near you. Local weather + data aggregation from all the insurance companies apps and suddenly about the only thing they don't have is whether you were looking at the road, and the condition of your tires and other vehicle specific metrics. Sure the GPS/accel data might be off a few percent vs…

All the things you name are available to a phone app as well.

Only 'kinda'. You might get 1 camera feed, and you can see what the weather report was for the area. Tesla has something like 8 camera feeds, and they can tell if visibility was compromised because the other car situated at 7-o'clock to the rear was in a building's deep shadow. The app could only kinda get that if one were lucky.

suddenly about the only thing they don't have is whether you were looking at the road, and the condition of your tires and other vehicle specific metrics

That and a lot more! Also, with far superior granularity, and with fewer data quality problems.

(BTW, Assuming a deal with your credit card company, they probably can approximate your tire age too).

Again, mostly. I would agree that the apps could compete. They're competing at a significant disadvantage, though.

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