Long overdue. Amazon charges unfair seller fee for listing, closing and referral. We end up paying 27-32% for each apparel sold. We've been advertising on their website since 2021, every day and lately the results are just poor. Amazon should be held accountable for their business practices. It has become a platform that doesn't favour the seller one single bit.
FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
641–650 of 930 posts
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#642Out of all the natural tech monopolies, Amazon is the ONLY one that did the opposite of exercising market power. They actually brought fast shipping to the market. A decade ago, you had to pay a crap ton of money to ship things even two days. They forced the incumbents such as Walmart to change. They’re constantly improving e-commerce. Heck they even opened up aws and created an entire industry. Amazon did more to re…
Less market concentration. Lina Khan, the current head of the FTC, argued before she got the job that market concentration and not consumer harm was a better target for antitrust enforcement. Amazon does exercise a fair amount of their market power. FBA policies are generous to the consumer and to amazon, taking it out of the third party sellers. The other classic example was IIRC diapers.com which was a sharp compet…
Antitrust law in the US was traditionally to protect consumers. I'm not seeing consumer harm on net from Amazon.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#643In 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)
Vertical integration is fine as long as there are competitors at each layer.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're over generalizing. There are plenty of sellers that took the time to develop their own products and sell them, only to be copied and undercut by Amazon.
That is literally the opposite of anti-competitive. That is the definition of a pro competitive behavior. Lower prices for consumers is the whole point of a competitive market! Yes, big companies can compete in the market, by offer better quality stuff, for a lower price. Thats what we want! You are literally arguing in favor* of monopolies, and against competition by saying that other companies shouldn't do a better…
The competitive market has multiple goals - lower prices for consumers is only one of them.
Big companies compete in the market by offering the same quality for a lower price. That's good, no problem with them doing that.
The problem is when the big companies crush nascent competitors by using their advantages in the market and not by being better quality or more consistent. That's bad; it stifles innovation and creates market concentration, resulting in monopolies and allowing large companies to charge supracompetitive prices.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#645FBA seller here. A lot of mom and pop businesses (~$20 million) have been built on Amazon over the past 10 years. Most of us are in the $250k to $5 million dollar range. The impact of Amazon’s monopoly power is felt big time by us as we’re being squeezed with no place left to go online especially post-iOS change. Our second option used to be the Facebook/Instagram/TikTok to Shopify connection but with that being dead…
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…
You have a hard time sympathizing?
Say what you will about their means of getting it, but this person did 100% of the leg work of getting that sale. That sale doesn't exists without them.
And Amazon gets the MAJORITY of the revenue cut for that?
I sympathize with the idea that China should get more of that, but make no mistake: Amazon's logistics and warehousing were not an option here. They were the cost of doing business. And Amazon took more for that service than this person who actually made that market happen.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reality is far more complex then the simple take you have here. >by offer better quality stuff, Amazon, for example, offering counterfeits of your product as your product is not under the definition of "better quality stuff" >for a lower price Again, offering a lower price consistently is one thing. Using pricing as a weapon, for example selling a product lower than cost in order to monopolize a market is not.
> Using pricing as a weapon, for example selling a product lower than cost in order to monopolize a market is not. If the price stays low and never goes to high monopoly prices then it is a good thing. If a company becomes a "monopoly" by being cheap, and staying cheap, thats just competition by definition. Which is the situation we are seeing with amazon.
>If the price stays low and never goes to high monopoly prices then it is a good thing.
Not necessarily, but it goes a long way to balancing out the negative consequences. The problem, though, is they've never had prices stay low. Eventually, prices go up. So far, Amazon does this through loss-leaders; products that have low prices allowing them to capture a market and charge high prices for other products as a monopoly.
>If a company becomes a "monopoly" by being cheap, and staying cheap, thats just competition by definition.
If that was all they were doing it would be legal.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Amazon does 100s of billions of 1st party sales. 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 astro…
Yes. Anyone who disagrees must be engaged in nitpicking, PR tactics, and astroturfing. This all seems very rational. Lina, is that you?
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS works this way too but I’ll get dogpiled by Amazon sycophants and other people who have built their careers around getting witless companies sucked into the Amazon machine.
At least AWS gives me an invoice each month with a break down of fees. GCP just sends an invoice for the total amount. No detail, no breakdown. And I have never gotten any of GCP's many different pages under their billing system to spit out any numbers that make sense. Pick your poison?
Check out https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/export-data-big... - you can configure GCP to spit out pricing data to bigquery, to be queried however you like.
(I don't think it produces a volume of data that escapes the free tier, but I'd have to check)
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is literally the opposite of anti-competitive. That is the definition of a pro competitive behavior. Lower prices for consumers is the whole point of a competitive market! Yes, big companies can compete in the market, by offer better quality stuff, for a lower price. Thats what we want! You are literally arguing in favor* of monopolies, and against competition by saying that other companies shouldn't do a better…
The competitive market has multiple goals - lower prices for consumers is only one of them. Big companies compete in the market by offering the same quality for a lower price. That's good, no problem with them doing that. The problem is when the big companies crush nascent competitors by using their advantages in the market and not by being better quality or more consistent. That's bad; it stifles innovation and crea…
> by using their advantages in the market and not by being better quality or more consistent
But they have a lower price.
That's competition working as intended.
Yes, the lower price thing should win out against the more expensive product.
> to charge supracompetitive prices.
We aren't seeing too high prices.
We are seeing low prices and then competitors that suck complaining about the fact that they suck in comparison to the more competitive company.
Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
ATT, where apple hobbled other ad networks running on iOS. It used to be that DTC companies could use the fine-grained targeting offered by FB and Google to reach consumers without needing to go through a major distributor. Since the targeting is much less effective it's more expensive (potentially uneconomically so) to reach people. As a result, sellers are forced back to Amazon.
I've been saying for years—and it's been received un-popularly here on HN—that ATT has been a bad thing for the industry overall, and this thread is a primary case in point.
If ‘industry’ is selling cheap tat by invading privacy then anything bad for that is good for society.