271–280 of 653 posts
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Just change the SKU of the product so they are "different". Big box stores do it all the time to reduce the probability of price matching.
Amazon is not a court of law and need not be bound by this technicality.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, break them all up. And for the love of crap, stop approving billion dollar mergers.
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Here are some possibilities (not claiming these are practical or a solution): The first is splitting Amazon-retail from their other products (Alexa, Ring, AWS, etc.) The second is splitting Amazon-logistics out. I'm not exactly sure how this would work, but it could be argued that Amazon logistics could operate standalone.
FBA as a separate business would be interesting for sure. It would separate out the value of Amazon marketplace from the value of outsourcing your order fulfillment logistics.
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That's the thing people don't get about making competitors to Facebook, Twitter, and other centralized platforms as well. You don't need to boil the ocean in order to serve a single community. For example, Facebook started in Harvard and its value to everyone in Harvard was based on how many people in Harvard used it, not how many people in the world used it. Similarly, if a single product vendor and their customers…
You are correct, but note that one very key edge that Amazon used to as a competitive edge is no longer available to new entrants in the business. For the first 15 to 20 years of Amazon, they were able to be cheaper than their competitors due to the fact that sales tax only had to be collected in states where they had a nexus. This gave them a pricing advantage which drove more customers to them which they intelligen…
An excerpt from: https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/ Amazon binds its sellers over to something called Most Favored Nation status. That means that sellers can't offer their goods more cheaply than they do on Amazon – even if it costs them (lots) less to sell in Target or direct from their websites. This means that every time a seller adds a dollar to their Amazon sale price, they have to add a dollar to…
Just change the SKU of the product so they are "different". Big box stores do it all the time to reduce the probability of price matching.
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The US is strong on the doctrine that the law applies equally to people (legal entities) regardless of size / market cap. I don't think we'll ever see something like the EU's law that targets only large internet companies. It might even not fly on equal protection grounds. I think that in either Finland or Iceland people receive traffic fines that are a percentage of their income. They would never fly in the US.
That is why I didn't say it applies differently. I said it is enforced on a ranking that is based on ROI. And... it really has to be. There are almost certainly low key levels of bad practices in small shops. But it would cost more and take more out of the economy to enforce them than it is to just not care. Now, that bar is rising, of course. Things that used to not matter years ago are easily enforced today.
I can’t imagine how this could be abused.
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So, to be clear, you have no problem with Amazon writing their own laws and collecting their own taxes? Because that is what they are effectively doing.
If sellers were obligated to sell on Amazon that would be the case, but it's not, is it? Ironically, people complaining about this are exacerbating the issue. If sellers who actually cared left Amazon it would loosen Amazon's dominance in e-commerce.
But that's not how this works.
It's technically true that fiber has competition if another ISP is offering dialup in the same area. No one in their right mind would agree that's actually a competitor in anything but name.
And so it is here.
If not selling on Amazon is an existential risk for your company, Amazon is effectively a monopoly, and THAT is what the law cares about.
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Just change the SKU of the product so they are "different". Big box stores do it all the time to reduce the probability of price matching.
Big box stores have a lot more leverage than a small seller on Amazon, who'll just get the "that violates our policies, we're nuking your business, no appeals" treatment.
Apparently this violates the content monopoly KU is supposed to have.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, break them all up. And for the love of crap, stop approving billion dollar mergers.
Highly fragmented markets are also bad for price discovery - so how do we know what size to have?