Washington state shuts down Amazon price-fixing program nationwide • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by kingcharles » Fri, Jan 28, 2022, 11:25 PM UTC

randomtwiddler wrote: post #282

kingcharles wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the heads-up. I've always accepted that Ethernet cables do what they say on the wire, but now that you mention it, it seems ruthlessly easy to print whatever on the cable and give you something that will only transfer at a fraction of the bandwidth.

I'm slowly collecting a list of things that I need to buy only from genuine suppliers.

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

#342

Post by jrpear » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #239

Permit wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For some reason I was under the impression that this is exactly how it works at some physical retailers? Can someone confirm that this is not the case? Does Costco/Walmart/CVS/etc. eat the cost if the items don’t sell?

It is exactly how it works for physical retailers. In most cases, they even delay payment for a few months to account for returns and the cost of returning unsold products. Costco, to my knowledge, is actually one of the more strict retailers with IIRC 6 month delay between a product sale and the vendor being played. Mostly due to their generous return policy. I don't know of any large retailer that eats the cost of…

> I don't know of any large retailer that eats the cost of unsold goods.

Trader Joe's does this. Though they also rebrand the products they sell.

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

#343

Post by chefandy » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 5:58 AM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #306

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is exactly how it works for physical retailers. In most cases, they even delay payment for a few months to account for returns and the cost of returning unsold products. Costco, to my knowledge, is actually one of the more strict retailers with IIRC 6 month delay between a product sale and the vendor being played. Mostly due to their generous return policy. I don't know of any large retailer that eats the cost of…

> In most cases, they even delay payment for a few months to account for returns and the cost of returning unsold products. You may be conflating payment terms of trade with sales/revenue recognition. In general for consumer goods (unless it's a consignment model), revenue is recognized by the manufacturer the day products are billed and shipped to the retailer. In other words Store inventory is usually on the retail…

Yeah. A 90 day line of credit is very different from "I don't pay for this if I don't sell it in 90 days."

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

#344

Post by AnssiH » Sat, Jan 29, 2022, 4:42 PM UTC

AlanYx wrote: post #302

AnssiH wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The picker at the warehouse picks from the same box That's not true. Commingled inventory is stored in separate bins so that the original source of the unit can always be determined. This is explicitly said on the Amazon seller help pages for commingling ( https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/20014148... , https://sellercentral-europe.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G... ) There is also this Financial…

I may be misunderstanding the links you're providing, but to me they only appear to say that Amazon is aware of the original source of each unit sold. They don't appear to say that a consumer has any control over which bin a product is pulled from. i.e., A consumer may choose to buy a product "sold and shipped by Amazon" and it may get fulfilled from a bin supplied by a third-party. The Financial Times article you li…

Your understanding is correct. My point was only that the claim "picker picks from the same box" is incorrect.