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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

#661

Post by lmm »

partiallypro wrote: post #636
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure it would be easy. Large hosting platforms like GoDaddy, Wix or Squarespace could try this too, but it puts you inherently at odds with your own customers. If I pay you to host my site where I sell my products, but you index me into the central sales portal in a bad way, I’ll be pissed. Kind of like restaurants on Seamless. It comes off as deep rent seeking - instead of helping me succeed, which is the re…

But I propose it as opt-in. If you don't want in, you aren't. It would also be entirely free, Shopify makes money on the transactions, so there are no ads but they have incentive to make you visible. I don't see how this is a negative in any way for anyone. Your store still exists in its own container, and the portal is just to drive sales to you by increasing your visibility. You could theoretically carry on your bu…

It's a very slippery slope. The portal is gonna cost money to create, and have a lot of brand value in itself. How could you ever trust that they were never gonna start charging for the portal? Or leaning on you to list in the portal.

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

#662

Post by alaskamiller »

partiallypro wrote: post #522
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…

I think Shopify should experiment with a centralized market place where stores can opt in. If you opt in, your store items are listed in a central location searchable in at single point, just like Amazon. Your item listing in the central market place merely directs you to YOUR branded store, allowing you to check out, and see your other products. That solves a huge problem of visibility that Amazon has mastered.

Nah, it'll just end up being 100 copies of Alibaba postings. 90% of Shopify is BS, just dropshippers copy pasting images and texts over.

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

#663

Post by alaskamiller »

homero wrote: post #600
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…

Facebook and Instagram do have their own checkout and are testing it

It's linked to Catalog Manager, which is a third class citizen in the FB ecosystem that they're shoehorning into being a second class. It's similar to Facebook Messenger taking Facebook Page and trying to upgrade its citizenry within the ecosystem and proclaiming it to be chatbots. That in 3 yrs flamed out and no one speaks of it anymore.

Marketplace team can do more if they can build a second class product from the get go.

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

#666

Post by chrischen »

theturtletalks wrote: post #471
chrischen wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon does have to pay. It is an opportunity cost to them.

Sure, another seller could take their spot and they are potentially losing that ad money, but with their strategy, they can price out anyone since they don't pay seller commissions either.

It's not as if seller commissions are purely an invented cost. They charge them because it's not a free service they provide, even for themselves.

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

#667

Post by george_kaplan »

seppin wrote: post #546
joyj2nd wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only on goods, they even charge commission on shipping costs. With eroding seller protection and stupid changes to the UI, I guess one of the only reasons they still have vendors is their monopoly.

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

#668

Post by akamaozu »

adrianmonk wrote: post #374
philosopher1234 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a ban against vertical integration no? There are real efficiencies (apples entire premise) from owning and running the whole stack top to bottom.

It'd be a ban of any mixture of vertical integrating with not vertically integrating. Which in turn makes it tough to transition (either direction) between the two. So, Apple would be allowed to vertically integrate and make the chips, hardware, operating system, and applications for their products. But they'd have to stop selling Belkin chargers alongside Apple chargers at apple.com, and the iOS app store would have…

Mind explaining how this is a better situation?

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

#669

Post by qaq »

tekknik wrote: post #620
qaq wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

with high availability you don’t wait for an outage to spin up new resources, at that point it’s too late. it’s by definition not highly available and if you build infrastructure this way then you can’t blame AWS for an outage

So you have say 3 Region deployment are you saying that you are running 50% more instances than you need in 2 regions that are not US East to make sure you will have capacity when US East goes down :) ? I somehow seriously doubt that.
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