Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

ftc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 930 posts

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#741

Post by behringer »

starluz wrote: post #727
ComputerGuru wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage plus shipping through FBA isn’t cheap. The problem isn’t that FBA is expensive, the problem is that selling on Amazon but not via FBA is heavily punished with placement and appearance leading to poor conversion rates.

Yes this is the issue for consumers as well. The first 16 pages of every search are nearly identical low quality fba products. Need a search layer to find the small sellers!

I don't even buy from small sellers on Amazon mainly due to terrible resilts. That's what ebay is good for.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#742

Post by doktorhladnjak »

22289d wrote: post #540
mvdtnz wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you personally shop at Amazon versus other outlets?

Once I figured eBay out, it's about 90% eBay, 5% Amazon, 5% other. Amazon does a great job of making it appear that they are the best option to shop at. But they really aren't. Even with Prime Free Shipping, if you search eBay correctly - the prices are likely better there. I know what some are probably thinking, eBay is full of scammers and knockoffs etc. That's not really accurate. Especially when you figure out ho…

I feel like going into eBay, I expect it to be the bargain basement race to the bottom. There’s no veneer. It is what it purports to be.

Meanwhile Amazon is full of fake reviews, counterfeits, sponsored listings, and other scams that are passed off as legitimate or even premium.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#743

Post by notatoad »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #692
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…

They farm out manufacturing to China, but if they designed the products, this isn’t very different from having Foxconn assemble iPhones. But of course, now the Chinese manufacturer could sell their design directly and undercut them, since they aren’t Apple. If they are using a design from the manufacturer, I have no sympathy for them. They are just trying to make money by adding some marketing and connecting dots tog…

https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/DA1BA85C-60B5-4150-B030-A...

a quick google search turns up this store. whether they designed these firepits themselves or it's a catalog design from a chinese seller, i don't think it's really fair to compare it to an iPhone. and given the sheer number of designs in his store, i think it's a fairly safe bet that they're reselling catalog products from chinese sellers.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#744

Post by jdminhbg »

dgreensp wrote: post #584

There are always so many blindly pro-business comments on stories like this, like when the Theranos stuff was happening, people were saying "come on, she was just pitching big returns and innovations like any start-up does," ignoring the difference between pitching and straight-up lying or deliberately misleading investors about current facts. Similarly, it seems like many commenters are defending Amazon not based on…

> There are always so many blindly pro-business comments on stories like this

Where? All of the comments above yours are anti-Amazon.

Regardless of which “side” is “right,” I don’t think you can argue that HN has a blind pro-big-business slant.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#745

Post by dehrmann »

pmarreck wrote: post #274
lokar wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple mostly prevents narrow targeting on iOS now

So basically, Apple's focus on user privacy had the knock-on effect of ruining Amazon's potential competition? That's astoundingly rich

It's really just a non-obvious consequence.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#746

Post by dehrmann »

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)

> Delivery logistics

I wonder if there's a model where carriers cooperate on last-mile delivery. Maybe form company they all invest in that goes from regional hubs to homes. It can't be efficient to have 4+ carriers delivering to the same neighborhood.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#747

Post by hnlmorg »

deepsun wrote: post #731
berniedurfee wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very similar to the music industry, where technology has made producing music so easy the market is growing by tens of millions of new songs every year. The slices of pie are getting very thin indeed. Especially when there are only a few pie delivery services to choose from and they take their slice first.

In efficient market every business must have razor-thin margins, otherwise competitors squeeze into it. Good fat margins are a result of an ineffective market.

So Amazon making good fat margins on every small business that sells on Amazon is demonstration of an ineffective market. And hence why the FTC are stepping in.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#748

Post by deelowe »

duped wrote: post #446
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.…

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...

What's to stop her from being replaced next election before this comes to fruition?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#749

Post by sambazi »

mrraj wrote: post #444
jollofricepeas wrote: post #52

FBA 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…

fwiw retail taking >50% of the final price is the norm

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#750

Post by roughly »

no_wizard wrote: post #416
m463 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 truth about consumer buying patterns is most purchases are treated as lowest cost commodity, unless the buyer is aware or the price threshold is high enough[0]. When you don't have subliminal[1] and limited selection pressure (both of which exist in brick and mortar stores), coupled with a UI that makes it pretty easy to discover other brands, and coalesced signals (reviews placement etc), lowest price wins. [0]:…

There’s a pretty strong “market for lemons” effect going on almost economy-wide in which every manufacturer out there seems to be sprinting to make the lowest quality shit they can sneak past the regulatory bodies, so it’s not surprising consumers are selecting solely based on price because there’s functionally no other differentiator at this point.
Post reply on HN