141–150 of 232 posts
Is their a legal distinction that establishes Amazon as a platform first, and a seller second?
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Amazon is is doing with sponsored listings the same thing that Google did with its organic search results. "Oh your site is not the top 3 in search results for this keyword? You have a chance to stand out if you buy these ads." The shady difference here between the two is that Google did not try to show results from their own company, Amazon is.
When I search “email”, “maps”, “video”, and “cloud” through google on iOS safari, I get as the first non-ad result; Gmail, google maps, YouTube, and google cloud respectively.
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I mean, Walmart is also mega huge, and also allows 3rd party sellers on their website. is it troublesome that Walmart also promotes their own items or the items where they make the most profit first?
I think the bigger problem that people have in general with moves like this is the _change_. If Walmart previously didn't promote their brands, and now did so aggressively, you'd hear complaints as well. The other complaint seems to be "fairness." If you operate a platform, people expect it to be fair. But what is "fair" probably has more to do with historical cultural norms than actual abstract fairness, again it is…
What irony. Amazon's co-mingling is actually benefitting them in ways other than lowering costs — It's actively driving people to their house brand(s).
Amazon is pure (evil?) genius.
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 abu…
... and by the time most users would jump to another platform, that other platform would start pulling the same thing, because why not? Ad infinitum.
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Theoretical competition =/= actual competition. Yes, that could technically happen, but Amazon's market power makes it extremely difficult. Here, there's a two-sided marketplace (consumers and sellers) where Amazon has both sides. It's not enough for one side of the market to decide they want out. For example, see what merchants have done with Shopify and the Shop app (merchants are all on board, but consumers don't…
What you're describing is the competitive advantage of shoppers preferring Amazon though, at least from how I'm reading your post. If a seller alliance or rival omnicorp can't entice consumers then they need either better marketing or better deals, competing in short. If they can't succeed at either of those in a manner significant enough to challenge Amazon then how is targeting Amazon with legislation actually help…
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I think it's easy to describe why it's problematic without even referring to antitrust. Amazon's brand (as a store / marketplace) is that it helps you sort through many options to select the product they believe you will like the best. This is different from the service offered by traditional grocery stores which offer many different products, but are not arranging those products in relation to a particular request.…
> Amazon's brand (as a store / marketplace) is that it helps you sort through many options to select the product they believe you will like the best This is an extremely important part of the service that every store provides. The only difference with Amazon is that they offer a wider selection of everything. In brick and mortar stores, only one or a few products of each type are stocked and the rest are simply not o…
A Safeway house brand is usually offered at a small discount to the name brand, because the consumer trusts the name brand more.
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Lots of things that are "normal" become highly anti-human when done with Amazon's scale and lack of human review/input.
> Lots of things that are "normal" become highly anti-human when done with Amazon's scale and lack of human review/input. This would make more sense if the consumers benefiting were not human.
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 believe the difference between Amazon and a grocery store is that a storefront has to pay for its stock up front and then sell it. This means that if a store stocks a competitor, the company that created the competing product has already been paid. Stores often have agreements with distributers to return and get partial refunds for unsold stock, but not usually the full amount. Whereas Amazon is not a storefront, i…
Among others. Including aggressive tax avoidance in most jurisdictions in which it operates.
Amazon is nothing like a grocery store. Nor is it like a department store. Nor is it an online store.
It's more like a B-movie monster which is trying to devour retail, manufacturing, supply chain management, logistics, consumer analytics, advertising, content creation, web services, publishing, consumer AI - and a significant proportion of the cardboard box industry.
> The new approach violates Amazon’s mantra that every decision must put the customer first, said Tim Hughes, a consultant who used to work in product management at Amazon. “Why would their brand be a better option for consumers?” said Hughes, chief operating officer of a firm that helps brands manage Amazon accounts. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be cheaper, or better, or anything. So then what’s their justification to say, ‘We’re just going to put this up in front of everybody else’? This is just another example of Amazon being able to manipulate the platform for its own good use.”
I don't disagree with this, but at the same time, if you're arguing for advertising determining what gets the top slots, why would a manufacturer that can pay more be a better option for consumers?
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…
Try it yourself. The hard part is finding out what Amazon's brands are since they (surprise!) don't publish a list. This is the best list I could find in my short time searching
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-owns-these-brands-lis...