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Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

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Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#91

Post by JumpCrisscross »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #84
mk89 wrote: post #21

Well, it's something that is slowly backfiring. It's under the eyes of everyone, and not enforcing such policy will only make it even worse for Amazon itself that eventually will end up selling only non-branded products. Finally it will be only another e-commerce like "ebay" used to be, and something else will replace it. Just enjoy the ride until you can. PS: speaking out of experience, I had one time a talk to a di…

Amazon != AWS. As someone who has access to customer data in AWS, I'm very limited in what information I can access (to the point where it actively makes my job in Premium Support harder than it would be otherwise). I also have to provide a legitimate business reason for access to data. Not only is there an audit trail for what I do internally, but any calls I make to review customer data is published in the customer…

> This report has 0 to do with AWS

Same company, leadership and culture. If you compete with Amazon, or could compete, it would be pretty stupid to put your jewels on AWS.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#92

Post by anotha1 »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #84
mk89 wrote: post #21

Well, it's something that is slowly backfiring. It's under the eyes of everyone, and not enforcing such policy will only make it even worse for Amazon itself that eventually will end up selling only non-branded products. Finally it will be only another e-commerce like "ebay" used to be, and something else will replace it. Just enjoy the ride until you can. PS: speaking out of experience, I had one time a talk to a di…

Amazon != AWS. As someone who has access to customer data in AWS, I'm very limited in what information I can access (to the point where it actively makes my job in Premium Support harder than it would be otherwise). I also have to provide a legitimate business reason for access to data. Not only is there an audit trail for what I do internally, but any calls I make to review customer data is published in the customer…

Given everything mentioned in your comment, I don't see how it implies that amazon can't cast a dragnet at some level you're not aware of.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#93

Post by batch12 »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #79
suprfsat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos will testify in front of congress that he will cease to be innovative if required to pay taxes.

Sounds like extortion to me.

How so? Whether or not amazon innovates should have no bearing on a decision by congress to levy additional taxes against them. If amazon decides to become shittier as a result, someone else can fill that void.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#94

Post by ch4s3 »

varispeed wrote: post #72

Amazon should be split into separate independent companies - logistics, AWS, marketplace and whatever else they do now. We need laws that will limit growth of companies to become too big to fail and have all the money to buy laws, destroy competition and in general do as they please without consequences. It's a loophole in capitalism that has to be closed. Big businesses should follow the same rules as your mom and p…

> too big to fail

How is Amazon "too big to fail" in your opinion? That phrase "I think they're too large", it means that a business is so central to the functioning on the broader economy and to several other industries that their failure would tank the whole economy. Think Boeing or JP Morgan Chase Bank.

> and have all the money to buy laws,

What exact laws has Amazon bought?

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#95

Post by iamAtom »

wolfretcrap wrote: post #5
spaceribs wrote: post #2

Amazon should be nationalized. All these 3rd party companies want is a "farmers market", a stall to sell their wares. Give them the municipal software infrastructure they need to do so and maintain it as a public good.

Amazon is far from only being software atleast in India. They've such a volume here in India that since Amazon has got here, traditional LTL logistics soared in price wayyy higher Amazon has completely revolutionised logistics here in India, you'll have hard time sending a box from point A to point B cheaper than what Amazon offers. We are at a point where Amazon sells things much cheaper shipped to your door than a…

So true. Without amazon retail experience is shit in India

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#96

Post by alfonsodev »

rualca wrote: post #65
alfonsodev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price would regulate itself by offer/demand balance and you would still be able to buy it if you can afford it. With no limits, they can actually create artificial lower prices that competition can’t match, and they become exponentially more powerful and dominating. And sometimes you end up as a customer having less options and lower quality.

> The price would regulate itself by offer/demand balance and you would still be able to buy it if you can afford it. No, not really. I shopped around. I picked the best for me. I want to buy from that company but it is already at your 10% limit. What then? Can I actually buy what I want?

if a company is maxing their sells, don't you think they will raise the price?, and play at a 9%, so there will be always room for new buyers willing to pay the price.

And honestly is hard to debate because it's an vaguely defined hypothetical, I guess we are talking about situations where the state limits how much you can produce. I think is already happening if you think about Spanish Olive Oil for example, EU limits how much countries can produce, so the price goes up, still everyone that can pay for it can buy it, but at a price that represents the scarcity of it, otherwise you can choose other origin of same product.

I'm really not an expert in these topics, but that's my mental model of it, and I'm not even defend it as I'm not sure it is the optimal, specially the EU way about vegetable production.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#97

Post by freeone3000 »

nova22033 wrote: post #77
ahiknsr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had one time a talk to a director from an important online shop (top 3 in the country in that specific field) and "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Imagine how deep it can go This seems to be very common. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/18/walmart-ci...

Amazon is a direct competitor so it makes sense for Walmart to not give them more money via AWS.

Everyone in retail is a direct competitor to Amazon. It makes sense for anyone with a physical storefront to avoid AWS.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#98

Post by ghusbands »

alias_neo wrote: post #87
sfifs wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's standard practice for any retailer to not use AWS. Part of it is why would you want to give any competitive knowledge to Amazon with your data or even metadata assuming you encrypt data with your own keys (eg. # of users derivable from # of distinct home/mobile IP address connections to your servers, # of transactions from connections your servers make to payment processors etc). The other part of it is why add…

I'm curious what kind of access Amazon would have to your data as a retailer running on AWS. Not in a technical sense, I'm a software engineer, I understand what data _is_ there, but more to the extent of, do they go out of their way to identify you, an AWS customer as a retail business and use that _retail_ data in ways such as described by the original complaint here? If the answer is anything other than "they defi…

Nobody can know for sure. Whether or not they were secretly mining data from AWS servers, they would say they don't and nobody on the outside would be able to tell. Even if it's unlikely, many people are simply choosing not to risk it.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#99

Post by b3kart »

pydry wrote: post #89
nerbert wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon the marketplace isn’t terribly innovative. It’s a marketplace supported by fantastic logistics, and most of it is backed by USPS anyways. There’s only so much you can do to remove the pains from buyers, sounds like we’re there.

It's pretty amazing to me how unsophisticated the filters and search criteria are. There are so many products where I'd like to filter or sort on weight (for instance) and it simply isn't possible. Nonetheless as a semi-monopoly you are rarely compelled to innovate like a smaller company is.

They can do better, no doubt, but it is a problem that sounds like it should be easy to solve, but becomes really rather tricky at Amazon’s scale and with their catalogue size, speed of updates to it, and general dependency on the quality of data provided by the sellers. Try defining good filter values when you have thousands of product categories with millions of products, many of which have poorly defined attributes, while all of this is subject to constant change. Quite a task.

Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

#100

Post by shiftpgdn »

alias_neo wrote: post #87
sfifs wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's standard practice for any retailer to not use AWS. Part of it is why would you want to give any competitive knowledge to Amazon with your data or even metadata assuming you encrypt data with your own keys (eg. # of users derivable from # of distinct home/mobile IP address connections to your servers, # of transactions from connections your servers make to payment processors etc). The other part of it is why add…

I'm curious what kind of access Amazon would have to your data as a retailer running on AWS. Not in a technical sense, I'm a software engineer, I understand what data _is_ there, but more to the extent of, do they go out of their way to identify you, an AWS customer as a retail business and use that _retail_ data in ways such as described by the original complaint here? If the answer is anything other than "they defi…

Yes, of course they do. There was a post on here about a year ago from someone in the "Amazon profitability team" that involved digging through customers AWS instances to see what they could learn or duplicate for Amazon.
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