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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
#12>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.
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Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data
#13Question. What would a system capable of proving “this didn’t happen” look like?
My thought was that people reacting to the article are disappointed they didn't get an empty promise.
Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon employees have accessed sales data from independent sellers on its marketplace to help the company develop competing products for its private-label. Amazon has a policy barring the practice, but lawmakers like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) focused in on the company’s enforcement of that policy.
“Let me ask you, Mr. Bezos, does Amazon ever access and use seller data when making business decisions?” Jayapal asked.
Bezos highlighted the company’s policy banning the practice, but said, “I can’t guarantee you that that policy has never been violated.” He continued, “We continue to look into that very carefully. I’m not yet satisfied that we’ve gotten to the bottom of it, and we’re going to keep looking at it. It’s not as easy to do as you would think because some of the sources in the article are anonymous.”
This seems reasonable. They have internal controls, but auditing of them is hard, and as he's under oath he can say they have the controls but ... proving a negative is hard. I understand why people predisposed to not trust Amazon, but in this case this is a reasonable answer being pulled out of context for a soundbite.
Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data
#14First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco?
You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it to gain success in some aspects of online retail.
But to the proponents of the "market power has helped Amazon strangle so many industries", you have to answer - how did market power help:
-Amazon grow Whole Foods?
-AWS become the most popular cloud service?
-Kindle become the most popular ereader?
It seems to me a much better explanation than "market power abuse" is that Amazon's culture and people have enabled it to dominate a variety of unconnected industries.
Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data
#15>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…
Ah there it is. That makes a lot more sense... honestly at their scale I don't think they should be able to do this, aggregate or not.
They're about 50% of all online sales in the US, where compared to brick-and-mortar, Walmart gets a lot of flak as a small-business killer despite only accounting for 15% of all physical retail sales.
Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data
#16First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it t…
I think you're right that Amazon has come to dominate a lot of markets on merit. But it's still the case that having overly dominant players in a market is bad for... well everyone except the dominant player. It doesn't matter why or how it came to be.
Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data
#17Question. 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.
Suppose the data is accessed by one employee who routinely accesses data of this sort for legitimate purposes — but the employee takes a copy of the data (even just a summary) and sneakernets it over to the in-house brands.
How can this attack vector be mitigated?
Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data
#18First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it t…
Such as what? I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland branded item that doesn’t have a name brand right next to it. Toilet paper, water, dog food, clothing, spices, oil, nuts, etc.
I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland item that was used to run a name brand out of business. And they don’t do any “special placement” either.
Amazon on the other hand....
Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data
#19Question. 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 crimin…
That's about the only way to do it, but it's still a relatively easy barrier to get over in my experience (I can't speak to finance).
I work in a heavily regulated industry as well with clear "firewalls" between different groups. You're basically relying on the company's own good faith and fear of being punishment to actually enforce it. And the chance of it being discovered is very low as long as it's not a formal process within the company.
Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Audit trail of data source access? Though then, you would need to differentiate between legitimate access and using it for your own products.
Suppose the data is accessed by one employee who routinely accesses data of this sort for legitimate purposes — but the employee takes a copy of the data (even just a summary) and sneakernets it over to the in-house brands. How can this attack vector be mitigated?
Yeah, this was what I was referring to. There is no way to control this and I am guessing this is why Jeff Bezos wasn't committing on this not being violated as well.