Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by salawat » Mon, May 03, 2021, 11:56 PM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #177

sharklazer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Money talks and BS walks” Consumers may not be fed up with Amazon, but if this is SOP then the sellers WILL leave and a competitor with better SOP will come in. Getting f’ed in the arse as a consumer is one thing. Getting f’ed in the arse by Jeffy B as a business is another. It is trust which makes this world go ‘round.

If sellers want their sales information to be private, they should make a compelling retail experience they control. That is where they obtain real competitive advantage. Changing from Amazon to another online retailer - that retailer will still analyze third party sales data. It still isn’t clear if it matters. You have little perspective or experience on selling easily cloned $10-100 items (Amazon Basics) anywhere.…

Mmmm. Nice logic there. Examine the following and see if you can detect where things get... off.

>Ya know what? I'm gonna make a thing that lets third party sellers sell their products and avail themselves of my burgeoning logistics network! It'll be so cash. I'll charge 'em pennies, they get to sell to a wide audience, I get use out of my logistics network, win-win.

Sounds like the start of some good ole fashion enterprise right?

>Hey, now that I got everyone on here, and since I'vegot all this seller data just lying around, we should do something with it. Charts, graphs, the whole shebang. Can charge extra or piecemeal to help people do more business, thereby enabling them to get more regular product flow, possibly even getting them to sign up and pay me for use of my logistics network to cache their stuff. I can turn around and offer supply reliability to end consumers, I can offer revenue stability and insight into invemtory profitability for my merchants, and I'm still making bank off my logistics network! Win-win-win for everyone around.

Still good, right?

>Hey, we got all this sales data laying around right? Why don't we aggregate it to see what's moving in the market overall so we can diversify into becoming a merchant competing in our own marketplace without any of the risk anyone else has to take because we have the ability to front-run commodity movement using info no one else has available to them at that level of abstraction oroverall visibility. Oh... Also, don't say 'Front-Run' because it'llmake the compliance and legal people upset, but it's totally what we're doing. Bonus point: with our scale, if we do find a winner, we can get in at rock bottom deals from the manufacturer, meaning we can ectract the value potential better than anyone else out there.. Sure, some of the merchants may lose out, but it's our platform, and their data is on our stuff right? Admin's priveleges. Besides, it isn't their sales data, we can just generate some anonymized non-vendor specifiic metadata to search using the web services we implement! Then it's our data not theirs!*

If you don't see where one of those three starts getting anti-competitive and abusive, you are waaaaaay too far down the slippery slope of the monopolist slip-n-slide.

The last one may be somewhat ham-fisted, but it's not far from some of the more... Fraught... conversations on the virtues and prickly points of business models with coworkers in the break room.

I assure you it does happen. Check out the GooglePay and ApplePay branding guides for similar examples of things that you read that make you go "Huh, is that why that's confidential? Because it tells you to do anti-competitiive things?"

Good luck finding a copy of course. You'll just need to find a poorly packed truck or something.

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

#442

Post by heavyset_go » Tue, May 04, 2021, 12:00 AM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #242

notyourwork wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rephrase this: "only seems worse because amazon is so big, and so monopolistic" as: "only seems worse because amazon is so big, and so dominant" I don't think monopolistic is a fair adjective because it has an implied legal connotation. Is Amazon a monopoly or just the largest e-commerce retailer today?

Monopoly does NOT mean being the only seller. According to US law, having 50% of the market can be enough.

It's not even 50%, according to the FTC[1]:

> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

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

#443

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Tue, May 04, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

tacker2000 wrote: post #430

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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)…

I dont have the source anymore, but ive heard of precisely this happening: Amazon employees snooping around the AWS setup of some other ecommerce competitors... so yea, its not just limited to the amazon seller account data

About 5 years ago I personally knew an SRE at AWS who did snoop around customer files (and Amazon corporate’s internal HR database...) for his own amusement - he proudly showed-off his phone’s browser to me which displayed some HR data for a mutual of ours. He doesn’t work at Amazon anymore and now has a criminal record (both for entirely unrelated reasons), I guess Amazon either never found-out or they didn’t care.

So yeah, I believe you.

(Amazon does have internal controls that do limit most users’ access, but he said was an SRE with “global” access, apparently - I’ve never worked for Bezos so I don’t know what Amazon’s access-security is really like).

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

#444

Post by former-aws » Tue, May 04, 2021, 12:15 AM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #177

sharklazer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Money talks and BS walks” Consumers may not be fed up with Amazon, but if this is SOP then the sellers WILL leave and a competitor with better SOP will come in. Getting f’ed in the arse as a consumer is one thing. Getting f’ed in the arse by Jeffy B as a business is another. It is trust which makes this world go ‘round.

If sellers want their sales information to be private, they should make a compelling retail experience they control. That is where they obtain real competitive advantage. Changing from Amazon to another online retailer - that retailer will still analyze third party sales data. It still isn’t clear if it matters. You have little perspective or experience on selling easily cloned $10-100 items (Amazon Basics) anywhere.…

This still does not make it equal between Amazon and the sellers. Remember sellers have to pay a listing fee, referral fee etc which Amazon does not have to. So with everything else being equal, sellers are basically paying a validation fee for Amazon to learn about their products, then compete with them. No one should trust Amazon in whatever business they are in.

