Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#491

Post by AmericanChopper » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

qaq wrote: post #476

AmericanChopper wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a big believer in use cases that fit on-prem solutions like that. But you’re dreaming if you think a 6-10 box operation is going to come close to the same service levels as AWS, and if you want to replicate the developer experiences that you can achieve on AWS, you’re going to have to devote a lot of resource to it. Whether scaling works well on-prem depends entirely on your scaling requirements. If you have burs…

I am not only not dreaming I've being running workloads like that for a long time. Both in cloud and colo. If it's my money sanity or ass on the line colo is my strong pref. I def. do not want to replicate developer experience of AWS in Colo as AWS has s ton more moving pieces which are black boxes and have arbitrary limits. Scaling is a disingenuous point for most e-commerce apps as you generally have RDBMS that do…

Say you completely ignore scaling. The two things you simply cannot replicate at that scale are redundancy and operational resource. AWS has their entire operations team working at all hours of the day and night supporting their infrastructure. They also offer some of the most highly redundant services in the world. There is simply no way you could ever dream of replicating those service levels with such a small operation, and if you were to even attempt it, it would require an absurd level of over provisioning. As I said, you’re completely misrepresenting what the actual trade offs are, and there’s no possible way your claims about replicating AWS service levels is even remotely plausible.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#492

Post by tcbawo » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #481

missedthecue wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really in the spirit of anti competitive laws if the consumer wins? This is more like one business owner (FBA seller) trying to sic the authorities on their competition (Amazon Basics) in order to keep a competitive advantage. This seems more anti competitive than what Amazon is doing

The consumer doesn't win in the end if there's only one major retailer that survives. There's lots of benefit in diversity of retailers competing against each other.

The consumer doesn't feel the effect of the consolidated marketplace until Amazon decides to start squeezing its customers. Once all the ducks are in a row, look out.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#493

Post by johnnyballgame » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

riazrizvi wrote: post #489

johnnyballgame wrote: post #470

Amazon is a cesspool of scammers now. I created a listing for a physical book. I have yet to send a single book out to anyone and there are already two sellers trying to sell the book on the listing I created. And one is listed as a "collectible"!

Not sure I understand. Are you saying you are the author of a new book, you haven't sold any copies yet, you created a listing for your book and people are offering to sell it as a collectible (presumably as an arbitrage where they'd fulfill on your book)? Or did you create a new listing for someone else's book, that others might credibly own already?

Author of a brand new book no one has any copies of yet.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#494

Post by 1_person » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #438

qaq wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This amazes me it's so much easier at that scale to deal with 6-10 boxes vs all the crap that comes with AWS. Don't want to deal with managing them there are companies that will do it for you and you will have an actual on call people that are accountable to you. Unless you are doing 6+ figures a month in AWS spend have fun trying to have same level of service.

I’m a big believer in use cases that fit on-prem solutions like that. But you’re dreaming if you think a 6-10 box operation is going to come close to the same service levels as AWS, and if you want to replicate the developer experiences that you can achieve on AWS, you’re going to have to devote a lot of resource to it. Whether scaling works well on-prem depends entirely on your scaling requirements. If you have burs…

The CDN will be fronting most of the load, behind that 10 decently specced servers running sanely architected code can scale to millions, if not tens of millions of requests per second.

Drop the servers in HA sets of 2-3 nodes across 3-4 regions, anycast your service endpoint from each cluster. The hardest thing to replicate without AWS is the 6-7 figure bills.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#495

Post by dv_dt » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #443

nwallin wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a bank were to seize your money, you'd notice, because you wouldn't have that money anymore. And it would be very well documented, leaving a clear paper trail to a criminal conviction and a civil suit. If your bodyguard did you physical harm, you'd notice, because your knees would hurt. And there would be ample evidence for a criminal case. If amazon copied all your proprietary data, you would almost certainly nev…

> If amazon copied all your proprietary data, you would almost certainly never notice, no criminal law would apply, and you'd have a hell of a time proving it in a civil suit. For a thought exercise, let's play this out. Amazon copies data running through VMs (or grabs it from storage). Let's assume it isn't on hardware certified for capital-letter processing [1], most of which require regular third party audits. So…

I thought Amazon was already organizationally constructed in very small functional units which each are encouraged to export their units "interface" in an formal way. Is the source data traceable if it becomes anonymized product sales samples exported to apis that mix into a pile of legit data and all fed into some sales analysis engine?

