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

Post by missedthecue » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 2:30 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #155

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #76

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What really is the issue? That Amazon is leveraging its success to be successful? It's unfair that Amazon is able to see that a product category is doing well so it invests its own money into manufacturing a product to sell through its site? Do you really think that if Amazon couldn't use the data from its own site that it wouldn't procure it elsewhere? Before any product is developed there is extensive market resear…

Vertical monopolies are anti-competitive. It works like this: 1. Amazon clones independent manufacturer's product. 2. Amazon strangles manufacturer because they can promote their own product more and have lower overhead because they control the entire chain. 3. Competitor dies. 4. Amazon has no competition on this product. 5. They raise prices and/or lower quality. 6. Consumers pay more for a shittier product.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 2:34 AM UTC

jlgaddis wrote: post #608

AmericanChopper wrote: post #491

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Say you completely ignore scaling. The two things you simply cannot replicate at that scale are redundancy and operational resource. AWS has their entire operations team working at all hours of the day and night supporting their infrastructure. They also offer some of the most highly redundant services in the world. There is simply no way you could ever dream of replicating those service levels with such a small oper…

> AWS has their entire operations team working at all hours of the day and night supporting their infrastructure. They also offer some of the most highly redundant services in the world. And yet, a couple times a year perhaps, we have discussions right here on HN about the latest AWS outage that took down half the Internet.

Post by baddox » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 2:46 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #237

baddox wrote: post #111

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> It is not illegal to have a monopoly; but it is illegal to use a monopoly you have in one area to get an unfair advantage in another. This is a very common misconception in the United States. It’s how a lot of defenders of antitrust law want antitrust law to work, but it is not how antitrust law does work. This Supreme Court case explicitly establishes that antitrust laws can be used against companies which obtain…

> antitrust laws can be used against companies which obtain a high market share simply by anticipating future demand and responding effectively and efficiently. This would make sense as a feature. If you subscribe to the view that competitive pressure is the source of progress, then you never want any company to actually win . Like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick, you want companies to endlessly run towards mark…

Post by Iknowecomm » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 2:58 AM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #522

alaskamiller wrote: post #497

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With Shopify you don't pay ~20% sales commission to Amazon per se, but you sure as heck will end up paying for that if not more to Facebook. Where by FB has no direct incentive, yet. It could be a FB Marketplace PM team someone has already copied Shopify outright and is just waiting for the right time to roll that out to all FB user worldwide. With Amazon Marketplace the strategy has always been to convert customers…

I think Shopify should experiment with a centralized market place where stores can opt in. If you opt in, your store items are listed in a central location searchable in at single point, just like Amazon. Your item listing in the central market place merely directs you to YOUR branded store, allowing you to check out, and see your other products. That solves a huge problem of visibility that Amazon has mastered.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 24, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

vageli wrote: post #395

deanCommie wrote: post #285

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Sounds like this head of IT isn't very good at his job if he can't explain the difference between EC2 access, databases, and web requests over TLS There are ways that you can use AWS that Amazon would have no way to access any of your data even if they wanted to.

If any decryption of your data occurs on AWS hardware (i.e. if your software in AWS has access to your unencrypted data), then wouldn't AWS also have access to it if they wanted? Even with encrypted volumes, etc, the decrypted data is present in memory, AWS controls the box with the memory in it.