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Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

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Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#21

Post by AndrewUnmuted »

aahhahahaaa wrote: post #15
tuna-piano wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look closely. Amazon claimed they don't access individual seller data, but they do access aggregated product data. However, in at least one case the aggregated data was only between two sellers: Amazon Warehouse (which only sold a few returned items) and the original seller. "Amazon draws a distinction between the data of an individual third-party seller and what it calls aggregated data, which it defines as the data…

Ah there it is. That makes a lot more sense... honestly at their scale I don't think they should be able to do this, aggregate or not. They're about 50% of all online sales in the US, where compared to brick-and-mortar, Walmart gets a lot of flak as a small-business killer despite only accounting for 15% of all physical retail sales.

eCommerce, though, only accounted for 16% of all 2019's US retail sales. [0]

So, Walmart ought to get rid of all these private brands [1] I take it?

[0] https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/e-commerce-sales-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walmart_brands

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#22

Post by dblohm7 »

tw04 wrote: post #18
tuna-piano wrote: post #14

First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it t…

Such as what? I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland branded item that doesn’t have a name brand right next to it. Toilet paper, water, dog food, clothing, spices, oil, nuts, etc. I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland item that was used to run a name brand out of business. And they don’t do any “special placement” either. Amazon on the other hand....

Not only that, but often times Costco's Kirkland branded item is made by the same supplier as the adjacent name brand.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#23

Post by nerfhammer »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #17
actuator wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Audit trail of data source access? Though then, you would need to differentiate between legitimate access and using it for your own products.

Suppose the data is accessed by one employee who routinely accesses data of this sort for legitimate purposes — but the employee takes a copy of the data (even just a summary) and sneakernets it over to the in-house brands. How can this attack vector be mitigated?

Bureaucracy. A company that size, these people probably wouldn't know each other and at the scale needed would require significant organization to accomplish this. You would need a team of people doing this full time which requires bureaucracy.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#24

Post by lemmsjid »

mc32 wrote: post #3
tantalor wrote: post #2

> “I do not think that’s systematically what’s going on,” Bezos said. “Third-party sellers in aggregate are doing extremely well on Amazon.” Cool so cheating is okay if you do it only a little, great take.

That's having your cake and eating it too. I hope congress does something to curb this behavior where these platforms glean information from hard working businesses and use that data to inform the platforms' tactics.

I'm honestly intrigued as to how this is so morally unambiguous.

Walmart, any-given-supermarket, Costco, etc., have in-house brands (for example Kirkland with Costco). These became prominent in the 90's and there was similar discussion at the time about the ethics of a supermarket introducing competitors to the brands it stocks. Such controversy has died down and now it is commonplace. Looking at some updated articles, in-house brands at those retailers have in many (most?) cases outsold their branded competitors, so in-house brands like Kirkland are actually the largest brands in the country.

So my question is: what makes Amazon different, behaviorally, than Costco, Walmart, Vons, etc.? Both use an (arguably) unfair data asymmetry to introduce in-house branded products to compete with the external brands they also sell. You then have brands like Trader Joe's that go out of their way to have an in-house brand, and make few exceptions.

On open question is: who is this behavior actually hostile to? I think it's now conventional wisdom that if you're a brand selling in Vons or Trader Joe's that you need some special sauce to compete successfully with an inevitably-introduced in-house brand. So what is that special sauce? You have some brands that are exclusive because of their provenance or method of creation (say, a particular Scotch). But then you have many brands that are actually manufactured in the same locations and by the same people as the in-house brands, wherein the brand itself is a middleman who created a particular formulation or price/materials ratio that may or may not be the best one. These would seem to be the most vulnerable to Amazon building an in-house competitor, or Walmart, or Vons, etc.

I suppose, looking for the other side of the argument, that the question would be if Amazon has so much monopolistic market clout that the third party has no way to exist once the in house brand has taken over. E.g. as though Costco were the only supermarket period, or, more accurately, if Trader Joe's were the only supermarket period.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#25

Post by nordsieck »

dblohm7 wrote: post #22
tw04 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as what? I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland branded item that doesn’t have a name brand right next to it. Toilet paper, water, dog food, clothing, spices, oil, nuts, etc. I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland item that was used to run a name brand out of business. And they don’t do any “special placement” either. Amazon on the other hand....

Not only that, but often times Costco's Kirkland branded item is made by the same supplier as the adjacent name brand.

> often times Costco's Kirkland branded item is made by the same supplier as the adjacent name brand.

That's true for basically all store brands including Amazon Basics.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#26

Post by hrktb »

tuna-piano wrote: post #14

First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it t…

On Costco, it’s not a marketplace for third party sellers to ship to customers. Sure it’s closer to us to make analogies with traditional brands, but Amazon’s position is nothing similar.

Then, the difference between business as usual and market power abuse is the extent to which you do something. The same way annoying someone and bullying is a matter of degree. Here being in a dominant position Is what makes it different.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#27

Post by sethherr »

tuna-piano wrote: post #14

First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it t…

Kirkland products are actually white label versions of the products they copy, produced by the company they are copying - so it’s an entirely different situation - ie Costco is paying brands for their products (albeit at a lower price), not stealing.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23912991

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#28

Post by dylan604 »

dblohm7 wrote: post #22
tw04 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as what? I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland branded item that doesn’t have a name brand right next to it. Toilet paper, water, dog food, clothing, spices, oil, nuts, etc. I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland item that was used to run a name brand out of business. And they don’t do any “special placement” either. Amazon on the other hand....

Not only that, but often times Costco's Kirkland branded item is made by the same supplier as the adjacent name brand.

Why would you think AmazonBasics are not the same thing?

The construction company my dad worked for was hired to redo the concrete flooring in the factory sockets were made. He told me how the sockets would come down the conveyor belt and then get pushed down different paths. At the end of the different paths, the sockets were stamped with Husky, Craftsman, etc. Different company names, same socket.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#29

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

aahhahahaaa wrote: post #5

>Before the Journal’s report came out, Amazon had told Congress that it doesn’t access sales data to help guide the launch of its own products. This is insanely hard to believe. Amazon just started selling batteries and other random goods under their Basics brand based on ZERO inside sales knowledge? I'd love to see how they enforce that.

I dunno. I mean I'll stipulate that they did access insider data. But batteries seems like something they could have just you know figured out on their own. Doesn't seem like a sinister undercutting of the market. It's not like there is a shortage of battery brands on Amazon or elsewhere.

Re: Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

#30

Post by vkou »

lemmsjid wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's having your cake and eating it too. I hope congress does something to curb this behavior where these platforms glean information from hard working businesses and use that data to inform the platforms' tactics.

I'm honestly intrigued as to how this is so morally unambiguous. Walmart, any-given-supermarket, Costco, etc., have in-house brands (for example Kirkland with Costco). These became prominent in the 90's and there was similar discussion at the time about the ethics of a supermarket introducing competitors to the brands it stocks. Such controversy has died down and now it is commonplace. Looking at some updated article…

> So my question is: what makes Amazon different, behaviorally, than Costco, Walmart, Vons, etc.? Both use an (arguably) unfair data asymmetry to introduce in-house branded products to compete with the external brands they also sell. You then have brands like Trader Joe's that go out of their way to have an in-house brand, and make few exceptions.

The difference is that Costco very clearly discriminates about whose products it will stock on shelves, whereas Amazon is more like a flea market that charges people for renting bazaar stalls to sell from, and POS machines for processing payments.

I'm not sure that should result in legislative differences, but that is a pretty significant difference between the two.

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