I checked out Zen Arbitrage's site to see what it is they offer and it sounds really interesting -- find cheap popular books sold outside of FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) with little competition, buy them, and put them up for sale on FBA (so Prime members get free shipping) with > 100% markup. But if it's really that easy and profitable why aren't they just doing this themselves? If you can double your money every month, finance the hell out of it and keep your profit machine private. It always strikes me as suspect when someone offers a sure fire way of making money but instead of using it themselves they just sell you the info.
Startup hacked by competitor, gets revenge
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Startup hacked by competitor, gets revenge
#12Could this come back to bite Zen Arbitrage in the ass if they get sued for damages caused by providing false data with the intention of sabotaging another company? I understand why they don't like Textbook Money scraping their database and using it to fuel a competing product (and it is a competing product despite OP's constant insistence that it isn't) but it's not necessarily illegal and I think you could argue in…
Yes, especially considering it sounded like they were a paying customer. Yes they were paying with fraudulent cards but they were still paying.
Wasn't the real Arbitrage here that the textbook money company knew where to get the data that the book re-sellers wanted?
Re: Startup hacked by competitor, gets revenge
#13Seems odd, someone gets (scrapes??) data from amazon - complains about someone scraping data from them.
Or is amazon sharing data and they have it legitimately?
Either way it is a funny world we live in now!
Re: Startup hacked by competitor, gets revenge
#14This would have been a lot more entertaining had it been even a little less spammy and fawning over ZA's feature set.
Re: Startup hacked by competitor, gets revenge
#15I checked out Zen Arbitrage's site to see what it is they offer and it sounds really interesting -- find cheap popular books sold outside of FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) with little competition, buy them, and put them up for sale on FBA (so Prime members get free shipping) with > 100% markup. But if it's really that easy and profitable why aren't they just doing this themselves? If you can double your money every month,…
A possible reason: It's really hard to scale a scrounge-and-resell operation - as you train employees to buy books they begin to wonder why they shouldn't just do it themselves.
Re: Startup hacked by competitor, gets revenge
#16Seems odd, someone gets (scrapes??) data from amazon - complains about someone scraping data from them. Or is amazon sharing data and they have it legitimately? Either way it is a funny world we live in now!
Amazon have an API that you can legally use for free.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/Wel...
Re: Startup hacked by competitor, gets revenge
#17No more debased form of internet commenting than laypersons debating the law, but a comment on this article does address some of the legal issues this raises.
The comment is from a non-lawyer but raises good points about selling scraped data and scraping that brings down / slows sites as being particularly illegal.
Here's the (edited) comment (in re: competitors suing over this article):
"I’ve dealt with this kind of law in a tertial way and can second your statement that subpoena powers would be the most dangerous (and stupid) thing they could grant you right now.
I’m not a lawyer, but in my dealings in this area I know that there are a couple things that spell MAJOR federal crime: One is scraping data and then selling it (the selling is where the prison time comes in), and the other is bringing down a site / affecting page load time (sabotaging a competitor and so on).
That doesn’t mention all the aspects of this story I’m sure you couldn’t talk about publicly.
A lawsuit would be fun for us voyeurs admittedly because you would have access to view ALL activity on their servers, email accounts, and so on and on. And once it is public record, it would be available for all of us to see. Now THAT would be a good article!
Yeah these guys would be majorly foolish to give you subpoena power right now!"