"we have a policy against this, but we violate it all the time"
Is there a maxim for this? When a group of people are highly incentivized to do something bad, they'll conspire to do something bad. Don't call me a conspiracy theorist.
Human nature
Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
161–170 of 466 posts
Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
#162I am constantly amazed by the level of trust that people give to tech companies. how did they earn this
It's just a lack of viable alternatives.
Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even that is not really true. They paid no federal income tax in 2017 and 2018, but have before and since. I'm no fan of Amazon, but you have to admit there is a pretty large distance between "Amazon pays no tax" and "Amazon pays billions in tax, but they didn't pay this one specific kind of tax a couple years ago". https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-in...
I think income tax is the most impactful and expensive tax we have in the US, it's the one everyone thinks of when someone says "doing your taxes". The fact that Amazon just this year after not paying for 2 years had to pay a measly 1.6% in taxes does not really negate the argument. Edit: 4 years -> 2 years
It really feels like you're twisting reality.
Amazon went 2 years without paying _income_ tax, not 4.
Amazon paid $3.5 billion in taxes in 2019 (some of which was differed, but still owed). That is over 25% of their income that year. Their federal income tax rate came out to 1.6%, but its borderline lying to say "they paid a measly 1.6% in taxes".
Amazon is an awful company. There is no reason to bend the truth to try and show how awful they are. Being disingenuous only makes your argument weaker.
Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
There is no need for a conspiracy theory.
The metadata that is _required_ to produce your monthly AWS bill reveals a ton of information about the success of your business and what is doing very well for you.
Doing analytics on customer billing is something that Amazon has every reason to be doing, and what Amazon does with that information can be anticompetitive or not.
Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
#165Well, 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…
> "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Unless I've grossly misread these articles, Amazon were using third-party seller data from sales on the Amazon.* websites. The data was on their (Amazon.com) sales database (who sold how much of what, for how much). They weren't accessing (hacking) data hosted on AWS (a database hosted for an online shop not related to AWS)…
AWS could easily collect metadata like how your traffic looks over time, where it's coming from etc., and use that to inform Amazon business decisions. That would go a bit further than what's in this article, but it isn't a huge stretch.
Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon pays mountains of payroll taxes, as they are one of the largest employers in the world. The "Amazon pays no taxes" meme is a false one.
Isn't it the workers who (whom? I never know) pay the payroll tax? That's their money, in exchange for their time spent on work, that's not Amazon's money. This doesn't make sense to me.
in USA it works like: pay is $100. then take home is $80 because $20 is taken out for various payroll taxes. then also the company pays $20 for their portion. employees only see the -20 from them, not the +20 from Company on wage stubs.
also, if the company has profits there is some tax on that (well, my little C-corp did)
(numbers are made up to show process)
Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
#167Like every supermarket chain in the world?
What stores are you going to that have third party sellers? A better analogy is a mall.
Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> This can happen already to you when products go out of stock (...)
No, it can't. Your case involves a scenario where no transaction is possible because there is no product to buy or sell. It has zero to do with my very simple and very straight-forward example of a customer wanting to buy a product indeed sold and available and on the store of a seller who already reached its 10% market share.
My example is very clear, and for some reason all proponents of this virtuous 10% market share are either unable or unwilling to step up and either think their idea through or explain how they expect to implement their virtuous idea.
And this is a very simple and straight-forward example: a seller has a product I want to buy, I shopped around and that seller has the absolute best offer, I want to buy the product from that seller, the seller has the product on the counter and I have the cash at hand, but the seller already hit the 10% market share. What then? Is the next step so mysterious that no one can even come close to dare explain what they believe should happen?
Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
On the other hand Apple competes hard against Samsung, yet relies heavily on Samsung to build a large part of it's competing products. Although I admit that this might not be as true anymore as it was a few years ago.
Probably because Apple has an army of lawyers to protect against any problems.
Re: Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a catch-22 ... would Amazon be this innovative had it been nationalised? At what point do you nationalise? Is there a next technology which will be stifled if it was nationalise? Does nationalisation sttifle innovation? I've been wrestling with these questions as I actually don't like Amazon for all the reasons that have been well publicised ... but their customer service is excellent. Which sets me against a st…
> Does nationalisation stifle innovation? I would argue that it does not. We have a lot of innovations from the last 100 years that have come from state-run projects / endeavors. The more I think about it the more it looks as though private ownership stifles innovation if there isn't a direct profit motive for it.
Being a monopoly of any kind stifles innovation.
It's often better for the state to react to private monopolies/oligopolies by entering the space and competing with a bare bones service. This has worked in banking, telecoms, land development, housing, etc. It often works better than taking over the monopoly directly. It's one of the reasons (IMHO) Singapore has such an effective private market.
Often private companies lobby for laws restricting the level that they can compete - this is a signal that it's an effective tactic.
If USPS were given a mandate and the cash it could absolutely build a marketplace that could compete and it would probably kick start Amazon into being a better and cheaper retailer. Unfortunately it's being whittled down to a husk of its former self.