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

#445

Post by fredophile » Tue, May 04, 2021, 12:26 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #410

fredophile wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analyzing their own sales and analyzing other people's sales on their platform are two different things. Saying that Walmart may also try to do this in the future does not make it right or excusable.

How is it different? The same outcomes and potential power abuse happens in both situations.

Who takes the risk in each scenario is different. If Amazon was only using their own sales data then they'd need to start selling a more diverse range of products themselves to acquire that data. Some of those products would sell well and some would be flops. Amazon would have invested money into selling all of them so the cost for the flops negatively affects their bottom line.

In the current scenario someone else sells things on Amazon and is taking the risk that the item they're selling will not sell well. If the item is a hit, Amazon swoops in and starts selling it themselves or possibly makes a competitor and sells it themselves. Either way, Amazon reduces their own risk of selling poorly performing products while also cutting into the upside for the vendor who took that risk when they are successful.

Edit: I forgot to mention above that the people taking this risk are paying Amazon to do so.

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

#446

Post by bostonsre » Tue, May 04, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #177

sharklazer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Money talks and BS walks” Consumers may not be fed up with Amazon, but if this is SOP then the sellers WILL leave and a competitor with better SOP will come in. Getting f’ed in the arse as a consumer is one thing. Getting f’ed in the arse by Jeffy B as a business is another. It is trust which makes this world go ‘round.

If sellers want their sales information to be private, they should make a compelling retail experience they control. That is where they obtain real competitive advantage. Changing from Amazon to another online retailer - that retailer will still analyze third party sales data. It still isn’t clear if it matters. You have little perspective or experience on selling easily cloned $10-100 items (Amazon Basics) anywhere.…

The problem is that Amazon is now basically the market itself while at the same time a competitor or a potential competitor. Small businesses don't have much choice in the matter if they want the ability to reach an entire market. If they go their own way and build their own retail experience, there is a ceiling on the percentage of the market they can sell to.

Without any regulation to curtail this behavior, the end state seems like it will have to be Amazon owning the markets that have the best margins and the least risk. Competitors will die and Amazon will be able to increase prices to maximize their profits without needing to worry about being undercut. That sounds exactly like what anti monopoly legislation was written to protect against.

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

#447

Post by kazamaloo » Tue, May 04, 2021, 1:07 AM UTC

citrusybread wrote: post #428

gok wrote: post #231

Lots of comments here of the format "every store does this." No, no other store operates this way. Walmart and Costco do not have a little flea market of third party sellers inside their stores who run their own logistics. This would be more like Amazon being both an anchor tenant and owner of a mall, and requiring that every other store within the mall provide all their sales information, then rapidly evicting all t…

isn't this effectively how home depot and lowes are run? basically everything is on consignment, and they occasionally spin up private-label versions of tools to sell?

Not the same thing. Check out other relevant responses here, too. In short, Home Depot or Lowe's are buying products to resell. They are the seller themselves. OP's argument is that Amazon is the platform facilitating the sale -- hence the mall owner.

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

#448

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 04, 2021, 1:43 AM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #443

tacker2000 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont have the source anymore, but ive heard of precisely this happening: Amazon employees snooping around the AWS setup of some other ecommerce competitors... so yea, its not just limited to the amazon seller account data

About 5 years ago I personally knew an SRE at AWS who did snoop around customer files (and Amazon corporate’s internal HR database...) for his own amusement - he proudly showed-off his phone’s browser to me which displayed some HR data for a mutual of ours. He doesn’t work at Amazon anymore and now has a criminal record (both for entirely unrelated reasons), I guess Amazon either never found-out or they didn’t care.…

[deleted]

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

#449

Post by aliyfarah » Tue, May 04, 2021, 3:07 AM UTC

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.

Agreed 100%.

Should be merged with UPS.

I also believe NBA should be nationalised. All teams should be owned by cities and revenues used to fund schools etc

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

#450

Post by unishark » Tue, May 04, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #312

an_opabinia wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If sellers want their sales information to be private, they should make a compelling retail experience they control. That is where they obtain real competitive advantage. Changing from Amazon to another online retailer - that retailer will still analyze third party sales data. It still isn’t clear if it matters. You have little perspective or experience on selling easily cloned $10-100 items (Amazon Basics) anywhere.…

Great argument, could be used to rebut anything: If someone wants their mobile phone data and photos to be private, they should make a compelling mobile os they control. If someone wants a water supply that is not polluted with toxic runoff they should start their own waterworks, lay their own pipes, and potentially buy their own lake because some pollution is unremovable. If someone wants not to be discriminated aga…

Meanwhile your reduction tactic can be used to claim entitlement to anything.

You have to give me whatever I want or modify your behavior in whatever ways I insist upon, because the only alternative for me to get my demands met is by creating the product from scratch and/or starting my own country, which is of course absurd.