>Many sex toy and adult novelty manufacturers refuse to sell their products on Amazon, or even offer wholesale products to any vendors who have an Amazon or eBay presence3. Mostly this is due to the influx of potentially counterfeit products.
This is incorrect and shows the author does not understand the topic. The primary reason people don't want to sell to Amazon sellers is that it leads to price erosion. Amazon sellers compete on price, which has negative effects for other channels; retail stores will see products selling cheaply on Amazon and won't be willing to pay your regular wholesale price.
Obviously, selling wholesale to someone who sells on Amazon doesn't make the counterfeit issue any worse.
Due to commingling counterfeiters don’t need to sell to customers as Amazon will simply substitute real products with fake ones. Effectively, any Amazon seller becomes a counterfeit channel and the counterfeiters get access to sell the real products to minimize returns and thus issues with credit cards etc.
This is obviously a horrible deal for the legit producer who also gets saddled with a terrible reputation.
This is easily addressed by requiring your Amazon sellers to not use commingling. I've even seen a handful of companies that require their sellers not to use FBA.
>counterfeiters get access to sell the real products to minimize returns and thus issues with credit cards etc.
Not following. Amazon knows which unit was sold by which seller, so they can attribute returns to the correct seller even if was actually sold by another.
Only if the seller pays more to keep their products separate via stickering. Otherwise the seller’s products are commingled with other sellers’ products and it’s impossible to know which seller’s physical inventory was used to fulfill the order.
Yes, once you have products in the program you can't recall those specific products - this should be obvious, because Amazon may have already shipped some or all of the actual products you sent in for someone else's sales.
However, that does not mean Amazon hasn't been keeping track. They explicitly say that they keep track of which seller originally shipped each item.
Too many instances of this happening for this to be the case. Plenty of reports on this site and others stating they bought from the proper Amazon seller and still getting counterfeit product. I bought a SpyderCo knife "Ship and Sold by Amazon" that was an obvious fake. I just think Amazon doesn't care, they shipped a free replacement that happened to be legitimate.
Two things. First, your link describes various punishments suffered by "good guys": legitimate sellers who've built up a brand and product set over time, whose thin margins are destroyed by those punishments. The bad guys don't have to spend near as much money on their fake goods, so their margins aren't thin and these punishments are simply a cost of doing business. They also structure their Amazon relationship differently, with lots of different accounts and brands and products, so that any particular adverse event won't kill them.
Second, I don't see anywhere in that link where they're talking about commingling and its related issues. I think that was already a well-publicized issue back in December when this link was published, so I assume that they didn't mention it in order to curry favor with either Amazon or with the various entrepreneurs in the Amazon ecosystem who agreed to be quoted. This link certainly doesn't establish that malignant comminglers are ever punished in any way.
I believe they know how many units you've sent, and how many sold units to attribute to your listing. So they can calculate how many units they owe you. But I don't believe they know where to find them. If they did, they'd be able to return your units to you, and they wouldn't need to replace barcodes to stop commingling.
1. You're wrong, and I linked to an Amazon page that explicitly says that. "For inventory tracked with the manufacturer barcode, each seller’s sourced inventory of the same ASIN is stored separately in our fulfillment centers. We can also track the original seller of each unit." from the link above.
2. " If they did, they'd be able to return your units to you" no, because they may have sold already. If I ship 100 units in, sell 50 myself, then someone else sells 50 and Amazon ships my units for their sales, then Amazon can't return my units for me, even though they know exactly which 100 orders my units were shipped for.
They say they can, but they don't act like they believe it. If I had to guess, I'd say new inventory might now be on separate shelves but some existing inventory is permanently in doubt.
On what basis are you saying they aren't acting like it?
And they've been saying that for years, and basically nobody keeps inventory for years because Amazon charges huge fees for doing so. If your position is they switched over years ago then it's not an issue now.
You don't know whose units were used to fill an order for your listing. You can't blacklist scammers. You don't know how many of your units remain in stock, and you can't get just those back.
If every lot of units were individually tracked, why would barcodes even matter?
Amazon may eventually catch on, but it’s a ticking clock until they get paid and disappear.
Day A, they ship X fakes to Amazon. Day B, they sell at slightly below market rates to sell as quickly as possible. Importantly as they have the lowest price they should get the bulk of orders. Selling off a mix of real units from others and fake units from themselves.
If they are a fairly low percentage of the market it could take a while for any significant number of their fakes to be shipped. Now it’s a race if they get paid by Amazon before Amazon catches on.
Obviously this works best if the fakes are close to the real product so it takes a while before a significant number of people notice. Think functional but substandard USB cables etc.
Sure, but it does not have to be successful to harm the reputation of a manufacturer. The issue is it’s a cat and mouse game with some actual winners which get others to try and do the same.
