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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

#691

Post by wpietri »

smbullet wrote: post #132
wpietri wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not. Consumers are best served when you have a bunch of relatively equal players competing for their business, and where success is rewarded financially. That gives everybody an incentive to focus on continuously getting better at serving the customer through R&D, etc. But if the reward for success is just having Amazon come in and hoover up the money you would have gotten by launching a knockoff, then sud…

I dislike Amazon as much as the next guy but let's not kid ourselves here. Consumers aren't looking for innovation in the paper towel market. They just want cheap stuff. If Amazon can make these products cheaper then the consumers win.

Product feature innovation is not the only kind of innovation. Supply chain innovation provides the cost reductions needed to lower prices. And you regardless need product expertise to know where to cut costs.

As a super-obvious example, an accountant looking to cut costs at a hamburger chain might first suggest reducing the amount of meat or using old meat. But that reduces value as much or more than costs, so it's a bad optimization.

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

#693

Post by kchr »

Iknowecomm wrote: post #627
partiallypro wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The reason they don't do this is a legal one. As a platform, they are not liable for what their sellers sell (copyright/trademark/counterfeit), but as a marketplace they would have deeper liability. A central marketplace also gives brands the ability to search through all Shopify stores, basically giving them a search engine to find infringement. How do I know this? 10 years in ecommerce with a different ecomm platfo…

That's exactly what Amazon has succeeded with: Owning the marketplace, but without any of the liabilities you mention...

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

#694

Post by wpietri »

jacobr1 wrote: post #116
wpietri wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your evidence that we get better outcomes for consumers?

Good question. Actually I don't have any data for that. Anecdotally many "store brand" items of things that seem commodity-like, are things that I can get the same quality as a name brand at a lower price. This is better for me, and I suspect better for most consumers in a static situation. But the market is dynamic. Does this stifle innovation of new products? Does the reduced revenue of "brand" named producers, esp…

Sadly, the American grocery store is not optimized for consumers, so we can't draw many inferences from it. It's true that no-frills versions of commodity products are a good deal compared with heavily marketed products. But I don't see any reason to think letting individual stores dominate that market segment would be necessarily better for consumers.

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

#695

Post by wpietri »

baddox wrote: post #125
wpietri wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not. Consumers are best served when you have a bunch of relatively equal players competing for their business, and where success is rewarded financially. That gives everybody an incentive to focus on continuously getting better at serving the customer through R&D, etc. But if the reward for success is just having Amazon come in and hoover up the money you would have gotten by launching a knockoff, then sud…

> Consumers are best served when you have a bunch of relatively equal players competing for their business, and where success is rewarded financially. That depends on the significance of economies of scale and barriers to entry in a particular market. The term “natural monopoly” (as it’s used in economics) refers to a particular market where, because of barriers to entry, the optimal number of firms is one. Two firms…

Consumers are definitely better served by competitive markets than monopolies, natural or otherwise. I agree that's not always possible, and where it isn't, we generally get bad monopolist behavior, heavy regulation, or both.

I also suspect the notion of "natural monopoly" is oversold and too simple. Would it be more efficient if we had exactly one ISP for the country? In theory, yes, because then we only have to run one set of wires everywhere, and we'd get rid of a lot of duplicative equipment and staff. But in practice, monopoly and oligopoly ISPs are generally both expensive and bad. I just moved from a competitive area to a "natural monopoly" area; my internet now costs twice as much for 10% of the bandwidth, much lower quality, and much worse service.

I think that's because companies aren't static entities that reliably produce goods, even though that's what most people imagine. Instead they're temporary coalitions of individual actors hopefully prodded into optimal behavior by external forces like competition. Especially so given American business culture, which often refuses to recognize ways of thinking that might mitigate the problems.

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

#696

Post by qaq »

tekknik wrote: post #679
qaq wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you have say 3 Region deployment are you saying that you are running 50% more instances than you need in 2 regions that are not US East to make sure you will have capacity when US East goes down :) ? I somehow seriously doubt that.

so you’re suggesting entire regions go down at once or one of the AZs? An entire region doesn’t go down. So again, you are not building for high availability.

