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Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

atg.wa.gov

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Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#281

Post by Vespasian »

bmitc wrote: post #244
pstrateman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sold by Amazon and Fulfilled by Amazon seem to come out of the same box at the warehouse. Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore.

> Unfortunately if you really need genuine products you simply cannot buy things off Amazon anymore. For whatever reason, I have noticed this getting dramatically worse over the past couple of years. Almost all "5-star" reviewed products are filled with top reviews of 1-star reporting fake products. And because of Amazon's overly generous return policy, there's a lot of used products sold as well. Buying off of Amazo…

Maybe Amazon Germany is different or I've been extremely lucky so far because I've never received a fake (as far as I can tell).

I wonder whether fakes are more prevalent in some product categories than in others.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#282

Post by randomtwiddler »

kingcharles wrote: post #202
NavinF wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh Amazon has been selling garbage for years, but only for “commodity” items that the average user can’t test for quality. Example: All coin cells (regardless of brand/seller) on Amazon are fake. These cells last 2-4 months (long enough that most people won’t bother to contact support) when the same model from an electronics distributor like Mouser lasts ~8 years as advertised. > people may want to limit online shopp…

I would guess that carries to other batteries as they are easy to fake and hard to detect. A decent proportion of all the memory cards, flash drives and SSDs are fake on Amazon.

Agreed on both batteries and SD cards. I would add Ethernet cables are crap off Amazon also. The specs offered are useless.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#283

Post by brodock »

blocked_again wrote: post #88
daemoens wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They raised the price of his goods so that they could sell their own product for cheaper.

They did bought the goods from him beforehand. And he agreed to sell. He should have considered the possibility that Amazon has option to later sell the items as a higher price. Isn't that obvious to any seller?

Amazon does not buy and keep a stock, they charge you for the privilege of selling in their marketplace:

> Sellers then bore the risk of having their products not sell in a timely manner, or at all, while still paying Amazon for things like storage fees of their enrolled products

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#284

Post by mFixman »

snow_mac wrote: post #227

One thing everyone is getting hung up on is the fact that Amazon isn't wholesaling the dongle. The contract isn't a wholesale deal, meaning if your widget doesn't sell, it's sitting on your balance sheet, not on Amazon's balance sheet. It would be like if Costco instead of buying 1000 legos, just stocked legos in it's warehouse, then paid Lego company everytime a single unit sold. Then they figured out how to make th…

Just curious: Isn't this exactly what most supermarkets do? Do merchants decide the price at which their product appear in stores?

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#285

Post by HostileGinger »

robomartin wrote: post #170
throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #38

In case others were as confused as i was about this "While they’re often confused, Sold by Amazon and Fulfilled by Amazon are two different things. With SBA, Amazon prices your products and owns any transactions that take place. When an item sells, they pass the proceeds on to you for allowing them to sell your product. With FBA, you price your products and own the transactions. It is a service where Amazon handles t…

> and own the transactions I would strike that from the description. You never really own the transaction when it comes to Amazon. FBA customers are not your customers. You cannot communicate with them and have the kind of relationship you would have with your customers if you "owned" the transaction. Case in point: Amazon can shut down your FBA account next Monday and you'd have no way to reach "your" customers unle…

That’s why you do FBM. More work on your part. But Amazon doesn’t control anything other than taking their cut. You list it, package it, ship it, initiate refunds and customer questions, etc..

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#287

Post by throwawaylinux »

jonp888 wrote: post #278
throwawaylinux wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Amazon all of once so I don't know anything. What do you mean really need genuine? Let's say you wanted to buy an iPhone or a Canon SLR camera or a Lenovo laptop. You can't buy these from Amazon? What happens if you try? Will they ship you a block of wood in a box, or a myPhone? And won't refund it?

We are not talking here about laptops or cameras. The usual targets for counterfeiting are things like USB cables or headphones. They might come without packaging, but then so do the geniune ones sometimes. They look normal to non-expert eye, but then when you use them they either break quickly, or whilst functiontal are not as effective as a genuine item(worse sound quality, slower charging, slower transfer speed et…

Okay I didn't realize that was implied with the context. So you can't use Amazon for buying genuine USB cables, headphones, or toothpaste. But laptops, cameras and phones are okay.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#288

Post by bostik »

dangus wrote: post #247
snowwrestler wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just buy from somewhere else? I don’t understand why you would put this level of effort into shopping at a place you don’t trust.

Alot of people outside of news/tech circles do trust Amazon. They're literally the most popular retailer, of course people trust them. Anecdotes are everywhere about inventory co-mingling being such a mega problem, but I think opinions are getting repeated and amplified by a vocal minority. Beyond that, trust is irrelevant when returns/refunds are dead simple. It's wasteful, for sure, but I guess that's capitalism.

I have a split-brain on the matter.

I trust Amazon to the extent that I am okay with them storing my card information. Their security practices in that regard are pretty damn good. (I do not trust Google with my payment card info. I do not want them to have anything on file they could trigger charges against, either by accident or through their many dark patterns.)

I do not trust Amazon when it comes to vendor or marketplace management. They have an enormous fake review problem, and the probability for counterfeits is, in some categories, unacceptably high.

Meaning: I don't buy any big ticket items from them. I'm still happily doing mostly recurring purchases from Amazon, for product categories where the chance of getting mislabelled junk is practically zero.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#289

Post by DannyBee »

salawat wrote: post #260
DannyBee wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confused. The "damning evidence" is usually only damning in the court of politics and opinion. That's where it gets used too. You can't prove an antitrust case on the basis of some random set your of 500k employees saying "market share" in an email (unless they are like c level exec). Think how stupid a basis for liability that would be - "we are breaking up your company because a fresh college graduate you h…

...Unless you are aware fundamentally that the nature of litigation is not set ahead of time, and highly dependent on the receptiveness of a judge/jury at the time of litigation. The Judiciary is completely free to "interpret statute however it wants in the presence of a reasonable and convincing explanation of why previous case law doesn't fit the bill". This is why even a lawyer's take should be taken with a grain…

Sure, but when you are trying to prove a company did something as a company, particularly as a company, you are usually going to need evidence that someone with sufficient authority to bind the company acted. For something serious like antitrust, arguing the apparent authority of low level employees (vs actual authority of high level ones) has never been a winning strategy.

Re: Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide

#290

Post by DannyBee »

bytelines wrote: post #193
DannyBee wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please kill this trope? it is because humans use terms colloquially rather than with the utmost precision, and then it gets held up as if the person meant the exact precise legal concept. This is true always, which is why the advice this person got is also commonly given in lots of forms. For example, doctors are often trained in being careful in what they write down for the same reason. The audit trail is alw…

> This is true always, which is why the advice this person got is also commonly given in lots of forms. For example, doctors are often trained in being careful in what they write down for the same reason. Alternative take: it is indeed for the same reason - to avoid incriminating yourself. You carry assumption that the behavior is not incriminating. Doctors do commit in malpractice. Companies do engage in monopolisti…

This argument makes no sense to me. Yes some people and companies break the law. That is completely and totally orthogonal to whether the training exists for a given reason or not.

They also train people to not commit insider trading. It still happens. Does that mean the training exists simply to help them figure out how to not get caught insider trading, or to avoid an evidence trail?

You aren’t going to successfully train people en masse in something like antitrust law in the course of a few hours. That’s why law school isn’t a single day.

I’m not defending any illegal behavior here, I’m defending the training that says "please be careful with what you say" does not exist mainly to try to hide some useful evidence trail, which was the claim.

The level of cynicism in all this is impressively high, and the level of knowledge about antitrust is very low

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