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

#541

Post by qaq » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #491

qaq wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 oper…

AWS has amazing marketing the truth of the matter is AWS Region has worse downtime than a single top tier DC. Mainly due to nightmarish complexity of their control layer. They had outages that lasted many hours in a row multiple times. You need to carefully separate marketing claims from operational reality and actual track record. When US East has major issues there is not enough spare capacity to spin up everything that was running there in other regions.

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

#542

Post by qaq » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #504

1_person wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you’re describing is “good enough service levels for what I need” not “the same level of service as AWS” (or a superior level, as the parent comment implied). If some sanely architected code was all you needed, then you’d expect at least other cloud/IaaS providers to be able to match AWS service levels. Which they can’t, and which some little software shop most certainly cannot either.

Look at actual downtime of US East over the years.

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

#543

Post by scottmcleod » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

Duh..?

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

#544

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

throwaway_aws wrote: post #521

nateburke wrote: post #266

About 10 years ago I met the head of IT for B&H cameras in NYC. Among many things, he was in charge of the hosting for their online store. After he complained about dealing with physical servers, I asked him if he had ever considered using AWS ec2 for the website, and he replied that his boss refused because he believed that Amazon would pull data on B&H products and use it to compete more effectively. I'm not sure t…

Throwaway account for obvious reasons. In the past, AWS has used the data from third party hosted services on AWS to build a similar service and in fact start poaching their customers. Source: I used to be at AWS and know the PM & his manager who built a service this way. I was hired on that team.

[deleted]

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

#545

Post by yojo » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

julianlam wrote: post #533

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…

> Next time you want to buy something from Amazon, I would encourage you to find the seller's website directly or find them on eBay. eBay charges less seller fees and is not in the business of selling products directly. Last time I bought an item off eBay, it arrived shipped via Amazon Prime. Pretty sure the seller just bought it off Amazon and shipped it to my house... it was a weird turn of events. It wasn't a bran…

This is a common arbitrage tactic. Seller carries no inventory, lists multiple products on eBay for slightly higher than the Amazon price, and buys/ships from Amazon if anyone buys the eBay listing.

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

#546

Post by seppin » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

joyj2nd wrote: post #307

sacks2k wrote: post #171

I saw this happening a decade ago, but I had no real proof. I had a profitable Amazon store in 2010. I found niche products that Amazon didn't sell. As soon as I started getting traction on any one product, Amazon would start undercutting me, and my sales would drop to almost zero over the course of a couple of weeks. I had near 100% feedback and I had a single customer complaint that I sold them the wrong product. W…

I had a few bad experiences with Amazon. 1st I got an item from a fraudulent 3rd party shipper. Did not get my money back and amazon claimed they don't know his identity 2nd Packet got stolen. Amazon claimed based on statistical analysis this packet is assumed to have reached me. Delivered to "mailbox". Paid with CC, made a charge back, closed my account. You know what is a pretty good competitor? eBay. As a business…

eBay charges almost 10% for all goods sold, that's larceny.

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

#547

Post by mrkurt » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

julianlam wrote: post #533

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…

> Next time you want to buy something from Amazon, I would encourage you to find the seller's website directly or find them on eBay. eBay charges less seller fees and is not in the business of selling products directly. Last time I bought an item off eBay, it arrived shipped via Amazon Prime. Pretty sure the seller just bought it off Amazon and shipped it to my house... it was a weird turn of events. It wasn't a bran…

This happened to me when we de-Amazoned, even from direct website purchases. Lots of them use Amazon for fulfillment even if they sell directly.

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

#548

Post by siruncledrew » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

saadalem wrote: post #440

Those were the dirtiest business tactics of Amazon Nobody can beat Amazon’s margin. Amazon “invites” you to sell on their marketplace. You hustle. You innovate. You test the market. You risk your time and money. Until FINALLY you nail it! After weeks or months of hard work you finally find the right product at the right price… SUCCESS! You start making money! Everything is amazing… But “someone” has been watching you…

In all fairness, if Amazon doesn’t copy your product, then some Alibaba store or Chinese manufacturer will and in a few weeks time you’ll see the same product and description surface on Amazon under the name YUKOOLSEE and with 1000 5-star reviews already.

/s

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

#549

Post by mr_toad » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

nateburke wrote: post #266

About 10 years ago I met the head of IT for B&H cameras in NYC. Among many things, he was in charge of the hosting for their online store. After he complained about dealing with physical servers, I asked him if he had ever considered using AWS ec2 for the website, and he replied that his boss refused because he believed that Amazon would pull data on B&H products and use it to compete more effectively. I'm not sure t…

It’s just as likely one of your own administrators could steal it and sell it to a competitor. A lot of espionage is inside jobs.

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

#550

Post by scotu » Thu, Apr 23, 2020, 11:00 PM UTC

viahoptop wrote: post #449

What is the difference between this and the store brands at supermarkets?

we should really stop thinking there is always a direct parallel between web and physical equivalent. On the surface they look alike but the reality is that they are fundamentally different in scale and personalization/targeting/tracking possibilities which makes the online case completely different than the physical case. I can see all the products at costco, I cannot see all products on amazon for example. Besides, costco is not a monopoly, and I can go to target or safeway if I want to...