That's not a reason to avoid selling any units on Amazon. The only brands this may be relevant to is very high end luxury brands, some of which avoid Amazon sales for that reason.
The domain listed on your user page [0] contains both Amazon and eBay branding images. Are you affiliated with those firms? If you're affiliated with Amazon you should have mentioned that in this thread.
I find that a little sad too. I am also starting to wonder if big companies are actually creating wealth like it usually is said. Or maybe they just concentrate wealth that could have gone to a lot of smaller players towards themselves and in the end it's just a zero-sum game.
At least in Europe (I mostly buy from Germany) there still seem to be a high number of these smaller E-Stores.
In fact everything thats more expensive than ~100€, I‘ll search for on my favorite price comparison website.
Very rarely Amazon has the best offer and ordering from a small E-Store isn‘t any more effort than ordering from Amazon, when they offer payments via PayPal or Amazon Pay.
When ordered before 18:00, almost all vendors nowadays will ship the same day and the products will arrive on the next one, just as when ordering from Amazon.
Amazon basically uses third-party sellers to outsource product discovery risk. By pressuring / enticing sellers to use Amazon's fulfillment platform they know where those sellers get their products from, and if a given product becomes very popular they can just contact the manufacturer and sell the product themselves, cutting out the third-party seller. It's understandable that sellers love the high reach they can get on Amazon, but by selling on the platform they provide Amazon all the information they need to eventually kill their business (except if they're producing the good they sell, in which case Amazon might have more difficulty cutting them out). In my opinion this is a gross misalignment of incentives, as the platform operator has a direct incentive to put you out of business as soon as you become successful.
Walmart helped to innovate the space. They did it mostly as a form of leverage, so they could apply pressure to brands that constantly seek to raise prices. Walmart will add or pull various Great Value products depending on if they want to punch a brand downward on price. So if Kraft insists on $2.50 for a box of Velveeta Shells, Walmart introduces a generic version of the same product at $1.10 and puts it right next to the Kraft product. They do the same thing throughout their store, not primarily targeting high margin products (of which they have few in their entire store), rather using it as a lid on pricing power for brands. Walmart makes very little on the Great Value brand products, however it helps them counter the exclusivity leverage that huge brands like Coke, Pepsi, Kraft, Mondelez, et al. have over them.
Amazon does seem to be using their basics system in a very different manner, from observing what products they're pushing and the prices they're charging.
Walmart does exert massive price pressure on their suppliers, but it's mostly by virtue of the leverage they gain by being so huge that their suppliers need Walmart a lot more than Walmart needs them.
Walmart didn't create or innovate store brands (aka private label) for food; they didn't even start selling food until 1988 or launch Great Value until 1992. Private labels date back to the mid-1800s. [1]
I never said Walmart invented the space. They did innovate in the space however and have used it at a scale that had not remotely been seen before.
I entirely disagree with your premise that Walmart's primary leverage against the large brands is their scale. The reason I was so specific on pressure on brands, is because that's where Walmart has the weakest position versus the core brands in cases of segment dominance. Kraft for example is an extraordinarily large and powerful supplier at what they do. Without the very cheap, near zero margin version of their Great Value competing products, Walmart has few good options for applying pressure to a supplier the size of Kraft that dominates so many spaces. There are no replacement products that can blanket fill up their thousands of stores coast to coast and always meet demand as the sole supplier. You can't get that kind of supply & guarantee from small mom & pop labels that are heavily regional.
Kraft-Heinz scale ($18B sales) is impressive, but it's still not much compared to Wal-Mart scale ($514B). That scale is what underlies the negotiation, just as Kraft-Heinz's scale typically let's them attempt to dominate their other customers. "Weakest position" for Wal-Mart, even if true, is relative and the absolute value is still quite strong.
Every regional grocery store chain has private labels from which they get roughly the same stuff; store brands are a mid-1850s innovation for exactly the same leverage over suppliers as Walmart want to get. Walmart making a decision to vertically integrate an element of their supply chain as opposed to regionally contract also isn't an innovation: it's simply an obvious and logical step at scale. Finally, dismissing regional contracting as a possibility is silly: Florida and Washington state having their generic mac-n-cheese rolling out of different factories is not a deal breaker.
Walmart historically is brutal on price and terms, but pays very quickly.
When they sourced some products locally in the 90s, they would pay the farmer I worked for immediately for his products, like within 2-3 days of receipt. The local chains were on net-30 terms and were always late.
Usually, it was better to have $0.95 for pumpkins on Halloween than $1.00 at Christmas.
sharecropping strikes again, its basically a guarantee that if you make significant amounts of money off a platform, the platform is going to try to muscle you out.
When has Amazon ever done this to a third-party seller?
If Amazon really wanted to muscle in on the third-party sellers, how can you explain the huge amount of third-party sellers who sell shoes, clothing, electronics, toiletries, and other stuff in direct competition with Amazon's own store, and who joined Amazon after Amazon has been selling those same things for years?
