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The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

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Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#501

Post by j-bos »

pierat wrote: post #383
cwoolfe wrote: post #244

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…

Isn't that open and shut fraud on the part of ebay?

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#502

Post by _uhtu »

mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

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…

I hate that every discussion of reigning in abusive companies has to come with 1000 comments about how other companies are also being abusive, which should apparently make us just wave the white flag. Nah, let's deal with all the monopolies, and Amazon is a good place to start since like you said, they are just incredibly blatant.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#503

Post by resoluteteeth »

mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

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…

> The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as WalMart gets specific SKUs

Does the trick of creating different SKUs work for amazon though? If not, it seems like what they're doing might be worse. Since according to the article they're now enforcing the rule against having lower prices elsewhere through software, depending on how it's implemented it could end up having a much broader effect.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#504

Post by BeFlatXIII »

thelastgallon wrote: post #17

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…

> 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.

Is there a way to get around this by having the list price higher than Amazon but run specials for most weeks of the year that undercut Amazon? Could that only be a viable strategy if Target is the final merchant but not on the manufacturer's website?

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#505

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

thfuran wrote: post #410
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they were separate companies, it would require actual collusion a I don't play bridge, never learned. A game consists of two teams of two players each. My vague understanding is that you might win if a partner gets ahold of a card that you discard, but that you can't know what card that is without saying so (cheating). Good players can tell what cards their partners might need, and discard anyway. This isn't che…

>Game theory supplies that just fine To a vastly lesser extent than when it's one company with one board and one CEO in charge of multiple business units that would be unrelated after the breakup. If you break off Costco's chicken selling business from the rest of the store, the chicken business isn't going to keep their prices so low to boost the other company's sales because it costs them too much money to do so an…

> If you break off Costco's chicken selling business from the rest of the store,

It sure seems like that, but in the real world we do have many counter-examples where a singular company does do the loss leader thing for a long while, going into the red year after year. Often, it's never clear why or how they could think this was a winning business model.

The chicken-selling business might do the same, and their justifications for doing that might never be sound, they might not even be the reasons why they're doing it, but just some post hoc rationalization to themselves and the real reason is poorly understood by all involved.

If the rest of Costco sees this happening, are they going to step in and sabotage the chicken-sellers? Lord knows it drives some traffic to their stores (they might be unwilling to study that and write reports, as it could then be used against them if the FTC comes after them again, but they'd still notice). If they can subtly act to somehow ease the pressure, or make that worthwhile to the chicken-sellers without leaving a paper trail, they'd be fools not to do it right?

Of course, without exotic economic principles, that can't last forever. But unless you're claiming that there are business units for AWS are deep into loss-leading, your analogy only applies very generally and it's difficult to see how they could fall into similar snags.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#506

Post by BeFlatXIII »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #293
thelastgallon wrote: post #17

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…

It is interesting to note that the US government often requires the same kinds of MFN terms, even though it is usually much more expensive to do business with the government than the private sector. There are many ways of constructively working around MFN requirements but it creates collateral damage. For example, the practice of having very high prices that are steeply discounted for most customers is often an artif…

> the practice of having very high prices that are steeply discounted for most customers is often an artifact of having the US government as one of your customers

That's one of the main cases of sticker shock in the healthcare industrial complex. Price a cancer treatment that would still be profitable at $10k/month at $125k/mo and offer sweetheart discounts to insurance companies (and treat self-pay patients as charity case writeoffs).

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#507

Post by fyrn_ »

abduhl wrote: post #366
fyrn_ wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice, but the reality is that Amazon has almost 90% control of e-commerce. They have huge monopoly power, and laws exist to protect consumers from that. Is it the ideal way to build a society? No, But the government should still step in when it happens.

90% by what metric?

I actually misread fig. 14 from the article which was the set of top market participants. So it has a 90% share of the ecommerce of those top 5, not the whole market. Honestly feel the article intended that misreading

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#508

Post by bonestamp2 »

mountainofdeath wrote: post #456

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…

> The agreement often has a stipulation that the same product can never be cheaper elsewhere which is sometimes easy as WalMart gets specific SKUs

Yep, this is anti-consumer and anti-competitive -- it should be illegal. Here's where it gets interesting though...

In wal-mart's case they're trying to win on price competition alone. They're hoping with their volume, operations and efficiency, nobody else can sell with a lower margin. But Amazon is doing the opposite.

I looked into selling on Amazon recently and the fees were over 30%! Amazon requiring that sellers can't offer a lower price elsewhere drives the prices up on Amazon and off Amazon. Primarily, they're trying to prevent sellers from directing buyers to their own website where they can offer the product at a lower price because there are no 30%+ fees.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#509

Post by MiddleEndian »

93po wrote: post #465
pierat wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, this is wildly unethical and shitty. I'm never using ebay again.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/investigation-ebay-employees-st...

They also allegedly hired someone to stalk and harass a couple who posted negative reviews of them online.

Re: The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”

#510

Post by Aerbil313 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #340
exabrial wrote: post #25

Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, break them all up. And for the love of crap, stop approving billion dollar mergers.

Do exactly how do you plan to beak them up? How would you divide them up?

Governments' and companies incentives are highly different. I live in Turkey where not every service is corporate like it is in the US. I can see in practice that a competitor service offered by government happens to be that real competition which drags the prices down.
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