631–640 of 930 posts
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Is drop shopping the kind of business to fight for supporting? That’s all this is.
Yeah, but if you search and replaced the part where the $88 is to pay the manufacturer, and instead say it is to pay they employees and the cost of materials, it's not like that suddenly looks like a viable business.
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The current FTC chair wrote the ~~book~~ essay on Amazon's monopolistic business practices (1) and has spoken so much about it that the only reason we'd see the government take their foot off the gas here is if Amazon's lawyers can claim that her previous advocacy biases the case against them. (1) https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
Advocating for a position and then using the strength of your arguments to be placed in a position of public authority through a democratic process is anything but fundamentally legitimate in a way no business will ever be. Amusing trying to see people claiming the opposite.
It was a galaxy brain political move early in the administration and a direct reason why we're seeing these antitrust cases prosecuted.
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What's funny is that I couldn't tell if this was serious or sarcastic at first glance. (caught fire -> sarcastic) Thing is, these silly UPPER-CASE-NONSENSE-COMPANIES are winning against established brands with quality products. Except there is a trend now where a brand with products of known good quality like YETI can now charge outrageous amounts of money - like 10x or more.
The UPPERCASENONSENSENAMES are so obvious it makes me wonder if this is a target-selection technique in the same vein as the 419 scammers use -- make it so only the most clueless people would ever buy your garbage product, so you get a lower percentage of people who are going to report you.
[0] https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-134/fanciful-failures...
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The journalist most famous for leaking the Panama Papers died under mysterious circumstances. And almost nobody is aware of her name or even what's inside the Panama Papers. How many famous journalists can you name? I'm not saying there aren't journalists that want to do good work and become famous as a result. But despite their efforts they're mostly fighting a losing battle.
> How many famous journalists can you name? I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Ask a dozen people on the street who John Carmack is I’m sure you’d get a lot of blank faces. But if he walked into a dev shop looking for a job I think he’d probably get one. Of course breaking a massive story is going to lead to you being well known. Perhaps only within journalistic circles but in the context of your career that’s the onl…
My argument is the opposite. You can break a massive story and people can still not care. That was why I brought up the Panama Papers.
Anyway, let's just agree to disagree.
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Unscalable is not synonymous with hard for the vast majority of people. If you communicate confusingly, you'll be asked for clarifications. That's not nitpicking and you can avoid it by using words for what they're for. > What you're missing are all of the thousands of people who try it and fail. It's not easy or hard. It's lucky. It's getting your ad seen in the right place with the right audience and taking off wit…
> Unscalable is not synonymous with hard for the vast majority of people. > It's not easy or hard. It's lucky. Great, thank you for teaching me about the English language. None of this addresses a single thing about my point, it's just nitpicking my choice of words. Use whateeeeeeeever words will make it through your compiler, insert those in place of mine - and that's what I meant. > Buy some Amazon Basics stuff and…
Until I do it incorrectly, and then I'm deliberately misconstruing your point into something you didn't say. Or if I do it in a way you feel makes you or your argument look stupid, at which point I'm arguing in bad faith.
No thanks. If you'd like to discuss things I'm happy to do that, that's why I'm here as Obi Wan says. But I'm not responsible for steel-manning your point for you because you lack vocabulary.
> Nitpick 2, Electric Boogaloo. Now you have a problem with the way I've used some other words or the absence of some qualifiers.
This is still not nitpicking. You have repeatedly put the notion of product acquisition on a pedestal, including the fact that pulling goods from China is this difficult, laborious task (which, it does take labor, that is true). But Amazon knows how to do that, it's basically how it became the retail juggernaut it is.
And that includes Amazon Basics products, which without even looking at one, I'd be willing to bet non-insubstantial amounts of money are manufactured mostly in China. That doesn't make them inherently bad: Chinese firms will make your products as good or as bad as you're willing to pay for.