Third-party sellers also use Amazon to outsource marketing, advertisement, and in some cases shipping. It's a lot easier to set up as a third-party seller on Amazon than to operate a complete e-commerce business. Some of the third-party Amazon sellers are just one person.
> It's understandable that sellers love the high reach they can get on Amazon, but by selling on the platform they provide Amazon all the information they need to eventually kill their business
Presumably, a company evolves its product so that amazon can't simply call them and say 'hey, sell to us, not Bobby'.
If your company is merely selling cupcakes or the like - I find it very difficult to be sympathetic - those kinds of companies only exist by the virtue of selling people useless junk they'd be better off without, or even worse, being a middle-man in between a manufacturer and the consumer that needn't be there at all.
It's hard to see Shopify resolving the issues at hand. The costs associated with mom n pop e-commerce are ultimately too high (eg investments in SEO). The same could be said for similar platforms like SquareSpace or Wix that offer e-commerce.
I have a side project that monitors mom n pop sites -- take for example vintage clothing store sites in New York City. The landscape has become a ghost town, with hundreds of previous sites now abandoned. They've largely moved to platforms like Etsy or Instagram.
Care to share some details about your side project? It sounds really interesting.
Funnily enough, my wife has a niche within a niche within a niche website selling German vintage items to Japan. The unexplained drop in traffic was quite sharp around oct-nov 2017 if I recall. She’s promoting things on Instagram and has some loyal followers, but it’s still quite a struggle.
I don't understand why Shopify doesn't create a search engine for Shopify products. Overnight they would become a powerhouse akin to Amazon and solve the #1 issue faced by sellers -- product discovery.
The #2 issue Shopify sellers face is fulfillment, but IIRC they are investing $1B+ in building out their own FCs across the US. (Which is peanuts, but a step in the right direction)
> I don't understand why Shopify doesn't create a search engine for Shopify products. Overnight they would become a powerhouse akin to Amazon and solve the #1 issue faced by sellers -- product discovery.
I don't see the appeal. I really, really like Shopify as a seller and would always recommend it to someone looking to sell online, regardless of volume. However as a customer I couldn't care less about a Shop's backend as long as I have a pleasant shopping and ordering experience. And Shopify alone doesn't guarantee that.
A general search engine and price comparison for online stores/products, regardless of platform, is more appealing, but I think we already have that, at least here in Germany with Idealo, Geizhals or Google Shopping.
Of course, when Shopify can provide fast, Prime-like shipping with their new fulfillment plans that's an actual appeal worth searching for.
I'm not sure this is true as presented. I agree less and less people run their own sites. But I don't know if this is because customers prefer platforms for cyber security reasons, or if it's also a value proposition for sellers (e.g. not having the headache of keeping a site running so you can focus on selling).
For hobbyist materials, eBay is still great. For bespoke goods, Etsy is unbeatable and you can even build relationships with the sellers.
No, the manufacturer likely uses Amazon as their fulfillment network as you often get better storage/shipping rates this way.
These manufacturer fulfilled network (MFN) orders cost the manufacturer a premium in shipping fees over FBA orders (orders sold/fulfilled through Amazon), but don't carry the referral fee (8-40%).
Given this, it is almost always cheaper for the manufacturer to sell off Amazon and ship MFN... if you ignore customer acquisition cost.
I apologize, the referral fee range I previously stated is a little misleading.
Referral fees for the vast majority of items is 8% to 15%, which in and of itself is a massive range. I believe this is mostly due to the typical margin on each item. Perhaps the typical cost of customer acquisition also plays a role.
The minimum is 6% for personal computers, which historically have super slim margins anyhow, and 45% for Amazon Device accessories, probably because Amazon wants to maintain a major advantage over third party accessories (and possibly because they dominate the market for Amazon device accessories, so they're able to charge a major premium)
While I have not looked into drop shipping in any extensive way, the flaw in the premise to me is that there are seemingly huge lead times (at least with regard to when sourcing from AliExpress or similar). Any idea how people who actually do this professionally mitigate that?
When was the last time we bemoaned the fact we don't have to call a travel agent to book a flight, or that we needn't pull out our yellow pages to find a cab company when we need to go to the airport?
The march towards efficiency is a never ending one, for better or worse. Mom and pop e-stores were a go-between that except for specific niches are likely casualties of that march.
The "mom and pop" shops can offer value in curation though.
One of Amazon's biggest problems is that, since they sell everything, and even more everything through third party vendors, they understand very little about most of what they sell. This is why their search is so terrible in many verticals, and probably part of the reason behind the counterfeit goods problem they have. Ship them live weevils in boxes marked "Galaxy S10"-- nobody in recieving will know the difference.
