Seriously, what is wrong with this? It's a for-profit private org. Does this really deserve the top spot on HN? What's next? "Toyota showroom wants you buy a Corolla instead of a used VW"?
Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
161–170 of 232 posts
Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is wrong with buying a single small item online? If done correctly it should have almost zero environmental impact. The marginal environmental cost for a shipped item is the extra fuel burned by the delivery truck due to the weight of the item (in this case the weight is insignificant) plus the fuel burned while the truck is idling when the package is delivered. I would be willing to bet that the environmental c…
There's the fuel cost of adding length to the delivery route.
Small items are almost entirely delivered by the post office instead of UPS, and the post office is stopping by your house pretty much every day no matter what.
Contrast with you personally making a detour in your car to a physical store to buy a single small item -- that actually DOES have a fuel cost.
Unless your purchases are always along a route your travel anyways (like your commute), delivery is vastly more fuel-efficient as a general rule.
Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
#163I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…
I think it's easy to describe why it's problematic without even referring to antitrust. Amazon's brand (as a store / marketplace) is that it helps you sort through many options to select the product they believe you will like the best. This is different from the service offered by traditional grocery stores which offer many different products, but are not arranging those products in relation to a particular request.…
How is this different than using Target? Or Walmart online?
Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
#164This is why I’m long on Shopify
There’s less and less incentive for you to put up your commodities on Amazon for a vendor
Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
#165I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…
I think it's easy to describe why it's problematic without even referring to antitrust. Amazon's brand (as a store / marketplace) is that it helps you sort through many options to select the product they believe you will like the best. This is different from the service offered by traditional grocery stores which offer many different products, but are not arranging those products in relation to a particular request.…
Amazon had the absolute worst product search engine since the beginning of time. This is probably on purpose to set this up since inception.
Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
#166Amazon's own-brand goods are generally servicible from what I've seen. It puts them at a competitive advantage that their own items are quite unlikely to be counterfeit, while all other brands are subject to suspicion.
That's some pretty serious doublespeak. A huge portion of the problem of counterfeits is a result of Amazon's decision to comingle inventory.
I think that's what GP is saying. Presumably they don't resell, and don't allow resellers, so no counterfeits of their store brand products.
Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
#167I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…
If you see amazon as a brick-and-mortar store, maybe it is ok.
If you see it as a platform, like the windows 95 desktop with the IE icon, it might be different.
Personally as a customer, it's annoying the liberties amazon takes with my shopping experience and sponsored results and toolbar like extras and prime interstitial ads and so on...
Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
My girlfriend had nail varnish delivered in ana Amazon box 30x30cm it was ridiculous! So I wouldn't be singing too many praises on their packaging stance
Funny how people buy a single small item have it shipped to them then have the gall to complain about shipping waste.
The pickers are collecting entire lists of items 1 item for n people is basically the same as n items for 1 person and any given distribution of items. Trucks are dispersed with entire loads full of goods generally going in the same direction. No additional resources are logically wasted until we discuss the last mile where it goes out for delivery and even that is aggregated with many packages to be delivered in the same general area.
In order to discover how much waste there is in ordering 1 thing one day and one the next you have to determine exactly how the route would have differed in each case. Given the delivery truck would probably still have been in your town anyway lets imagine for the sake of argument that it drives an additional half mile each way. If we try to imagine the net effect of lots of extra packages lets say all the extra packages in the truck caused a net of 100 miles of travel divided 100 ways. So lets imagine a net cost of 2 miles of travel. So the person probably wasted the equivalent of 1/5 of a gallon of gas.
More efficient delivery trucks which fedex and ups are rolling out will make a difference. This relies on a few parties that will directly benefit from doing so. Totally going to happen.
Less packaging by actually putting more than one thing in the same exterior packing would make a difference. This relies on a few parties who would benefit slightly. This might in theory happen.
Batching orders instead of ordering item A when you actually need it and item B when you need it doesn't matter much and would be difficult to do. It requires millions of people to think ahead and always order things before they need them. This will NEVER happen.
The people complaining about shipping waste are addressing a legitimate problem that actually could be solved. Your statement is akin to the people that say why do we need to work on problem foo while their are still children starving in Africa. It's true their are and we ought to do something but in the meanwhile we can still do other things to.
Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
#169I just did the “ground coffee” and melatonin searches. Entire first row was an ad for bulletproof coffee and sugarbearhair vitamins. Second row had the amazon brand on the left with prominent amazon logos on the coffee bag and the pill bottle and a tag that says “featured from our brands” and the first word in he title for both items was Amazon. The next three items were sponsored ads. I don’t see amazon being decept…
FWIW, I just did a similar thing. The first 5 or so Amazon brands were clearly labeled as such. Then I searched some of their lesser known brands and found many weren't clearly labeled. Try it yourself. The hard part is finding out what Amazon's brands are since they (surprise!) don't publish a list. This is the best list I could find in my short time searching https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-owns-these-brands…
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Re: Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
#170I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Many retailers reserve some of their best shelves paces for their private label products, both as a form of differentiation and to extract higher margins. You could argue that Amazon is unique in that it is large and potentially has a monopoly over eCommerce, but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Most amazon basic products are commodities, and pri…
> but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end. Consumers are actual humans with complex lives that often also include producing things. Every seller that Amazon drives out of business is a consumer (or consumers) that no longer has an income. That's how this harms consumers.
Every Amazon shareholder is also a consumer.