661–670 of 930 posts
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Considering they have to pay 56% of their revenue to Amazon, how do you expect them to be able to afford locally manufactured products?
They don't have to. They could get their own distribution channel. Distribution is a thing, you can't just complain that you don't have it for free.
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I would believe those are actual brand names. Has anyone created software or a web site to generate hilarious Amazon brand names automatically? Edit: Looks like there are lots of AI-fueled Amazon/business name generators. Most of the names weren't as funny as your examples, though I got some good ones (electrofakes.com, etc.) from prompts like "low quality tech products" and "cheap knockoff technology products." Anot…
My favorites are HILETGO, KeeYees, AITRIP, "Oi ya gai", Treedix, and Gikfun. I bought products from all these Amazon vendors last year, hilariously they're still around.
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How is Shopify a monopoly? There's all kinds of competitors for making online stores
They force sellers to use their payment processor. If you don't, they charge an extra 0.5% markup on top, which basically means that no 3rd party payment processor can be competitive on price. I think you can also measure their power in the same way as Amazon - The % of fees that they capture as a percent of sales volume goes up every year. Slow squeeze.
My family buys on Amazon a lot but I am well aware that I can buy any of that stuff, including at times for a lower price, elsewhere - from company website to Costco to Walmart market, via Google shopping, etc.
Doesn't the existence of these infinity choices make claims of monopoly a bit farfetched? I am sure it's more complicated than this, but... is it?
Was there a similar action taken against Walmart when they were crushing small and large suppliers alike?
Nope, the FTC has been historically toothless from 1990-2020 or so. Some people (such as Lina Khan and Joe Biden) are trying to turn that around. Doesn't seem likely to fully turn around as the next Republican president will likely appoint another toothless chair of the FTC. Democrat presidents for the foreseeable future will probably be going after big companies more than their predecessors in the 90s and early-2000…
Incidentally I heard today how many laws against anti-competitive behavior were stripped with Carter and Reagan onward, and it's become a trend in our hyper-corporatist world now that's hurting workers and income classes below the highest.
Watch "DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow" on YouTube
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Okay so take the FTC out of it. Let’s say we’re writing the laws from scratch today. Why would store brand generics be outlawed?
They wouldn't, except for market dominating retailers.
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They don't have to. They could get their own distribution channel. Distribution is a thing, you can't just complain that you don't have it for free.
That's literally the meaning of being a monopoly: There are no other distribution channels that can compete with Amazon. They are a distribution monopoly.
The world wide web + google and facebook make finding eyeballs open for all. Fedex, UPS and USPS make shipping products open to all. Stripe makes accepting payments open to all. Cheap 3rd party manufacturing makes making things open to all.
We've probably never been further from a monopoly in any of the areas in question. The reason it's so damn hard to make any money selling random products is that there is just so much competition.
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I heard some stores switched to Shopify, would be interesting to learn why it is not an option for stores like yours.
Shopify and Amazon are quite different things. Amazon is a marketplace and provides exposure - in other words, they bring you traffic besides providing ecommerce functionality. Possibly a lot of traffic if there's not much competition already in your space. With Shopify you have primarily an online store solution. It's up to you to do your own marketing somewhere to drive traffic. Shopify does have what they call "Sh…
It's getting pushed harder due to things like Shop Pay being a thing. I've actually been trying to use it more, given I do purchase an increasing number of things from Shopify-powered retailers - but their search and targeting still needs a lot of work for it to behave like a proper marketplace.