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FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

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Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#671

Post by neycoda »

BizarroLand wrote: post #488
BowBun wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point, but I think the parent point is true as well. You still have people actually producing work, unable to compete on these platforms where Amazon will literally make a copy of their product at a lower price. This is the result of commoditizing 'starting a business' to the point of near-worthlessness in the bottom 50%+. Like you say, I don't value the businesses that simply re-sell re-labeled produ…

Amazon is basically allowing sellers to carry all the risk while product testing and marketing a product. If it does well enough, Amazon can use the same manufacturer and release a branded "Amazon Basics" version that pops up in the same search for the same product but cheaper as Amazon doesn't have to pay someone else $112 for the listing and warehousing, and the original seller that did all of the actual "work" (as…

The whole Amazon Basics thing, cannibalizing sellers, should be illegal. It just victimizes people trying to make a living in a crap job market where online sales are closing street shops.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#672

Post by Guvante »

WalterBright wrote: post #630
Guvante wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't offer lower prices directly so Amazon forces all your customers to pay for their services whether they get them or not. Or you can not be on Amazon but "just don't sell Windows if you don't want to pay extra" didn't work for Microsoft... Amazon charges for all of those things still. This isn't 50% off and we deal with everything it is ~50% but you still take all economic risk.

I neglected to mention that the mail order resellers demanded we provide them with product at 50% of the price we retailed it. So, if we lowered the retail price, we'd also have to lower the wholesale price. Nobody was being stupid here. Or maybe I should say that one learns the ropes fast or goes bust.

I am pointing out that your example includes risk transference. Unless they also charged you for shipping, storage, and returns.

There is a difference between "let me buy from you and I need room to make a profit" and "you can sell through me but you bear all costs but I still want my profit".

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#673

Post by anjel »

steveBK123 wrote: post #177
jollofricepeas wrote: post #52

FBA seller here. A lot of mom and pop businesses (~$20 million) have been built on Amazon over the past 10 years. Most of us are in the $250k to $5 million dollar range. The impact of Amazon’s monopoly power is felt big time by us as we’re being squeezed with no place left to go online especially post-iOS change. Our second option used to be the Facebook/Instagram/TikTok to Shopify connection but with that being dead…

I ran a small FBA business for a year nowhere near any scale and it was an interesting lesson. People who weigh in on these tech topics should actually try these things out to understand them better. It's nothing like listing on eBay where there's some haircut off the top and that's that. There are fees for - accepting inventory, holding inventory, returning unsold inventory, shipping sales, processing returns, destr…

Those fullfillment fees are nothing new. I worked for a publisher thirty years ago and they had a similar network of fees. The only difference was they were predictable in that the fee schedule changed only at time of contract renewal.

Whats different is that the fulfillment centers then couldn't see our books and weren't looking over our shoulder seeing our accounting figures, so as to grab the profits the moment it crossed the threshold of feasiblility.

Uber was easy and profitable in the beginning and clearly a superior value to car services and cabs. Many drivers took on debt to buy bigger better cars, never imagining the goalposts were adjustable by design so as to centralize all the profits.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#674

Post by afavour »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #634
afavour wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many famous journalists can you name? I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Ask a dozen people on the street who John Carmack is I’m sure you’d get a lot of blank faces. But if he walked into a dev shop looking for a job I think he’d probably get one. Of course breaking a massive story is going to lead to you being well known. Perhaps only within journalistic circles but in the context of your career that’s the onl…

> Of course breaking a massive story is going to lead to you being well known. My argument is the opposite. You can break a massive story and people can still not care. That was why I brought up the Panama Papers. Anyway, let's just agree to disagree.

But again your definition of “people” is the general population and they aren’t the ones hiring and firing journalists.

The Panama Papers were a huge story, they won a Pulitzer! If you’re a journalist of course a story like that is going to open doors.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#675

Post by _2d30 »

duped wrote: post #446
Justsignedup wrote: post #19

remember that time that amazon was bleeding like 5 million a day just to make sure they can destroy diapers.com? by selling diapers at a loss, which was numbers that diapers.com couldn't compete with given that they didn't have another business to rely on, then forced diapers.com to sell to amazon because they had no other option? And this came out last time they were doing monopolistic inquiries against amazon. Yet.…

