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The Amazon tax

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Re: The Amazon tax

#211

Post by MattSayar »

radicality wrote: post #166
toomuchtodo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a Costco nearby, highly recommend for the products they carry. I pay for the executive membership, and also ship products to where ever I need using their online shopping. (no affiliation, I just love the company and how they treat their employees and customers, strong value for price paid imho)

Is the Costco shipping good / good inventory / similar or same as in store prices? Should I consider it if living in a city like ny? I live in central nyc, been only a few times to a Costco, and had no idea they even do any shipping! I assumed that part of all those good prices is the smaller selection, large minimum quantities, and that you have to get yourself there with a car to get it in person.

I don't purchase from costco.com regularly, but the selection is generally the same as in-store and a bit more. The shipping is free, but slower than Amazon and faster than a couple weeks.

Re: The Amazon tax

#212

Post by mbesto »

abixb wrote: post #29

I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy. I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while. I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story. Amazon's o…

>I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy.

This is why I'm so bullish on Shopify. It increasingly is getting network effects (Shop.app) and people are starting to become even more brand loyal than before. Even Chinese companies are creating strong brand categories at a fraction of US counterparts and selling direct on Shopify to (e.g. Anker, Fnirsi, Fanttik, etc.)

Re: The Amazon tax

#213

Post by runarberg »

tchalla wrote: post #48
runarberg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this mentality is giving up. We as a society may or may not value some thing over another. But instead of guessing what we value we should look at our behavior. And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else. In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement.

> And our behavior is that our governments give lax regulations and consumer hostile legislation to growing monopolies which abuse their power dynamics to maximize profits above all else. In other words: blame capitalism, not our value judgement. It’s very easy to blame systems and other people.

Sometimes the easy one to blame is also the right one to blame.

But I disagree though. Blaming human nature is much much easier. It means there is nothing we can do except give up and live with it.

In contrast, blaming the system means we can still change the system, and changing the system is extremely hard, especially when the rich and powerful have so much interest in keeping the system the way it is.

Re: The Amazon tax

#214

Post by rich_sasha »

This seems generally like the US corporate playbook. Create a product, monopolize it and milk the monopoly. SpaceX, Uber, Amazon, Stripe, Facebook, Google…

Re: The Amazon tax

#215

Post by geodel »

fourside wrote: post #175
abeppu wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you expect an AI developed in the same economic system would optimize for your preferences rather than their revenue? I think this only works if people can run, fine-tune and update their own models -- otherwise the giant AI vendors have every incentive to nudge you towards whichever retailer is bidding most on your Sponsored Responses, right? I think the only difference will be that instead of advertising to…

Yeah I truly do not understand some people’s logic. Like the ones talking about some post scarcity world where universal income will offset AI related job loss. So the people in power, the ones who have constantly tried to cut back government spending, are now going to flip and support universal income? Right.

Well same people had expected self-service restaurants, self-pay terminals will cause no tip. And even more fun future robotic servers can just work without expecting/asking for tips.

Or maybe I am wrong and "This time its really different".

Re: The Amazon tax

#216

Post by gizmo686 »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #201

Grocery stores and department stores have played games with what items they stock and where they stock it (location on the shelf is hugely important in a grocery store) for decades, it's just better hidden than the 'sponsored' text next to Amazon paid ads. It's infinitely easier to make a product and get it available on Amazon.com than it ever was to get your product into a grocery store. >They know the best-reviewed…

> without ads, even if you make the best air fryer on the planet tomorrow, good luck getting people to realize that.

If you are Amazon, this is essentially just the multi-armed bandit problem, at it is not particularly difficult. You show the no-name product/vendor to enough people to get data for it.

Re: The Amazon tax

#217

Post by senderista »

I think AWS still cares about customer trust, but Amazon retail abandoned that at least a decade ago. The ads are so high-margin compared to retail though (biggest profit center after AWS) that I don't expect them to change anything.

Re: The Amazon tax

#218

Post by senderista »

swatcoder wrote: post #110
mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who rent time at my local makerspace who sell on Etsy. Maybe the issue is that Etsy doesn't make it easy to find them?

Etsy still welcomes small craft artists and makers and provides a convenient e-commerce portal for them, but yes, it's the discovery that's been ruined. They originally broke through and defined themselves by insisting that vendors only sell original cottage-crafted work, but gave up on that requirement years ago and the sincere low-volume, low-margin crafters can't compete with high-volume, high-margin importers in…

It's a lot like Google search: the good websites are still there but now it's impossible to find them.

Re: The Amazon tax

#219

Post by mynameajeff »

83457 wrote: post #30

When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.

Since most things I buy from amazon are commodity type items I need quickly and cheaply, my method has been "Prime Only" + "Sort Lowest First". Add on a score minimum filter if the first results are junk.

If you're just looking for something that's all whitelabeled stuff all coming from the same alibaba source, you can just find who's selling the same thing at the cheapest price currently. The prime only label is needed to filter out the stuff with extreme shipping pricing and times selling for $1. Would be much nicer if they could just properly sort everything with shipping included like ebay but whatever.

The results have long been flooded with brands with names like XEZAXFE all selling the exact same thing so it's the fastest and easiest way to find what I'm looking for if it's not brand name (which I wouldn't trust amazon to send me a non-bootleg version of otherwise if I want brand name).

Re: The Amazon tax

#220

Post by rjrjrjrj »

teiferer wrote: post #162
rjrjrjrj wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions. They're employees of contract companies that put the Amazon logo on their vans. But that aside, what part do you disagree so strongly with? 52 weeks * $1B weekly advertising profit / 1.5M employees = ~$35000 I don't know how he's determining profit, but quarterly advertising revenue is ~$20B and margins are presumably very high.

> The delivery drivers aren't employees of Amazon, at least in some jurisdictions. Of course hair splitting can make things "technically true" but that doesn't make this any more suitable to a serious debate in which the other side is playing dirty and the main argument against that is that dirty is bad. That argument loses its sting if itself embedded in dirt.

Not sure what you're trying to say here. As far as I can tell his estimate is reasonable.
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