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Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

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Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#41

This may backfire. Will they also show how much their profits are costing consumers?

Where exactly do you think Amazon's profits are coming from? Over half of their profit comes from AWS, and the retail side does not appear to have substantially different margins than brick and mortar retailers (~3% net margin).

The fees they charge third party sellers are significant.

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#42

This may backfire. Will they also show how much their profits are costing consumers?

Indirectly… Tariff is based on their cost, not list price, right?

That requires you to know when the item was imported. The tarrif forecast is a harder business than mid level wizardry.

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#43
Over half of Amazon's third party sellers are Chinese companies who regularly false report to dodge tariffs on their products in ways that American competitors can't. Amazon claims to police them but they're extremely reliant on them at this point and the Chinese sellers just start up new brands if penalized.

https://x.com/zackkanter/status/1908343624464576666

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#44
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would also be quite a misleading way to do it.

I’m sure it would be off in some cases, but “quite misleading” seems like an exaggeration: the economy was steadily growing and there weren’t any major drivers of inflation other than Trump’s massive tax hike.

I don't think it takes much thinking to realize how misleading this is. I'd really be interested in Prime Day when tariffs are decreasing everything

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#45
I wonder if they keep this after Trump's gone, especially for countries whose tariffs were high before Trump. I as a customer would prefer they did.

My uninformed guess is that this hurts the bottom line in at least the short term if customers are less likely to purchase an item which sports high tariffs (even if they might otherwise buy the item if the precise tariff were hidden). And the long term benefit to global trade (inasmuch as one sees that as a good thing, which I mostly do) isn't something that's very testable, much less certain.

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#46
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would also be quite a misleading way to do it.

I’m sure it would be off in some cases, but “quite misleading” seems like an exaggeration: the economy was steadily growing and there weren’t any major drivers of inflation other than Trump’s massive tax hike.

There are other sources of price changes - commodities prices, exchange rates, taxes in originating countries, costs of transport....

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#48
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lazy way to do this is to take the current price as the non tariff price and assume any increase in price is based on tariffs.

Some Amazon programmer tomorrow priceIncrease := (newPrice - oldPrice) / oldPrice var trump_tariff bool if priceIncrease > 1.0 { trump_tariff = true }

Please don't use if:s to assign boolean literals, just do it:

    const trump_tariff = priceIncrease > 1.0
also saves you from not initializing the variable in the default/other case. :)

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#49
post #40

This may backfire. Will they also show how much their profits are costing consumers?

Would that actually be very much for any particular item? Amazon is a business whose success is due to scaling a very small profit on billions of transactions rather than making very much on any particular sale.

It's about transparency and scamazon has none

Re: Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers

#50

Are they going to show the cost of tariffs for other countries as well? Or just partisan hackiness?

Do you really believe that it would change anything if a democrat did this?

There's nothing partisan about this, it's Amazon. They like free trade. It's about policy not the party

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