The current FTC chair wrote the ~~book~~ essay on Amazon's monopolistic business practices (1) and has spoken so much about it that the only reason we'd see the government take their foot off the gas here is if Amazon's lawyers can claim that her previous advocacy biases the case against them. (1) https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

I’d encourage everyone to read at least the abstract of this link and then consider the case the FTC is trying to bring to see if they notice anything odd! HINT: there is something very odd about the two taken together.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#676

Post by LeonB »

abduhl wrote: post #497
BizarroLand wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is basically allowing sellers to carry all the risk while product testing and marketing a product. If it does well enough, Amazon can use the same manufacturer and release a branded "Amazon Basics" version that pops up in the same search for the same product but cheaper as Amazon doesn't have to pay someone else $112 for the listing and warehousing, and the original seller that did all of the actual "work" (as…

What’s the problem here? If you don’t have a durable competitive advantage then you’re going to get eaten up. First movers should not get a license to continue to reap a profit in a competitive market absent real innovation, which would come in the form of reputation (trademark) or technology (patent). Drop shippers who can be displaced by Amazon in the way you discuss have neither. They already made a profit on the…

Amazon is the rent seeker here.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#677

Post by afavour »

sadhorse wrote: post #560
afavour wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Bezos were using this Washington Post for this purpose a member of the newsroom would immediately leak it. It would be a career defining story for that journalist. The fact that we’ve heard nothing strongly suggests it isn’t happening.

Career defining? Nobody wants to hire rats that you can't trust.

Bezos might consider that person a rat, I’m quite sure fellow journalists would not.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#678

Post by unclebucknasty »

somsak2 wrote: post #651
billjings wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a hard time sympathizing? Say what you will about their means of getting it, but this person did 100% of the leg work of getting that sale. That sale doesn't exists without them. And Amazon gets the MAJORITY of the revenue cut for that? I sympathize with the idea that China should get more of that, but make no mistake: Amazon's logistics and warehousing were not an option here. They were the cost of doing bu…

> this person did 100% of the leg work of getting that sale. That sale doesn't exists without them. I don't really see it that way. The sale wouldn't exist without anyone in the pipeline (Amazon, manufacturer in China, shipping merchant, etc.)

>The sale wouldn't exist without anyone in the pipeline (Amazon, manufacturer in China, shipping merchant, etc.)

I think it's actually worse than that. The merchant is the only party that is not needed.

In fact, calling a lot of these folks "merchants" at this point is probably a little too generous. Amazon is the merchant. Many of these other guys are sourcing and marketing "partners" for Amazon and the manufacturers.

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#679

Post by stale2002 »

ameister14 wrote: post #653
stale2002 wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by using their advantages in the market and not by being better quality or more consistent But they have a lower price. That's competition working as intended. Yes, the lower price thing should win out against the more expensive product. > to charge supracompetitive prices. We aren't seeing too high prices. We are seeing low prices and then competitors that suck complaining about the fact that they suck in comparis…

That is not competition working as intended. So you can have pro-competitive behavior (lower price) that balances out anti-competitive behavior (crushing nascent competitors through market manipulation or cartels); That doesn't mean everything you do is above board. It means that while the lower prices are there, a certain amount of anti-competitive behavior has been acceptable because the net outcome to consumers is…

> So you can have pro-competitive behavior (lower price) that balances out anti-competitive behavior

Defeating competitors with lower prices is pro competitive, not anti competitive.

It is exactly what competition is supposed to do.

> why do the other anti-competitive behaviors?

Notice how I made no comment on anything to do with vague "other behavior".

Instead I was only directly responding to the idea of "undercutting" competitors.

This is competitive and the whole purpose of competition.

Undercutting competitors and copying them is the only thing I was responding to.

So my point stands.

That thing is pro competitive.

Go back and read the comment that I responded to here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37662993

Re: FTC sues Amazon for illegally maintaining monopoly power

#680

Post by joshribakoff »

Good. Amazon lies to customers too. They will tell me things like go down to UPS and buy a box and we will refund the cost, then when you chat back they waste hours and request screenshots and then still refuse to issue the refund. They started treating customers like dirt and refusing to honor their own policies within the last year or so. Additionally they will do things like end the chat abruptly or transfer you around 15x repeating the same questions over and over. In another case they promised a full refund and only after I returned the item told me I wouldn’t get a refund due to “restocking fees”. Its too egregious to not be intentional. I will specifically spend more money just to avoid them because the wasted time and frustration isn’t worth any marginal savings.
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