The unit could be the "open sales modeling unit" that just supplies one data feed among thousands.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#496

Post by abacadaba » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #436

entee wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major question I don’t have a good answer to is, “Why is this different than brick and mortar store brands like Safeway signature?” Surely a part of is is placement, but Safeway could put own brand ketchup at the same level (and I think sometimes does) as Heinz and still wouldn’t sell the same volume. Amazon is clearly getting a big advantage here, I’m just curious about what the underlying dynamics are that allo…

The difference is that Safeway does not have any other sellers on their shelves. Safeway buys inventory at wholesale and sells it at retail. Everything that is sold in Safeway was intentionally selected by Safeway to be there. If you see a product on a Safeway shelf, the company that makes that product already got paid--by Safeway. If Safeway puts a generic ibuprofen bottle next to a bottle of Advil, that's fine with…

Advil may very well be paying for the privilege of being on that shelf. See "slotting fees."

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#497

Post by alaskamiller » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

theturtletalks wrote: post #455

This is the exact reason why Shopify grew rapidly. Sellers knew they needed a platform where they own the data and could abstract the operations outside of Amazon seller dashboard. People also forget that Amazon doesn't have to pay to advertise its own products, but 3rd party sellers do. This immediately puts you at a disadvantage if you want your product at the top since you pay seller commission and advertising fee…

With Shopify you don't pay ~20% sales commission to Amazon per se, but you sure as heck will end up paying for that if not more to Facebook.

Where by FB has no direct incentive, yet. It could be a FB Marketplace PM team someone has already copied Shopify outright and is just waiting for the right time to roll that out to all FB user worldwide.

With Amazon Marketplace the strategy has always been to convert customers off that platform into your own.

Most top listings in most niches/categories are priced for break even inclusive of the multitudes of keyword PPC campaigns they're running with the hope that you leave a review and that you actually pay attention to the little postcard that comes inside the package asking you to register your email address.

Both games suck tbh.

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#498

Post by triceratops » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

replicatorblog wrote: post #322

CodeCube wrote: post #290

So many comments about, "doesn't everyone know they do this?", and "everyone does this!" I say there should be an explicit difference between "running a platform", and "selling on a platform", and never should the two meet. By "platform" here, and in the context of selling stuff online or IRL, I mainly mean that the store should never compete with their suppliers ... it's madness and unethical. If everyone can get a…

So no private label products from Walmart, Target, Kroger, or CVS?

Those are different. Explained elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961009

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#499

Post by triceratops » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

URSpider94 wrote: post #399

CodeCube wrote: post #290

So many comments about, "doesn't everyone know they do this?", and "everyone does this!" I say there should be an explicit difference between "running a platform", and "selling on a platform", and never should the two meet. By "platform" here, and in the context of selling stuff online or IRL, I mainly mean that the store should never compete with their suppliers ... it's madness and unethical. If everyone can get a…

So, force all retail stores to divest their house brands, which they have been selling without complaint as long as I’ve been alive?

Those are different. Explained elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961009

Re: Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products

#500

Post by vntok » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 9:51 PM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #318

vntok wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, done. Now you have Amazon Basics' products competing with Amazon Fulfillment's products on Amazon Dotcom's website. Different entities, not even under the same corporate governance.

If they are different entities, how come Amazon Basics can use the same name as the platform? Did Amazon sell the rights to another company to use their brand?

"Did Amazon sell the rights to another company to use their brand?" But of course, why not? These kinds of trademark licensing agreements are all over the place, there would be no difference here.