491–500 of 653 posts
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Many sites support Paypal which means your payment data is safe
I really wish there was an open standard for something like this.
Supported everywhere except Firefox (where there's currently a flag to enable). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...
What magic does apple work behind the scenes to avoid scrutiny? If we're talking about hidden taxes, surely the only app store allowed on 50% of smart phones taking 30% is a hidden tax? And if not that, surely visa/mastercard's fee is it's own hidden tax?
Yes, the FTC should look at Apple. But Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook would all be higher on my "FTC TECH TODO" list than Apple so I'm not sure why you focused on Apple in this "whatabout"?
Each of the web companies also have one of the most comically low barriers to change of any 'monopoly'. When att was broken up it was truly the only phone carrier for much of the US, switching was borderline impossible. You could replace Google search in the next 30 seconds.
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I do understand, but what you're describing is bad for Amazon's customers, as you note yourself. Furthermore, again, no one is obligated to sell with Amazon. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of sellers who do not sell their stuff on Amazon. It's not some requirement to do business in the 21st century. In any case, we can come back to this case a year from now, and we can pretend to be shocked when nothin…
I think you're looking at the short term and small scale instead of the long term and large / societal scale. Yes I'm the short term Amazon's customers don't get the discount they could get om Foo retail. Bit then they become Foo retailer customers and they benefit. Too many things optimize for the small scale. Similarly Amazon's upon losing customers to Foo retailer has to become more efficient overall (or reduce it…
If I make light bulbs and sell them to customers through my own channels – exactly who is the rent seeker?
In my industry there are actors that are as dominant as Amazon are in retail, but there's also a huge part of the industry who just sell directly to the customer. It's your own choice. If you don't accept Amazon's terms, you don't have to do business with them. And vice versa.
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When Facebook was founded there was no Facebook. Now there is a Facebook. When there's a better alternative customers are less likely to try out your new, less good idea. Can you give an example of someone serious using IPFS instead of S3? I don't really get what "all storage worldwide" means.
When FB was founded there were: MySpace Friendster Whimit - Russians online (LOL) and many other small examples. There was still AOL, MSN, etc. There was a time when they ruled. The only reason that FB, Google and yes Amazon were even able to launch, is because the open permissionless web disrupted AOL, MSN etc. Imagine them allowing Amazon to launch on top of them. They’d cannibalize them just like Amazon cannibaliz…
Scale matters. You seem to be a programmer, you should know that.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
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>It will be hard for the court to argue that amazon should start recommending more expensive items to consumers, just to push consumers into looking for a cheaper platform. Yes, 100% this. That's why I said that this lawsuit has a major remedy problem. Even if the court agrees this is anticompetitive, how do you fix it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37767994
Amazon isn’t recommending “more expensive” items to consumers, it’s offering different products. It should be recommending the best product for the user at the price it can offer the product at. The fact that the product exists $1 cheaper on another site does not make it not the best recommendation for the customer’s need. If I search “tablet” are you saying I should be recommended a cheap off brand tablet promoted t…
I think you are misunderstanding the issue. Amazon is selectively determining to show the "buy box" on a specific product page based on whether the prices for that SKU on Amazon are competitive with prices for the same SKU on other websites.
In your example, Amazon might not have a buy box for a given iPad model if the same model was available on apple.com for less. The presence of cheaper non-iPad tablets would not impact the iPad buy box.
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This is a classic programmer response. The problem is not Amazon's software, it's their marketing, distribution network, huge audience that searches for products exclusively via Amazon, "free" and very fast Prime deliveries, etc. That doesn't all happen via simply open sourcing some code.
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Cool example you chose there. 99% of VoIP is actually closed source, proprietary solutions.
WhatsApp, Facetime, Skype, Telegram, Google Whatever, Slack, Teams, ...
Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Amazon just does it more overtly and with smaller businesses. In fact, various aspects of this where pioneered by WalMart and Costco. 1. WalMart determines the expected product and expected price and tells vendors to take it or leave it. The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as Wal…
> Much of what Amazon does is what other retailers already do. Walmart and Costco subsidize free shipping by raising prices on the third party businesses who sell through them? Because that's what the article is about.
This strategy has been adopted by eBay as well and artificially drives up prices. Let me elaborate. Recently, eBay has made it so that only the products with paid ads are shown in places where customers click. This drives up the cost of everything by more than 10% which is eBay's ad fee. I refused to buy a paid ad to sell my MacBook. It sat on the site for a month, which is highly unusual for an in-demand and rightly…
You are touching on a point that Benedict Evans has made quite eloquently in the past: >There was a joke a few years ago that rent is the new [Customer Acquisition Cost], and that now applies to everything. The [Total Addressable Market] for search ads is not ‘advertising’ (let alone online advertising) but everything that is spent to reach and serve a customer, starting with retail rents. This applies to Amazon, but…
It's still possible that people exist who charge "what it's worth" rather than "what they can get". Those people can still make a fine living off of a two sided market place through flat transaction fees. Craigslist is an example that comes immediately to mind. Smart market participants are already punishing providers that maximize profit with payola, which is leading to success of new smaller niche markets - reverb.com comes to mind, or bricklink.com or alibris.com. That is not to say the market of markets is "solving" this problem - we probably want more consumer protection law - but it does show that your startement about ads is, strictly speaking, false.
This strategy has been adopted by eBay as well and artificially drives up prices. Let me elaborate. Recently, eBay has made it so that only the products with paid ads are shown in places where customers click. This drives up the cost of everything by more than 10% which is eBay's ad fee. I refused to buy a paid ad to sell my MacBook. It sat on the site for a month, which is highly unusual for an in-demand and rightly…
Thats not the only thing I caught, at least with Ebay. During the pandemic, I decided to sell a bunch of a component I had stockpiled. (Im not a scalper. I got the parts when my dad died.). I put them for sale with $100 minimum, auction. They ended up selling for $300. I was definitely happy.... until Ebay refused to send me my money, and instead demanded access to a bank account, after the sale was complete. Fuck th…