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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

#41

Post by dastbe »

shanemhansen wrote: post #31

So I used to work with someone from Amazon retail. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that Amazon mined their seller data to undercut them. We sold on Amazon and he constantly told us that we were fools to do so. He even mentioned that prior to accepting a position he had looked up our seller performance to make sure he was going to a good company. Maybe policies have since changed. At the time I was also told the mo…

I can't comment on any of the meaty stuff, but I can comment on the silly.

> At the time I was also told the most popular "test" SKU used by Amazon engineers was a 50 gallon barrel of lube.

Not knowing when this was, but I can say around 2013-2015 that this wasn't a general thing[0]. Could there have been an engineer who used it a lot? Sure, but there's a lot of them.

Even if you disregard the crudity of it, it also just doesn't make for a good test ASIN outside of a small number of verticals. You'd much rather test with real ASINs where possible (which is almost 100% of the time), or with something idiomatic to the experience you're developing.

EDIT: though maybe people have become inspired by https://observer.com/2015/07/at-1k-55-gallon-bottle-of-lube-... ? Still, it stands to reason that you want to test with real products whenever you can.

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

#43

Post by yonixw »

alextheparrot wrote: post #34
tuna-piano wrote: post #14

First 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…

The argument I’m familiar with goes as follows: Stores choose all their goods, bazaars provide stalls for merchants. People don’t like when one tries to masquerade as the other, or, be both. Costco, being a store, can choose foods or goods that have been rebranded or independently sourced and no one really cares — they are still fully autonomous. They have always taken ownership of the product, so a change in supply…

I think it is more a problem of reach\scale. If a store has a reach just like a bazaar, we need to worry about how the store operates behind the scene just like the bazaar.

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #17
actuator wrote: post #6

Earlier 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?

[deleted]

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

#46

Post by hrktb »

darawk wrote: post #35
hrktb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Costco, it’s not a marketplace for third party sellers to ship to customers. Sure it’s closer to us to make analogies with traditional brands, but Amazon’s position is nothing similar. Then, the difference between business as usual and market power abuse is the extent to which you do something. The same way annoying someone and bullying is a matter of degree. Here being in a dominant position Is what makes it diff…

> On Costco, it’s not a marketplace for third party sellers to ship to customers. Sure it’s closer to us to make analogies with traditional brands, but Amazon’s position is nothing similar. Is it not? I mean, some of the details are different, but fundamentally Costco sells third party products. I don't really see how the distinction here is relevant to the issue at hand.

Amazon doesn’t buy the third party products to resell to the client, nor does it pass delivery and production contracts with volume orders and quality checks etc.

It’s a completely different business that has a different relationship with its sellers. In particular Amazon guarantees nothing and the seller is fully responsible for delivering the goods and satisfying the client. Going through Amazon’s warehouses is still a different case, but if I’m not mistaken it’s just a shipping agreement and nothing more.

In specific cases Amazon might actually buy the goods from the seller first, but it’s the exception more than the rule.

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

#47

Post by lemmsjid »

vkou wrote: post #30
lemmsjid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly intrigued as to how this is so morally unambiguous. Walmart, any-given-supermarket, Costco, etc., have in-house brands (for example Kirkland with Costco). These became prominent in the 90's and there was similar discussion at the time about the ethics of a supermarket introducing competitors to the brands it stocks. Such controversy has died down and now it is commonplace. Looking at some updated article…

> So my question is: what makes Amazon different, behaviorally, than Costco, Walmart, Vons, etc.? Both use an (arguably) unfair data asymmetry to introduce in-house branded products to compete with the external brands they also sell. You then have brands like Trader Joe's that go out of their way to have an in-house brand, and make few exceptions. The difference is that Costco very clearly discriminates about whose p…

It's interesting how perspectives differ and I'm not disagreeing with yours. If you'd asked me before this discussion whether or not I felt, given those criteria, that Amazon was a store or a flea market, I'd say I'd prefer Amazon to act like a store, and while it does have flea market aspects, I'd be happy for it to move away from them and in the store direction.

The times I've actively disliked Amazon was when I bought some cheap but well-reviewed product and got something that was below cheap quality. I realized at those times that my natural expectation of Amazon was that it had some quality threshold for what it sold. I realized my thinking about Amazon did need to become flea-market-like, e.g. look that gift horse in the mouth! Except that isn't viable online where you can't personally evaluate what you're buying, especially on the low end of the market.

I now like buying Amazon Basics at the low end price tier because it has a certain quality bar. I'd be more than happy, from a pure consumerist perspective, for Amazon to be mainly stocked with high quality third parties, its in-house brand filling in the cheaper side of the market, and then non-premium third parties who have somehow successfully competed with the in-house brand with some angle (say, sourcing a cheaper process that still gets results).

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

#48

Post by granzymes »

"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he can't guarantee employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers to develop the company's own products"

There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? The best Amazon can do is have policies, logs and access controls and punish employees if they break those policies. And Bezos committed to doing that.

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

#50

Post by phonon »

sethherr wrote: post #27
tuna-piano wrote: post #14

First 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…

Kirkland products are actually white label versions of the products they copy, produced by the company they are copying - so it’s an entirely different situation - ie Costco is paying brands for their products (albeit at a lower price), not stealing. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23912991

Do you think Amazon is making its own sunblock? I'm sure many of their self-branded products are being manufactured by name brands as well.
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