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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

#191

Post by philwelch »

jimnotgym wrote: post #118
txcwpalpha wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Grocery stores (and all other brick-and-mortars) spend tons and tons of money and effort specifically arranging their stores to influence which products you will buy. It's done on the scale of which aisle certain products are on, all t…

>Grocery stores (and all other brick-and-mortars) spend tons and tons of money and effort specifically arranging their stores And if I don't like Tesco I can go to Asda. If Tesco won't sell my product I can try and sell it to Sainsbury's or Waitrose. The equivalent with Amazon is "If I don't like Walmart, there is some guy with a market stall selling fish, another with apples, a store 5 miles away that has carrots...…

If you don't like Amazon you can try Walmart.com. And hey--if I click on "Household Essentials" on Walmart.com, there's a "Brands We Love" section, with the first brand being Great Value, the Walmart store brand.

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

#192

Post by malandrew »

raz32dust wrote: post #160
wwarner wrote: post #152

Haters gonna hate. Every retailer has a store brand. Why is it a public good that I have to pay a premium price for a cable from a pre-approved seller? Why should anyone selling on Amazon think that they have an exclusive relationship with their customers? Sellers can, and always have, cannibalized one another's products. Yes, in school it's cheating, but in retail it's called competition. Every retailer can compete…

This has been discussed in threads below, but the jist of the issue is that Amazon is pretty much a monopoly as an online product discovery service. If they put their own products at the top, people will end up with no way of discovering other companies. It would be using its monopoly position as a product discovery service to profit its own manufacturing subsidy. > Every retailer can compete with Amazon on any axis…

It's absolutely laughable when people say that Amazon operates as "a monopoly as an online product discovery service".

There are so so so many options out there. I use plenty of online retailers all the time. Complaining about them being a monopoly in this way is like going to the same brick and mortar retailer and complaining they are a monopoly because you're too lazy to see what other retailers are available. If anything it's even more absurd because the closest brick and mortar competition might be miles away while online the competition is mere keystrokes away.

Every single search engine is also a product discovery service too: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo.

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

#193

Post by aeturnum »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #188
aeturnum wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you as far as generic categories go. Going to the cheese and dairy section in a supermarket is very similar to going to the Amazon cheese and dairy (and eggs) section[1]. Stores maximizing the revenue they receive from their average customer, which they do quite aggressively as you note, feels very different from what Amazon is doing. >the store has arranged their aisle in such a way that influences which ch…

You're basically saying that because Amazon has better agility, and can effectively rearrange their "shelves" faster than Target can (Amazon can rearrange them between every customer, whereas Target can only do it maybe once a day), Amazon should be punished for that? I just don't really see why or how that makes a difference. To extend it again to the grocery store example, if I walk into a Target and ask the custom…

Yes, stores that push the products made by them over other alternatives are worse for the customer and harmful to the market.

I don't think there's anything wrong with stores recommending something in general. For instance, I don't think there's anything wrong with the "amazon's choice" label that Amazon uses.

This feels different to me, because as I said originally, this isn't Amazon recommending their brand. Amazon still ranks search results based on some combination of popularity and (probably) profitability.

To return to the in-store scenario: let's say you asked someone in Target to recommend crackers. The employee has a recommendation, but to hear it you first need to be shown the Target brand crackers, and then the employee will give you their recommendation.

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

#194

Post by ghaff »

vikramkr wrote: post #183
aeturnum wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you as far as generic categories go. Going to the cheese and dairy section in a supermarket is very similar to going to the Amazon cheese and dairy (and eggs) section[1]. Stores maximizing the revenue they receive from their average customer, which they do quite aggressively as you note, feels very different from what Amazon is doing. >the store has arranged their aisle in such a way that influences which ch…

How often have you been in a pharmacy and seen the generic CVS brand on both ends of the aisle before seeing the pharma brand? There's a lot of people working on making that 100% without violating their contracts with their suppliers

Or signs next to their house-branded products that basically say "Buy $FAMOUS_BRAND $X if you like but if you look at the ingredients you'll see we're the exact same thing and we're cheaper."

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

#195

Post by koolhead17 »

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…

Amazon also knows my previous buying shopping history, it can target princely the white labeled product of its, which I have been buying regularly.

It is more than best shelves.

Tyranny and data moat when marketplace also becomes your competitor.

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

#196

Post by ghaff »

jbay808 wrote: post #146
modeless wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The other difference with Amazon is that they have very low quality enforcement, and offer counterfeit items. So "Amazon Basics" is a strong indicator of quality for commodities and they can charge as much or more than for brand name items. A Safeway house brand is usually offered at a small discount to the name brand, because the consumer trusts the name brand more.

Yep. If I need a USB cable or some other electronics commodity, I at least know that the Amazon Basics isn't a knock-off and it's at least good enough. That, of course, reflects badly on Amazon in other ways but it is, as you say different from store brands which are mostly about undercutting perceived premium brands with good enough product for people who aren't fussy. (Or for offering a cheaper alternative for things that really are commodities.)

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

#198

Post by mikepurvis »

_jal wrote: post #106
ehh2heiddn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how people buy a single small item have it shipped to them then have the gall to complain about shipping waste.

Funny how people lean so far out to criticize others only to find their own butt flapping in the breeze. Amazon does this a lot, no matter what your order looks like. The most pathological I've ever seen was at an old workplace, they shipped 20 boxes of pens (12 packs or whatever size of disposable pens) each in a separate large box. The delivery person took several trips up the elevator to deliver them. But, of cour…

I think in some of these cases the items are pre-packaged for shipment. There's some inflection point where 90% of customers who order item X order only that item, and it makes sense to have them ready to just slap a label on and go. I'd imagine that the packing stage could become a bottleneck for a busy time at a DC, and pre-packing single items would not only lighten the load during a rush, it would also allow those packing stations to remain occupied during a lull.

Obviously, Prime also pushes people toward single-item orders, which helps justify this strategy, and also increases people's dependence on a service level that is hard for competitors to match who aren't at a scale where these kinds of approaches work out.

Kind of a fail that the system wouldn't flag a 20-parcel order as something that needed a human to ok it, but who knows, perhaps it was reviewed after the fact and something got tweaked.

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

#199

Post by enos_feedler »

aeturnum wrote: post #52
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 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.…

For me, Amazon helps me sort through many options to select the product that _I_ believe I will like best. I am not stupid. If I see an Amazon branded item I will obviously meet its placement with some kind of suspicion. In fact, I will dig a bit harder into the reviews. Do the batteries really last as long as some of the brand name ones? Let me see if it's worth the cheaper price. That sort of thing.

Amazon can be the e-commerce site and sell commodity things. It would be different if it lacked transparency or was trying to hide it's involvement in the private labels.

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

#200

Post by SkyMarshal »

Honestly, I’m so sick of all the fly-by-night ALLCAPS no-name brand names on Amazon setup by armies of passive income-seeking YouTube-advertising dropshippers. Amazons shopping experience these days is trash.

If Amazon starts giving their own brand preferential treatment over this crap it will be an improvement to the service. The few Amazon brand products Ive purchased, like USB and Lightning cables, are among the best available, for good prices.

As is, I try to shop elsewhere these days, even if the shipping takes longer.

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