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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

#141

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

jjoonathan wrote: post #130
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is at the level of a conspiracy theory right now, and one that doesn't even make any sense. If it were true that Amazon were taking sneaky peeks at data inside AWS related to retailers, and this became public, AWS as a business would be done. The loud banging you'd be hearing would be the door closing as the last customer exited, followed by all the engineering staff who work on AWS as they see the writing on th…

> If it were true... and this became public, AWS as a business would be done. Why on earth would you think that? They did worse on their storefront, which has a much smaller migration burden than AWS, and while a few big brands made a stink and pulled out, it didn't even noticeably slow growth.

... because it's a colossal breach of trust. AWS has an entire staff of people whose job it is to convince clients that they can be trusted to be a safe custodian of data that includes heavily regulated types of data.

Doing this would blow a huge hole in that.

Do you really think banks are going to stay in AWS if this happens? Do you really think Salesforce is going to be OK with it? Do you think they'd ever do any US Govt business again?

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

#142

Post by alfonsodev »

rualca wrote: post #118
alfonsodev wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 limi…

> a company is maxing their sells, don't you think they will raise the price? I said nothing about price. It is irrelevant. I shopped for a product and that particular company had exactly what I want, and they offer it in a way that makes it the absolute best option for my preference. The choice was made. The company wants to sell the product, I want to buy that product from them, but they hit 10% market share. What…

This can happen already to you when products go out of stock, because the company doesn’t have enough capacity to produce, or they underestimate the demand, but after the company makes profit and reinvest in the next batch, they can adjust the price to balance the demand.

It’s not like you are already free to buy whatever you want, there are production limitations, and your budget limitation.

Right now big companies are allowed to give 100x better solutions at fraction of the cost, that makes imposible to other companies to compete and your freedom to buy is just not real, as many times you’ll be obligated to buy from the big fish, being the only alternative. In the other hand limiting them, they will have to raise the prices and then it would make sense that something 100x more convenient is also more expensive. Right now we have convenience and low cost, but it’s at the expense of killing smaller business and creating virtual monopolies.

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

#143

Post by count »

choward wrote: post #113
namdnay wrote: post #8

Like every supermarket chain in the world?

What stores are you going to that have third party sellers? A better analogy is a mall.

Nearly every grocery store in the US has third party sellers. They pay the store for shelf space, provide their own stockers, etc. It's not as different as you'd believe, because you've 'heard' of the brand names doing it.

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

#144

Post by russh »

ctvo wrote: post #122
berkeleyjunk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Info about what products sell well? Amazon has a thriving white label business and they can use it to decide what to make.

And we think they need to risk the lost of business of breaking into your data on AWS to get this information? They somehow have no other way to infer this? How much business is this thriving Amazon-made products line? It's a fraction of AWS's profits considering retail's overall profits.

People have done worse for less. It may not be a significant fraction of Amazon’s income but it could be a significant fraction of a sellers income or a significant fraction of sales manager’s sales.

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

#145

Post by nvr219 »

syops wrote: post #125
whoknew1122 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different leadership and largely different culture. Or are you just making assumptions? Being on AWS works for Netflix, Disney+, and a lot of other streaming services I won't mention. ESPN and Fox Sports both use AWS. A lot of incredibly visible companies that offer cloud storage white-label S3. Tons of game studios use AWS. A lot of successful companies are pretty stupid I guess. But I'm not going to spend my time t…

I suggest that your reply would be much better without the last paragraph.

hmmm, yes.

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

#146

Post by dv_dt »

mk89 wrote: post #28
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.

I disagree. There are more and more services providing logistics, delivery, payments, etc. And they are quite reliable. Just 2 years ago I was entirely relying on Amazon as a good ecommerce. As of 2020/2021, to be honest, there is nearly no difference with some individual retailers (which don't use a 3rd party platform to sell their goods like Amazon or Ebay). Lots of websites have improved, logistics, delivery, cust…

What are the Amazon level logistics and delivery service that is available to a smaller retailer? I see some nascent choices but they really aren’t that close.

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

#147

Post by whalesalad »

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.

Every time a business gets this successful someone will inevitably come out of the woodwork and say "the government now needs to own this, there is no other option" - wat?

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

ctvo wrote: post #101
anotha1 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's put it in terms of business. What does Amazon gain reading the data of retailers in AWS that they don't already have? How much more money would this make them? How much brand damage and lost of business to AWS (their most profitable organization) would they lose if this were to leak? The more prevalent their use of this AWS customer data, the higher the chance it gets leaked. Why do you think Amazon, one of the…

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by bsch »

I'm a third party seller and I just left Amazon. When you buy a book, for example, are you aware that 40% of the sale goes to Amazon? Many sellers sell cheap items at a steep loss just to keep their sale metrics up. A couple bad reviews, etc. and your business is kicked off with little explanation and cold or no way to appeal. Third party sellers are not treated well and I'm not surprised Amazon steals seller data metrics
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