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FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

ftc.gov

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Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#511

Post by highwaylights »

BizarroLand wrote: post #488
BowBun wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point, but I think the parent point is true as well. You still have people actually producing work, unable to compete on these platforms where Amazon will literally make a copy of their product at a lower price. This is the result of commoditizing 'starting a business' to the point of near-worthlessness in the bottom 50%+. Like you say, I don't value the businesses that simply re-sell re-labeled produ…

Amazon is basically allowing sellers to carry all the risk while product testing and marketing a product. If it does well enough, Amazon can use the same manufacturer and release a branded "Amazon Basics" version that pops up in the same search for the same product but cheaper as Amazon doesn't have to pay someone else $112 for the listing and warehousing, and the original seller that did all of the actual "work" (as…

Yes, but the argument is that drop-shippers aren’t really producing any value.

It’s not like they’re putting banners over their product pics saying “hey, you know you can buy this exact same product for like half the price on alibaba if you’re willing to wait a couple more weeks for it right?”.

I don’t like Amazon consolidating this much power either but if they can push you out of your business that easily you weren’t the critical component of it.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#512

Post by letsdothisagain »

abduhl wrote: post #497
BizarroLand wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is basically allowing sellers to carry all the risk while product testing and marketing a product. If it does well enough, Amazon can use the same manufacturer and release a branded "Amazon Basics" version that pops up in the same search for the same product but cheaper as Amazon doesn't have to pay someone else $112 for the listing and warehousing, and the original seller that did all of the actual "work" (as…

What’s the problem here? If you don’t have a durable competitive advantage then you’re going to get eaten up. First movers should not get a license to continue to reap a profit in a competitive market absent real innovation, which would come in the form of reputation (trademark) or technology (patent). Drop shippers who can be displaced by Amazon in the way you discuss have neither. They already made a profit on the…

The anti-competitive bit is they have all the sales information that would typically be a trade secret for a company.

Go ahead, call up your local 7-11 and ask them what their sales were for the quarter. They'll tell you to fuck off.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#513

Post by comex »

babypuncher wrote: post #329
kmeisthax wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the old machinery for small businesses to find their customers - e.g. news, hobbyist magazines, etc - is no longer around, and so there's nothing for those businesses to return to. The Internet, and specifically advertising companies, killed them off. What's unfair is not that they can't violate privacy, but that Amazon still can.

Is Amazon somehow exempt from the App Store's privacy rules?

For one thing, the privacy rules only cover sharing data with third parties. They don’t cover Amazon using its own data for product recommendations.

But also, Amazon doesn’t rely on product recommendations in the first place. When I want to purchase something, I usually go to amazon.com and type in exactly what I’m looking for. No need for Amazon to guess. Amazon does make recommendations, but at least in my case they represent a tiny fraction of purchases.

In that way I’m voluntarily contributing to Amazon’s monopoly. I feel bad about that. But I use Amazon anyway because there are no alternatives that offer even a remotely comparable buyer experience.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#514

Post by actionfromafar »

brianstorms wrote: post #305
bombcar wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't even begun to enter the world of unscrupulous activity, and Amazon is mostly 'hands off' because they don't care - but other 3rd party sellers DO and they know all the tricks about how to pump alternative sellers off the page, etc. The whole thing is a worthless Alibaba ripoff now.

Do you think some other seller falsely "reported" me, claiming my copies my be counterfeit, for surely there was no way I could offer them so cheaply to beat out the next cheapest seller by, what, 50 cents?

Or maybe some machine learning deduced you were "counterfeit". Who knows. The common denominator is - Amazon doesn't care, it's just a machine, even more so than corporations by nature are.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#515

Post by sib »

pixl97 wrote: post #310
dtjb wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different from Walmart selling their Great Value store brand? They see what products sell well then formulate their own cheaper alternative, maybe even giving their product better shelf placement. Every national grocer does this. It seems to be a pretty close analog yet nobody bats an eye at the practice.

