Bet these merchants already agreed to this by signing up for Amazon MCF with Shopify.
Evil amazon dont list my products but pls still fulfill my orders.
Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
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Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
#32Wouldn't this be violating copyrights left and right? Presumably most of these listings have pictures and I'd be surprised if Amazon were asking permission to reproduce them. Would the same apply to item descriptions...?
Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
No - the obvious play here is for Amazon to undercut the original vendors by 15%, sell at a loss until all of the sales go through Amazon, and then pressure the vendors into cutting their pricing and becoming suppliers subservient to and dependent on Amazon, allowing Amazon to become a middle-man dipping into the revenue stream.
But then brands could buy their own products back for cheaper and just get a real life infinite money glitch?
This actually happened to some restaurants who found their service on DoorDash. The restaurant owners were able to make a fine profit out of DoorDash’s arbitrage scheme.
Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
#34Bet these merchants already agreed to this by signing up for Amazon MCF with Shopify. Evil amazon dont list my products but pls still fulfill my orders.
But this is literally the point of MCF: third-party logistics for selling off-Amazon. All these brands chose not to sell on Amazon for one reason or another and yet, without explicit opt-in, were being surfaced on a marketplace they didn’t want to be on. If I send a video through gmail that doesn’t mean I want it on YouTube.
Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is structurally no different than hiring an assistant to shop for you. The complaint isn't a moral one. It's fundamentally a trademark dispute. Manufacturers of goods want control about how their products are presented to consumers. Hermès doesn't want their stuff on the shelves at TJ-Max because it "dilutes their brand" or whatever. Unfortunately trademark law doesn't speak to AI Agents, which is why ther…
> this is structurally no different than hiring an assistant to shop for you In my opinion it's fundamentally not, because when you hire an assistant, you're hiring them with the intent to have them buy the product from the merchant. Here, it would be like if you went to your local Safeway or other supermarket and there was a man standing at one of those sample carts who said "Hey, what you think of these papayas?" T…
To add to this. Having a personal shopper is not new. Net-a-Porter for example do it. But you are paying for the personal shopper and the brands have a closer connection to their customers.
So I agree, it's very different.
Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
#36Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product. Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a…
>Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine?
1. Brand management is strict for a reason. You don't want some third party pretending to represent you and suddenly they become malicious or simply get hacked and have their customers (and indirectly, your customers) assosiswte you with frustration and danger. Or even something completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but a PR nightmare. Like having Nintendo products in a list next to some Magnum condoms.
2. There's subtle issues with making things "too convenient" to buy. Trackers and affiliates get frustrated, so it might make you less money in the long term. You might have related items to tempt buyers to buy more so spending goes down. Less users accounts (be it an email list, curation algorithms, or following on social media) weaken outreach for future holiday deals.
And those are 2 points when not considering a trillion dollar tech giant and the Ai concerns.
Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this is structurally no different than hiring an assistant to shop for you In my opinion it's fundamentally not, because when you hire an assistant, you're hiring them with the intent to have them buy the product from the merchant. Here, it would be like if you went to your local Safeway or other supermarket and there was a man standing at one of those sample carts who said "Hey, what you think of these papayas?" T…
To add to this. Having a personal shopper is not new. Net-a-Porter for example do it. But you are paying for the personal shopper and the brands have a closer connection to their customers. So I agree, it's very different.
> the brands have a closer connection to their customers
That's... not a thing though. No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here. In particular there's no inherent recognition of a manufacturers ability to control what happens to downstream goods. Stuff is stuff, if you sell stuff the people you sell it to can sell it too.
[1] Nor do we really want there to be? I mean, I get that this seems bad because ZOMG AMZN, but in general do we actually want to be handing more market control to manufacturers vs. middlemen and consumers?
Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add to this. Having a personal shopper is not new. Net-a-Porter for example do it. But you are paying for the personal shopper and the brands have a closer connection to their customers. So I agree, it's very different.
> the brands have a closer connection to their customers That's... not a thing though. No such thing as "brand rights" [1] beyond stuff like trademark, which clearly doesn't apply here. In particular there's no inherent recognition of a manufacturers ability to control what happens to downstream goods. Stuff is stuff, if you sell stuff the people you sell it to can sell it too. [1] Nor do we really want there to be?…
As the source article covers, some manufacturers routinely ensure this kind of closer connection through contractual promises from authorized retailers. (Obviously any individual person who buys a product can still resell it, but for things like clothes consumers widely understand this to be a separate "second-hand market".) Amazon invests a lot of effort themselves in the consumer experience, they understand very well that stuff isn't just stuff and it matters how you sell it.
Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
#39> Through “Buy For Me,” customers were placing orders for Chua’s products on Amazon.com to be fulfilled through Chua’s Shopify account. Chua’s products have since been removed — she contacted Amazon at branddirect@amazon.com to opt out, per the company’s FAQ page for sellers — but Chua said other small online merchants like herself could be unknowingly opted into Amazon’s “Buy For Me” program.
It seems pretty likely that no one would even know that this exists in order to opt out of this until at least some purchases have been made. This isn't even "opting out" in the traditional (and already user-hostile) way of doing something by default that's orthogonal to what the user signed up for; it's a lot closer to the whole "shadow profile" thing Facebook does where the account exists without anyone signing up in the first place.
Re: Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
#40Odd story. If you strip out the "Amazon" and "AI" stuff, the core seems to be that there's a tech company offering a service called Buy For Me which crawls various merchants who operate their own storefronts, lists the products they find for Buy For Me's users, and have a button the users can press which...buys the product. Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a…
> Which is a little odd, and the value is questionable, but fundamentally seems...fine? You're a merchant, you're selling pencils on the internet, people are buying your pencils from you.
Why not apply your exact "its fine" standards to Amazon too ? Standards go BOTH ways, after all.
> In November, Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity over its new Comet browser, which lets users ask an AI agent to find and buy items on Amazon. In a statement, Amazon said third-party shopping agents should “operate openly and respect service provider decisions” on whether or not to participate.
These people want Amazon to "respect service provider decisions" - just like Amazon demands of other people.