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FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

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Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#371

Post by robertlagrant »

wolverine876 wrote: post #355
pcurve wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But it shouldn't be assumed that the high fees necessarily mean reduced income for the original seller." I agree. It just gets passed down to the customers. Most of my shock was directed at the 50% increase in fee in just a few short years. You can't do that without having a lot of leverage.

> It just gets passed down to the customers. That's a common but not an accurate belief: As a business owner pricing a product or service, if your costs increase you can either take the marginal cost out of your net income or increase the price. Taking it out of your net income is simple: You keep prices the same, revenue remains the same, and profit drops a bit. Increasing the price is more complex; you are changing…

It's not just elasticity. The main weight on your prices is your competitors' prices.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#372

Post by eitally »

brianstorms wrote: post #287

I signed up as a Seller on Amazon a while back, with one primary goal: sell extra copies of my book, published by Pantheon Books in 2017. The publisher offered me boxes of them at dirt-cheap prices and I took them up on their offer. So I started selling on Amazon, and I set my price as the lowest possible for "New" condition hardcover. For a while my price got listed on the main book product page. Only briefly though…

My nextdoor neighbor is a shoe salesman (in the US). He traditionally dealt with a region of retailers on behalf of his employer, a multi-brand company like VF, Clarks, Born, etc. In his previous role, he was asked to try to figure out how to add Amazon as a B2C channel. He did, and it essentially became his full time job. A couple of years ago he was laid off, and when his new employer (differently shoe company) learned he knew how to "use Amazon" he was immediately reassigned from field sales to full time online. According to him, there are so many quirky and esoteric things about selling through Amazon it's nearly impossible to figure out how to get started, much less understand nuances of pricing, taxes, shipping and returns, and -- as you said -- Amazon support is conflicting and inconsistent at best.

Nowadays, I'm fine buying consumables from Amazon if I need them asap, but for any name brand stuff I specifically want, I prefer purchasing elsewhere. If reviews were trustworthy, it'd be one thing, but with Amazon having turned into AliExpress, it's impossible to know whether any of the Chinese brands are actually trustworthy and of high quality.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#373

Post by InitialLastName »

tantalor wrote: post #343

"most customer-centric company" I don't think anybody actually buys that line. Do they believe that internally?

The funny thing about slogans is that you can almost always count on the sloganeer to embody the opposite:

- Don't be evil

- Drain the swamp

- Hope and Change

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#375

Post by hrdwdmrbl »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #146

They only passively mentioned fulfillment. The fact that Amazon owns the market and fulfillment and even last-mile delivery is the most obvious case of vertical integration I have ever heard of, and I personally interact with it in some way at least once every week !

Is vertical integration illegal?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#376

Post by CaffeinatedDev »

ihaveajob wrote: post #82

In my opinion, Amazon needs to be split into at least 4 independent entities: - Online marketplace - Consumer products - Internet infrastructure - Delivery logistics Similar to the three-tier distribution system for beer in most states (a brewer cannot be a wholesaler or a retailer). This makes it easier for smaller players can compete with the big ones on quality at least, if not price or recognition. (Edit: format)

Amazon has been cognizant of this[antitrust risk] for a while now I believe. The internal systems are all set up to run independently, most systems are modular and already run as separate entities with permissioned access.

Proof: worked as an SDE for AWS and Amazon for 7 yrs.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#377

Post by musicale »

anigbrowl wrote: post #369
brianstorms wrote: post #287

I signed up as a Seller on Amazon a while back, with one primary goal: sell extra copies of my book, published by Pantheon Books in 2017. The publisher offered me boxes of them at dirt-cheap prices and I took them up on their offer. So I started selling on Amazon, and I set my price as the lowest possible for "New" condition hardcover. For a while my price got listed on the main book product page. Only briefly though…

Sue them in small claims court. It's perfect for this, you just bring in your documentation and write up a timeline for the judge.

Interesting idea - has anyone tried this?

Does Amazon retaliate and ban you permanently if you win?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#378

Post by hrdwdmrbl »

softwaredoug wrote: post #47
hrdwdmrbl wrote: post #21

Do Shopify next! And Apple's 30% tax is literally outrageous!

How is Shopify a monopoly? There's all kinds of competitors for making online stores

They force sellers to use their payment processor. If you don't, they charge an extra 0.5% markup on top, which basically means that no 3rd party payment processor can be competitive on price.

I think you can also measure their power in the same way as Amazon - The % of fees that they capture as a percent of sales volume goes up every year. Slow squeeze.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#379

Post by tristan957 »

lacker wrote: post #227
_uhtu wrote: post #3

I'm honestly not sure how you could make the case that they aren't maintaining and abusing monopoly power. I mean they literally blatantly copy the designs of other companies who sell on amazon, then put their own results for their own products higher in search results than what they copied off of. It's incredibly blatantly anti-competitive.

According to the best statistics I can find, in the US, Amazon has 37.8 percent of the retail e-commerce market. https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t... The simplest pro-Amazon case is that they do not have monopoly power, because they are not a monopoly.

You do not need > 50% market share for the government to go after you for monopolistic practices. If Amazon made that case in court, they would be laughed out of the building.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#380

Post by dragonwriter »

symlinkk wrote: post #363
dragonwriter wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just have a hard time understanding how it is any different than brick and mortar companies using their sales data to determine which products they should have a store brand version of. Costco, Walmart, Target, etc. all do this, and have been doing it for decades. The legal difference underlying the lawsuit between this behavior by Amazon and the behavior you raise by those stores is not the behavior, but its con…

Amazon does not have a monopoly on online shopping that’s absurd. Chewy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart, AliExpress all are huge competitors.

> Amazon does not have a monopoly on online shopping that’s absurd.

“That's absurd” is an inadequate rebuttal to pp. 39-71 of the complaint detailing the basis for the claim Amazon has durable market power in two relevant markers.

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