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Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

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Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

#21

Post by Dahoon »

saltedonion wrote: post #13

I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…

> but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end

It's quite easy. Amazon is abusing its position to drive others out of business. They collect a lot of data and when someone finds a great selling product they move in and take over a big chunk of the market. That can and will hurt the customer. It should be illegal, as it actually is in some markets.

Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

#22

Post by ponker »

saltedonion wrote: post #13

I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…

Lots of things that are "normal" become highly anti-human when done with Amazon's scale and lack of human review/input.

Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

#23

Post by mtgx »

ABeeSea wrote: post #8

I just did the “ground coffee” and melatonin searches. Entire first row was an ad for bulletproof coffee and sugarbearhair vitamins. Second row had the amazon brand on the left with prominent amazon logos on the coffee bag and the pill bottle and a tag that says “featured from our brands” and the first word in he title for both items was Amazon. The next three items were sponsored ads. I don’t see amazon being decept…

There probably need to be laws that you can't be both a platform and compete against those on your platform with your own products/content. And make sure to close the "we'll just ban our competition from the platform then!" loophole.

It seems inevitable that once a platform, whether it's an ISP, a media platform, or an ecommerce platform, starts making its own products for that platform, then they will also start abusing their power against their own platform partners.

It's just irresistible for them not to, because there's so much to gain from it. So only (pro-active) laws could stop this. You can't leave it "to the market" to solve this, because by the time that happens (if ever), the platform company would have already extracted tens and hundreds of billions of dollars from the strategy and killed an untold number of smaller companies.

Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

#24

Post by telchar »

masona wrote: post #7

Working at an agency that mostly did CPG work for P+G, I remember how so much of the design work was about catching someone's eye on shelf: how to stand out in a sea of packaging. Millions (and millions) of dollars were spent trying to crack the code. But it's no longer a flat canvas where you can see everything all at once. The shelf is not flat, it's deep. You have to move through products one by one. In the articl…

I think the depth is inversely proportional to the utility of search - the better I can search for the combination of features, price, etc that I need the less deep the shelf gets. The endless generic white-labeled junk plus poor metadata really makes the problem bad though.

Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

#25

Post by mikepurvis »

saltedonion wrote: post #13

I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…

I've found the "basics" products to be a little hit and miss, at least as far as electronics— USB cables, network hubs, and the like. However, one thing I really do like about them is the minimal packaging. So much other e-commerce stuff still arrives in retail-style blister packages, which is absurd.

Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

#27

Post by Spivak »

chillacy wrote: post #20
saltedonion wrote: post #13

I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…

Add to this the fact that a lot of these brands don’t even manufacture their items in the first place: they source manufacturers and slap their logo and marketing on, then markup the item price. Does that really add value? In some cases the private label even uses the same manufacturers, the people producing the product still get paid in the end.

Sooooooo many no-name brands that just buy something on Aliexpress and put their logo on it. I'm happy to wait the long shipping times just to get the unbranded version.

Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

#28

Post by ChrisLomont »

Dahoon wrote: post #21
saltedonion wrote: post #13

I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…

> but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end It's quite easy. Amazon is abusing its position to drive others out of business. They collect a lot of data and when someone finds a great selling product they move in and take over a big chunk of the market. That can and will hurt the customer. It should be illegal, as it actually is in some markets.

Amazon's share of the US retail market is too small to call them a monopoly there, and they hold around half of online retailing, again too small to be a monopoly, since there are ample places to get goods elsewhere.

Until they're a legal monopoly in some suitable category, they are welcome to do this. One effect may drive amazon competitors to cater to all the sellers. And at any rate, to be the top spot Amazon has to be offering good enough prices to get consumer dollars.

For now it benefits the consumer, because they are getting good prices and possibly avoiding lots of junk sellers selling bad goods. Amazon brand good are trustworthy compared to a lot of sellers.

Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

#29

Post by throwaway0a5e »

chillacy wrote: post #20
saltedonion wrote: post #13

I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…

Add to this the fact that a lot of these brands don’t even manufacture their items in the first place: they source manufacturers and slap their logo and marketing on, then markup the item price. Does that really add value? In some cases the private label even uses the same manufacturers, the people producing the product still get paid in the end.

> Does that really add value?

The value add is that you can have decent confidence the product isn't so crappy that the brand is unwilling to put their name on it. Presumably Walmart, Harbor Freight, Amazon, whoever at least got a test batch of the product and made sure it actually worked before ordering millions of them. The consumer can just buy the widget at a slight markup for $1.99 and know it will work instead of going on Ebay or Alibaba and buying direct from exporters and wondering whether they should get varieties A, B or C for $1.59, $1.69 or $1.79.

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