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Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

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Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#3
post #2

> “I do not think that’s systematically what’s going on,” Bezos said. “Third-party sellers in aggregate are doing extremely well on Amazon.” Cool so cheating is okay if you do it only a little, great take.

That's having your cake and eating it too.

I hope congress does something to curb this behavior where these platforms glean information from hard working businesses and use that data to inform the platforms' tactics.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#5
>Before the Journal’s report came out, Amazon had told Congress that it doesn’t access sales data to help guide the launch of its own products.

This is insanely hard to believe. Amazon just started selling batteries and other random goods under their Basics brand based on ZERO inside sales knowledge? I'd love to see how they enforce that.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#6

Question. What would a system capable of proving “this didn’t happen” look like?

Audit trail of data source access?

Though then, you would need to differentiate between legitimate access and using it for your own products.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#7

>Before the Journal’s report came out, Amazon had told Congress that it doesn’t access sales data to help guide the launch of its own products. This is insanely hard to believe. Amazon just started selling batteries and other random goods under their Basics brand based on ZERO inside sales knowledge? I'd love to see how they enforce that.

Playing the devil's advocate here.

You can get this data easily from market research reports and sales data of the respective companies also.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#8

Question. What would a system capable of proving “this didn’t happen” look like?

A hard regulatory barrier between the product side and the sales platform side.

This already exists in the financial sector. What you would call an "investment bank" is actually a holding company with a number of subsidiaries.

The investment bank subsidiary does capital raising and M&A advisory, while the broker-dealer does market transactions. These are separated by a "Chinese wall" or a "firewall". There are criminal penalties for circumventing the wall.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#10

>Before the Journal’s report came out, Amazon had told Congress that it doesn’t access sales data to help guide the launch of its own products. This is insanely hard to believe. Amazon just started selling batteries and other random goods under their Basics brand based on ZERO inside sales knowledge? I'd love to see how they enforce that.

Look closely. Amazon claimed they don't access individual seller data, but they do access aggregated product data.

However, in at least one case the aggregated data was only between two sellers: Amazon Warehouse (which only sold a few returned items) and the original seller.

"Amazon draws a distinction between the data of an individual third-party seller and what it calls aggregated data, which it defines as the data of products with two or more sellers."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...

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