21–30 of 88 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Up next: Amazon will mark the items up 15%.
No - the obvious play here is for Amazon to undercut the original vendors by 15%, sell at a loss until all of the sales go through Amazon, and then pressure the vendors into cutting their pricing and becoming suppliers subservient to and dependent on Amazon, allowing Amazon to become a middle-man dipping into the revenue stream.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No - the obvious play here is for Amazon to undercut the original vendors by 15%, sell at a loss until all of the sales go through Amazon, and then pressure the vendors into cutting their pricing and becoming suppliers subservient to and dependent on Amazon, allowing Amazon to become a middle-man dipping into the revenue stream.
But then brands could buy their own products back for cheaper and just get a real life infinite money glitch?
Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product. Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a…
Yeah, this is structurally no different than hiring an assistant to shop for you. The complaint isn't a moral one. It's fundamentally a trademark dispute. Manufacturers of goods want control about how their products are presented to consumers. Hermès doesn't want their stuff on the shelves at TJ-Max because it "dilutes their brand" or whatever. Unfortunately trademark law doesn't speak to AI Agents, which is why ther…
In my opinion it's fundamentally not, because when you hire an assistant, you're hiring them with the intent to have them buy the product from the merchant.
Here, it would be like if you went to your local Safeway or other supermarket and there was a man standing at one of those sample carts who said "Hey, what you think of these papayas?" They're good, you look at them and decide you want two. "Great, I'll go in the back and get it." They disappear and come back with the papayas.
What's different:
1. You probably don't know where the papaya came from. Your intent in buying papayas didn't start with a clear understanding of the whole transaction.
2. You didn't interact with the merchant. If you want support, you have to go through the supermarket.
3. Whether you can file a credit card dispute is questionable. You likely won't win a dispute saying "I bought these and they're bad." You paid for a personal shopper, not a product. They substantially complied with their end of the transaction. You can't reliably dispute your instacart order saying "The papayas were disgusting." Instacart didn't sell you papayas, they sold you shopping services.
4. The merchant didn't sell to your email, they sold to some Amazon email. Good luck getting tracking details or getting customer support to talk to you directly. Good luck with returns.
5. Either Amazon is giving out your real credit card number (!) or using a virtual card. If it's the former, they've just invented credit card fraud as a service: you really going to trust Amazon's AI to hand out your card details safely? If it's the latter, you're probably going to get billed separately from the merchant charging you, which means Amazon is a middleman for refunds and payment issues.
In November I ordered a nozzle that I needed, which I knew had been discontinued. I ordered from a small seller, thinking they might still have some in stock. Turns out, they never even charged my card (probably because they don't have one and never will). I have been unable to get in touch with them about the order. I suspect this is very common, especially with drop shipping.
If Amazon charged me up front but they were not charged, that's outrageous. They don't even have a way for me to prove I didn't get my item (how could they?). Or will they mysteriously charge me at some point in the future? Who knows!
When Amazon can buy stuff on your own website thats out of stock for wholesale prices without your knowledge, it's time to get your shit together. Your shop software is at least misconfigured. When you really lose trust from your partners because officially announced things Amazon does, like adding your products to their shop system, then your partners have no trust in you at all. When you don't want that Amazon sell…
"Amazon announced it" in some back alley press report and certainly not in a proactive outreach way to tell these folks they were listing their products. At the very least there's a trademark issue here because these sellers in no way gave Amazon permission to reuse the images and descriptions of their products. If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your…
But at the end of the day you can't stop someone from reselling your stuff no matter how much you hate it, that has been clearly established by the First Sale Doctrine.
> If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your house, I don't think you'll be on the side of "just tell them to go away and my neighbors will totally understand it wasn't really me"
The comparison here would be that you are selling tickets to a party outside your house, which I don't think anyone would bat an eye at if the local newspaper announces?
When Amazon can buy stuff on your own website thats out of stock for wholesale prices without your knowledge, it's time to get your shit together. Your shop software is at least misconfigured. When you really lose trust from your partners because officially announced things Amazon does, like adding your products to their shop system, then your partners have no trust in you at all. When you don't want that Amazon sell…
Doubling prices to the AI now means you're product shows up twice as expensive on Amazon. Nobody is comparing Amazon to your site directly, they're comparing your product on Amazon to the next item on Amazon. Now instead of this person going to Google to find your product, they're skipping your product entirely.
That is, if I go to Amazon and search "Krater23 Widget" and don't find it, I might search elsewhere. If I find it and see it's outrageously priced, I'm probably no longer buying it.
Is this like when food delivery places started offering fake web sites for local restaurants without their permission? This seems like the same play.
Yep. Up next: Amazon will mark the items up 15%.
This should lead to anti trust.
Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product. Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a…
When Amazon can buy stuff on your own website thats out of stock for wholesale prices without your knowledge, it's time to get your shit together. Your shop software is at least misconfigured. When you really lose trust from your partners because officially announced things Amazon does, like adding your products to their shop system, then your partners have no trust in you at all. When you don't want that Amazon sell…
"Amazon announced it" in some back alley press report and certainly not in a proactive outreach way to tell these folks they were listing their products. At the very least there's a trademark issue here because these sellers in no way gave Amazon permission to reuse the images and descriptions of their products. If I announce in my local paper (you get to guess which one) that you'll be throwing a party outside your…
Good luck claiming damages with an "and then I sold more of my things at the advertised price" kind of argument.
Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product. Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a…
Overtones designed to stoke outrage aside, this is very much in line with what the original vision of the Web was about. Amazon's tech here is acting as the user agent. (It happens to be that this UA that operates on/with the data that is supplied by some far-off website (the vendor's) is a UA that is itself presented in a web browser and accepts commands that way, and ferries them off the user's local device instead…
Crazy take. If you could control the UA I would agree with you, but this "user agent" is totally controlled by Amazon. So it's not a user agent at all - it's in fact an Amazon agent and the inevitable direction here is that Amazon will use this leverage to make itself more money, likely at the expense of the user .
My browser speaks TLS and HTTP for me. Maybe it talks if I'm low vision. Maybe it adjusts the page to be more visually appealing. What is Amazon doing? They're using the same interface that I am. They're completing an identical transaction to me. I'm maybe sure I could sit down with a sufficiently large piece of paper and a sufficiently advanced calculator and crunch the numbers to speak TLS (for a packet or two, at least). Not enough to complete a transaction, though.
But I can confidently place an online order. There's no control that Amazon can offer. In fact, they're essentially just giving me a rebranded interface to perform the same action I can perform on another page.
Just because it's a service doesn't make it a user agent.