In general there are many different grocery stores, even Walmart the massive company it is only represents something like 10% of grocery sales in the US. Amazon represents something like 40% of all online sales. Typically having a large plurality in a market raises the likelihood of actions against you. >It seems to be a pretty close analog yet nobody bats an eye at the practice. Or, more likely, tech people pay atte…

Walmart has more than 20% share of grocery in the US...

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#516

Post by verdverm »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #469
mrraj wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Bloomberg article : "Chuck Gregorich, who sells fire pits and outdoor furniture, says turning a profit on Amazon is getting harder. One of his popular fire pits costs $200, of which Amazon takes $112 for its commission, warehouse storage, delivery and advertising. That leaves him with $88 to pay the manufacturer, ship the product in from China and cover his overhead." I have a hard time sympathizing here. Th…

Considering they have to pay 56% of their revenue to Amazon, how do you expect them to be able to afford locally manufactured products?

Do the fees and commissions scale linearly with product price? Are any of them flat fees or capped?

Perhaps selling a higher priced product would find a lower share going to Amazon?

I don't know myself

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#517

Post by btmoore »

Justsignedup wrote: post #19

remember that time that amazon was bleeding like 5 million a day just to make sure they can destroy diapers.com? by selling diapers at a loss, which was numbers that diapers.com couldn't compete with given that they didn't have another business to rely on, then forced diapers.com to sell to amazon because they had no other option? And this came out last time they were doing monopolistic inquiries against amazon. Yet.…

I do. I also remember when they were selling books at a loss, and the FTC went after Apple's book store instead

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#518

Post by BizarroLand »

abduhl wrote: post #497
BizarroLand wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is basically allowing sellers to carry all the risk while product testing and marketing a product. If it does well enough, Amazon can use the same manufacturer and release a branded "Amazon Basics" version that pops up in the same search for the same product but cheaper as Amazon doesn't have to pay someone else $112 for the listing and warehousing, and the original seller that did all of the actual "work" (as…

What’s the problem here? If you don’t have a durable competitive advantage then you’re going to get eaten up. First movers should not get a license to continue to reap a profit in a competitive market absent real innovation, which would come in the form of reputation (trademark) or technology (patent). Drop shippers who can be displaced by Amazon in the way you discuss have neither. They already made a profit on the…

The problem is being both the platform and a competitor.

They have an inside advantage that no one else on the planet outside of ebay and Alibaba (and its ilk) have.

It entrenches them and enriches them unjustly. They make profit off of their competitors and have the option of destroying anyone who rubs them the wrong way without repercussion. The capitalistic market cannot speak on the matter as there is a monoposonistic gatekeeper on the market path.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#519

Post by highwaylights »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #469
mrraj wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Bloomberg article : "Chuck Gregorich, who sells fire pits and outdoor furniture, says turning a profit on Amazon is getting harder. One of his popular fire pits costs $200, of which Amazon takes $112 for its commission, warehouse storage, delivery and advertising. That leaves him with $88 to pay the manufacturer, ship the product in from China and cover his overhead." I have a hard time sympathizing here. Th…

Considering they have to pay 56% of their revenue to Amazon, how do you expect them to be able to afford locally manufactured products?

It wouldn’t matter if they could, Amazon can still acquire and sell them for less regardless.

The only viable business here would be a product you’re self-manufacturing or having made bespoke, and even then you better hope you can get some recognition behind your trademark before the chaps out in Shenzhen get a hold of it.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#520

Post by redwood »

taeric wrote: post #262
arielcostas wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even in consoles, you have the option of never buying one: you can play videogames on PC, on a tablet or on a mobile phone. And now you even have the cloud option with NVIDIA or MS' Game Pass Ultimate. With Amazon however, it's more complicated since they control so many businesses. Visiting a website? Very probably it's hosted on AWS, or on a platform that runs on AWS. Visiting a friend with a smart doorbell thi…

Note that AWS is actually not a part of this lawsuit. So that is mostly not relevant.

Is that explicitly the case? Because the same antics apply to the marketplace and the copying of ecosystem participant services there too..
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