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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

#771

Post by PeterStuer »

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…

FBA SKU pooling has completely killed Amazon for me. I used to purchase on Amazon regularly but I just can't trust them shipping me a genuine product anymore. I've gone back to select local eShops, even if the quoted Amazon price is often cheaper.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#772

Post by asow92 »

jamiek88 wrote: post #650
asow92 wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are its unintended consequences in propping up monopoly also good for ‘society’, then? Hate to break it to you, but the topic is a bit more nuanced than ‘privacy good’ ‘ads bad’.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#773

Post by webninja »

skeltoac wrote: post #759
Pikamander2 wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I also have my own site where I can sell for the same price and keep much more of the revenue, but most shoppers won’t buy if they didn’t find it on Amazon. If I leave Amazon or raise my Amazon price to recoup the costs or stop paying for FBA and Amazon ads, I lose almost all of my sales. This is all because Amazon is doing anticompetitive things with its monopoly power. Can you expand on what you think Amazon is do…

Amazon charges exorbitant fees to Marketplace sellers and adds to the cost of everything sold on Amazon. Are you aware of who is the seller every time you buy something? When the seller is not Amazon, do you know how much of the price is going directly to Amazon? Is it worth it for what Amazon provides you? In my category Amazon takes 15% of every sale. That’s even true for FBM where Amazon never lays eyes or hands o…

>> But I can’t lower my prices anywhere off Amazon because they will retaliate by burying my product where nobody will find it.

This is the problem.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#774

Post by jtbayly »

abduhl wrote: post #559
letsdothisagain wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But Amazon is the 7-11 (and more)! It is the customer facing part of the business that houses and delivers the beef jerky to the ultimate customer. 7-11 sees that jerky sells, that lots of brands can sell jerky, that consumers don’t seem to care about the brand of jerky as long as it says teriyaki, and so 7-11 now sells 7-11 basics teriyaki jerky. The FBA middlemen are more like traveling salesmen - they take an orde…

But Amazon refuses to be the actual seller taking the risk in the first place. They aren’t buying jerky from anybody and then selling it. Until they decide to make their own based on the actual seller’s data.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#775

Post by tyingq »

callalex wrote: post #732
lostapathy wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon now has special search tools for buying fasteners that make it easier to find exactly what you need Easier but they are no McMaster, by a long shot.

I have a lot of friends in the manufacturing business that range from self-employed to military-backed conglomerates. None of them use this tool. Are they all Luddite idiots, or is this Amazon search tool, backed by their swiss-cheese supply chain, just not that useful?

I think it's the same as the overall enshitification of all products and product quality. Consumers now value cheap fast shipping and low prices over everything else. Amazon delivers that, with the tradeoffs in product quality, support, etc. Other things are low quality too, like the product listings themselves. Often, for example, the listed dimensions or other specs (thread type, grade strength, etc) are missing or just wrong. That's much less true for sites like McMaster. But nobody values that anymore.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#776

Post by reuben364 »

midoridensha wrote: post #763
SenAnder wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon inflating rates after capturing the market, permitting counterfeits, and penalizing sellers offering lower prices off-Amazon, has nothing to do with market efficiency or commoditization.

There should be some tough laws against selling counterfeits, with harsh penalties.

Simultaneously, there must be harsh penalties for abusing that system. See Samsung's use of a patent on display technology to label third party displays as counterfeits, despite not using that patent nor misrepresenting themselves as Samsung screens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A002AesVaFk

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#777

Post by xyzelement »

Given_47 wrote: post #707
xyzelement wrote: post #664

This rings a little hollow to me because as a consumer, wouldn't I have noticed a lack of non-amazon options? My family buys on Amazon a lot but I am well aware that I can buy any of that stuff, including at times for a lower price, elsewhere - from company website to Costco to Walmart market, via Google shopping, etc. Doesn't the existence of these infinity choices make claims of monopoly a bit farfetched? I am sure…

> This rings a little hollow to me because as a consumer, wouldn't I have noticed a lack of non-amazon options? You haven’t? What sorts of products do u typically browse/shop for?

All kinds of house hold stuff, appliance parts, whatever. What would be an example of something I can only get on Amazon?

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#778

Post by steveBK123 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #740
bminor13 wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

If I remember correctly, they charge for the BigQuery table you use for the detailed export. In other words: there's a charge for seeing detailed charges! All other clouds provide a detailed cost breakdown report for free .

what a grift

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#779

Post by sah2ed »

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...

> https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

The article has been discussed around here before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20079699 (2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13562968 (2017)

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#780

Post by sfifs »

hackerlight wrote: post #735
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 and logistics/warehousing to Amazon You miss the key distinction. The former part of that equation is competitive , the latter part isn't . A guy who sells firepits can't be expected to create a competitor to Amazon. Amazon has complete monopolistic pricing power. Whenever a company is in that position, they will abuse it.

No telhey can distribute in Walmart Home Depot or Lowe's or equivalent. Amazon is just a more convenient way to distribute and will probably charge you less than the others :-)
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