US East as a whole went down several times plus a number of incidents when S3 or other critical services went down for the whole region.

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

#697

Post by gk1 »

throwaway_aws wrote: post #644
rglover wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynical curiosity: did the services they poached from have such abysmal UX/DX or is that an Amazon touch?

They poached because it was a lucrative business. AWS’ sales pitch was that their service was so much better integrated with the underlying infra. Also, they priced out the competition and offered generous discount for bundling with additional AWS services.

Funny (or sad)... I described those very tactics in When AWS, Azure, or GCP Become the Competition: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/big-cloud/

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

#698

Post by tehjoker »

ceejayoz wrote: post #429
kube-system wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure about that. AWS terms do not assign their customers any rights to any physical computer. And the AWS customer agreement gives Amazon the authority to access your data for certain purposes. I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone prosecuted under the CFAA for accessing a computer that they physically own and physically control. AWS is a service, not a computer rental.

https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ > We will not access or use Your Content except as necessary to maintain or provide the Service Offerings, or as necessary to comply with the law or a binding order of a governmental body. The CFAA uses wording like "exceeds authorized access", which Amazon would absolutely be guilty of if they went into your database to spy on your product listings. If they could go after Aaron Swar…

A reminder that the legal system is designed to serve the wealthy, and few are wealthier than Amazon. It's not absolute, but the little guy isn't going to walk away with Bezo's fortune in damages.

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

#700

Post by salawat »

reaperducer wrote: post #653
salawat wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets see.. Boeing: See 737 MAX, other 737 boondoggle like the vertical stabilizer reversal back in 94'ish. Monsanto, hell, what chemical hasn't hid information they damn well shouldn't: Dicamba, roundup.. Take your pick. The stellar behavior of this corporate citizen taints cements the stereotype of an entire industry. https://thecounter.org/dicamba-trial-monsanto-basf-pesticide... https://www.phillyvoice.com/new-yor…

Several dozen companies doing bad things, compared with the hundreds of thousands of companies operating in the United States. I stand by my statement -- it is rare.

You misunderstand. That is just what I keep in my head and have been accurately tracking and commiting to remembering in the last 5 or so years.

As has been mentioned as well is that governmental/regulatory apparata are typically starved of funding, so must limit their investigation/scrutiny to likely the most obvious cases.

Furthermore, if you've just entered into white collar circles these last few years, you may have been surprised at a tendency to not write things down. This isn't just people not realizing it is a good idea to do so, but a conscious decision in many cases due to eDiscovery, and the effects it has on provability in a court of law.

Pay attention on HN, and you'll get little snippets of other cases of "tribal skeletons" every now and again.

Anyway, by all means, I'm not necessarily arguing against your point; merely stating that given the sample size, and keeping in mind that regulators/the media can only dig up so much muck given limited manpower; it is not prudent to assume there isn't wrongdoing where no one has looked yet. I used to hold the same view you espouse; then I started A)cataloging things and B) noticed how often settlements seem to be applied with no admission of wrong doing.

Absence of evidence does not imply evidence of the non-existence thereof. You just haven't found it yet.

Can't believe I forgot about Wells Fargo, btw. That whole mess.

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

ISP's have been known to falsify their Form 477 data fabricating coverage stats, and overcharging customers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/complaints-att-directv-bundled-...

https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/verizon-wireless/nation...

There's plenty more where that came from with every ISP to be honest.

FTC keeps stats on all enforcement actions apparently. Might be a decent place to start looking to get some solid numbers.

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases-proceedings/

Mind that that's only the ones. I assume CFPB and other commissions have similar, but do keep in mind they can't be everywhere or investigate everyone. So without stats on how many actions are dropped by prosecutorial/investigator's discretion, it is actually difficult to make really solid claims as to the actual frequency of malfeasance. Further, from my social circle's anecdata, it seems to be a safe bet that just about every organization at least has something in the the way of "muck they've cleaned up after" without getting authorities involved.

Anyway... I've rambled enough.

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