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

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

#601

Post by jlgaddis »

saurabhtandon wrote: post #571
julianlam wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sellers use Amazon FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon). Their inventory sits with Amazon and irrespective of platform where transaction happened, Amazon ships it in their own box.

Re-read the first sentence -- very carefully -- of the comment you replied to.

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

#602

Post by ceejayoz »

kube-system wrote: post #591
ceejayoz wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act > In practice, any ordinary computer has come under the jurisdiction of the law, including cellphones, due to the interstate nature of most Internet communication.

Sure. The question I am alluding to is: can someone defraud their own computer? Maybe it is possible, but the consequences to answering 'yes' to this is pretty scary.

If I buy my spouse a phone, and secretly bug it, I'm still violating wiretap laws, even if it's technically mine.

If I'm renting an apartment, my landlord can't install a camera in the bathroom, even if they're the owner of the building.

Ownership doesn't change the fact that the law says "exceeds authorized access". Amazon agrees to only access the computer I'm renting from them in very specific scenarios. If they violate that, it looks like a pretty clear CFAA violation.

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

#603

Post by Talanes »

dathinab wrote: post #508
theturtletalks wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is different that Costco selling their own brand vodka or toilet paper because buyers can see those items side by side when shopping. Amazon has their products on the top every time and if 3rd party sellers want to be next to them, they have to pay for ads. Amazon doesn't pay for its own ads so they can effectively hide their competition.

I believe amazone should pay for their own advertisement to well themsell and prices should be transparent (amazone has to pay them self what other would have to pay), _because then they would still need to pay tax_ for this. At least in countries where taxes are not very low this could make the situation slightly better. Through not that much better tbh.

That is how it works in the physical goods world, at least. A corporate owned store "buys" it's inventory from the corporation. I'm not sure exactly how taxes intersect with those transactions, but they establish a much clearer picture of how money moves within the organization. Opportunity costs become a lot clearer when it's not "we could have made X amount from ads here" but instead "we spent X on advertising."

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

#604

Post by [deleted] »

Guest42 wrote: post #530
alaskamiller wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does amazon allow seller sites to have lower prices?

[deleted]

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

#605

Post by zapttt »

coryrc wrote: post #576
Guest42 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does amazon allow seller sites to have lower prices?

Just sell a "variant"

amazon is a hellhole because of this. makes their search totally broken.

and the funny thing is, amazon itself screws brands that have the same price restriction that they push on their sellers. Thats the reason behind those "see price in cart" shenanigans (which amazon can do, but sellers cant)

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

#606

Post by Spooky23 »

yojo wrote: post #545
julianlam wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s a money laundering thing too.

There was a story in my area a few years ago where people had some sort of scheme to convert Amazon gift cards into cash via EBay.

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

#608

Post by jlgaddis »

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 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.

And yet, a couple times a year perhaps, we have discussions right here on HN about the latest AWS outage that took down half the Internet.

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