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I rephrased it to accommodate the nitpicking and you completely ignored it, going right back to hard/easy rather than scalable/unscalable. FBA is scalable. These people are doing the unscalable part. "But I was nitpicking whether the word nitpicking was accurate" I'm not choosing a new word, get out your thesaurus. Then read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
And it's still wrong. Amazon does 100s of billions of 1st party sales. As does Costco, Walmart, Target, and probably a dozen other stores I'm not aware of. It scales, big time. Choosing products to sell when you have a giant distribution engine is one of the most scaleable things in business. If you want to trot out the principle of charity, it goes both ways. You assumed people were nitpicking. It was wrong. Every w…
And the remainder is not scalable. All of that done by their sellers. As evidenced by the fact that they are not doing it themselves.
I'm beginning to think this thread is being astroturphed. All of you are employing an identical strategy of latching onto minor issues with how things are phrased. A standard PR tactic. And Amazon has a long documented history of astroturphing.
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I can't help but think that Amazon should be replaced with a non-profit or regulated public utility that provides a single unified online marketplace, part of internet infrastructure like ICANN. Sellers would select among competing fulfillment services (warehouse+shipping). Platform referral fees would go toward customer remediation, anti-counterfeiting, and review integrity. I don't merely say this as a "fuck Amazon…
Don't you think if we turned USPS into this it would be a another billions of dollars a year waste for taxpayers? Do we really need to be subsidizing drop shippers? > Amazon is not marshalling new capital to innovate or improve its digital marketplace. Rather, Amazon simply owns digital real estate and extracts rent, like some kind of futuristic dystopian corpo-baron. What on earth are you on about? They own a url.
You've missed the idea entirely. No shipping services are envisioned whatsoever by the "public utility". It would just be the actual marketplace connecting buyers, sellers, and fulfillment.
Amazon can continue to do order fulfillment if they like, it's just that any company with a warehouse can actually begin to compete with them. Sellers would be able to freely associate with whatever fulfillment company best suits their needs, rather than being captive to FBA.
> What on earth are you on about? They own a url.
Right, from which they extract enormous rents. It is not a product in which they continually invest. If you have used it with any frequency over the past decade, you've almost certainly noticed how shitty it's become. That's not an accident; their "sellers" (tenants) are locked in, and are paying something more like obligate rent rather than indicating with their dollars that Amazon's product is the best.
It would be the same story with privately owned power lines or privately owned roads. You're not using them because they're the best, but because you don't have a choice. We screwed up with the actual internet cables, but we still have time to get it right with internet marketplaces.
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> Unscalable is not synonymous with hard for the vast majority of people. > It's not easy or hard. It's lucky. Great, thank you for teaching me about the English language. None of this addresses a single thing about my point, it's just nitpicking my choice of words. Use whateeeeeeeever words will make it through your compiler, insert those in place of mine - and that's what I meant. > Buy some Amazon Basics stuff and…
> Use whateeeeeeeever words will make it through your compiler, insert those in place of mine - and that's what I meant. Until I do it incorrectly, and then I'm deliberately misconstruing your point into something you didn't say. Or if I do it in a way you feel makes you or your argument look stupid, at which point I'm arguing in bad faith. No thanks. If you'd like to discuss things I'm happy to do that, that's why I…
That's what you're doing now, aside from pretending it isn't deliberate.
I strongly suspect all of you are Amazon astroturphers, so I'm going to disengage now.
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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…
Show me a business that Amazon couldn't destroy just for kicks. Also, it's not like you have any choices. If you manufacture your products yourself, you have to fund a massive venture to handle the workload. If you outsource the products, then the companies you pay to manufacture your stuff can easily make knockoffs and then let drop shippers undercut you with inferior versions of your own products. Look at a lot of…
If your business depends on potential competitors for it's existence, then being eventually forced out seems like a pretty natural conclusion.
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> on the backs of Amazon. They were using the Amazon platform for what it was intended for, and Amazon made more millions off of them. It was supposed to be a mutually beneficial relationship.
And I am saying what Amazon is doing is not anticompetitive at all. These “companies” that sell on Amazon are basically glorified trade companies that arbitrage low cost Chinese manufacturing. I don’t feel bad for them at all. If they are hurting so bad, go sell the goods on Shopify store or Walmart/Target. Oh, what’s that? They charge more than Amazon? Interesting…