Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?

Post by TulliusCicero » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 7:34 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #87

_4vew wrote: post #18

(Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not in the retail, legal, or finance departments, and I have no inside information about what the company is doing with respect to its pricing. Opinions are my own and not of the company.) Yet another sensationalist headline that is unsubstantiated by the article. "This law student" has a theory . He does not have evidence -- and, in fact, much ink in the article is spilled on the…

There is, in fact, evidence that 1. Amazon occasionally sells below cost (hence existence of CRaP products) 2. Amazon has pushed some vendors to 3p 3. Amazon directly or indirectly dictates allowable 3p prices The progression from Amazon selling at a loss to them pawning the product off to 3p sellers and taking a larger cut is reasonably argued in the source article to be harmful to consumer welfare.

Post by TulliusCicero » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

thesumofall wrote: post #106

For me, this is difficult to reconcile with my experience that there is barely any product left on Amazon where they really are the cheapest. You’ll almost always find well rated smaller online shops across all categories that sell substantially below Amazon’s prices. This is even more so true if you want something sold and fulfilled by Amazon.

Post by sizzle » Wed, Apr 24, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

serioussecurity wrote: post #73

tyingq wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe these sorts of "Amazon is amazingly smart" posts. But they are hard to reconcile with why Amazon keeps showing me a rice cooker ad, after I buy a rice cooker from them.

Because ad click through rates are so low and the signal is so incredibly sparse. It's all measured against a test set which the researchers rarely look at directly (because the data set is so large). So if something lifts ad vlicks by 1% and that's from 100 in 10k to 101 in 10k, they don't really care if 9k of the ads get appreciably dumber.

Post by elamje » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

paxy wrote: post #95

elamje wrote: post #91

Regardless of law, they are profitably delivering a very wide variety of items to my door for significantly cheaper than anywhere else I look. I cannot ignore that

What about if/when they are the only retail company left and significantly raise prices? This is the reason such laws exist.

Post by aeternus » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #64

nanoscopic wrote: post #20

Amazon has a team called "Amazon Profitability Group". I used to work for said team, albeit only briefly. The purpose of the team is to calculate the proper price to sell items for, the "discount" to vendors, and the items to put in the "buy box" in order to make the most profit for Amazon. I think the what is described here in the article is only the tip of the iceberg. Amazon isn't doing something as simplistic as…

I do believe these sorts of "Amazon is amazingly smart" posts. But they are hard to reconcile with why Amazon keeps showing me a rice cooker ad, after I buy a rice cooker from them.