It's a problem with no good solution for them-- even benign stuff like removing obvious duplicates from their catalog would probably cost them precious search results and require huge manual efforts. Going so far as to actually cut off products that sell just because they suck would shake their business model to pieces.
If you go to a "mom-and-pop" shop that's dedicated to one specific niche, they're probably not going to be full of the "noise" products Amazon will have. The specialist enthusiast PC shop won't be stocking weird off-brand SSDs and heatsinks too anemic for modern processors. The camera store doesn't push those $35 Vivitar cameras with a three-megapixel sensor interpolated to 48.
In a way, you're selling confidence-- if I buy any random product in this store, it's much more likely to be an authentic and non-garbage product.
While obviously not a mon-and-pop store, I've definitely heard this argument thrown around about Costco-- they don't have 75 TVs on the store floor, but the 20 they have are probably all reasonable selections in their price range.
I like that this article actually takes a nuanced approach and describes the pros on both sides. Most writing on this I see doesn't.
I believe there is an inevitable tension between centralization and decentralization. The former gives you:
- Usability. Look at fifty product pages on Amazon and you can easily scan each one since they all have the same layout and user experience. You don't have to hunt through fifty different web designs trying to find the price. You don't have to figure out if this page includes the shipping in the price while this one doesn't. Consistency is one of the keys to usability, and centralization gives you this.
- Economies of scale. A mom and pop store likely can't afford to roll their own crypto, fraud prevention, 24/7 support, etc. But when a single organization moves enough product, these kinds of things enter the realm of affordability.
- Predictability. Consumers can accurately predict how their experience is going to go. Fewer unpleasant surprises because they are likely dealing with the same branch of one giant organization every time. Walk into a McDonald's anywhere on Earth and you mostly know what you're going to get. That can be a real relief when you just want a safe experience.
But you lose:
- Innovation. If changing the layout of a design affects a hundred million pages and a billion users, it takes a hell of a lot of work to get everyone on board to ship it. It's much harder to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
- Resilience. A centralized organization is basically a monoculture, and suffers the same risks as biological monocultures. A single vulnerability or bug can take down the entire system because every part of the system is identical, including having the same weaknesses. When you have a lot of diversity and redundancy in the system, much like genetic diversity, the system is more able to respond to a surprising condition. There may be some winners and losers, but the whole system won't lose, and then can learn and adapt from the winners that remain.
- Novelty. When it's all the same, the time you spend interacting with the system becomes less personally enriching. No one writes an entry in their diary about the 523th burger they had from McDonald's. The stories people remember about their lives -- especially when interacting with businesses -- are almost always unique experiences with small enterprises. The family-owned hole in the wall restaurant, the tiny labor-of-love tabletop game store, the three-partner law firm that helped them navigate a crisis.
The important part is that each of these pairs of points are diametrically opposed. Gaining one sacrifices the other, so there is no perfect solution. Just trade-offs. Which means what we probably need is a meta-diversity -- a range of businesses at all scales. Accept that some big businesses are good. Sometimes you just want to complete a transaction or eat a damn burger. But also support a thriving set of small and medium-sized businesses for when you want something more lively.
One thing I really worry about the US is that government and incentives today clearly push towards a mono-scale where almost all successful business are big. I see few forces to combat the economies of scale and the power that large corporations wield, so we're heading towards a world where there are only giant mega-corps.
Interestingly as Amazon becomes the front of so many sellers, there is a lot of edge cases they are supporting that end up breaking these two.
For instance some products are listed and have a price, but only come from third party, non integrated vendors so you won’t know the shipping price or conditions until choosing a specific vendor.
Or they’ll list an item and contact you for adjustments after a purchase attempt (I had that for a business printer, and there was options for maintenance plans etc.)
Or there will be items that can only be shipped for free above some total amount, when that limit don’t exist for others.
Basically I think that by absorbing so much of the market, amazon also inherited the complexity to some point.
I'm in this space. There are just so many ways to reach potential customers nowadays each with their own audiences. Although marketplaces still rule, I’m beginning to see the trend that savvy long-term businesses who want to protect their upside and own their customers are beginning to focus more of their efforts on their own properties (à la Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace, etc) while treating the marketplaces they sell on as marketing channels. It’s already becoming commonplace now for a retailer to be on a wholesale platform, a few marketplaces, have their own website, and also sell in a brick & mortar location.
Shameless plug: I work on Trunk [0] which helps businesses sync their inventory in real-time across everywhere they sell. The long-term vision is to make selling on multiple places just as easy as selling on one!
Thankfully that hasn't been an issue so far (although my largest customer only does 500 orders per day at peak). The current strategy is to just make inventory syncing as fast as possible (making use of webhooks or polling very often).
There is something on the roadmap though that will introduce minimum stock levels such that even though you have 10 in stock within Trunk's centralized inventory, Trunk can add a buffer for high-volume products such that it will sync a stock level of 7 to sales channels instead of 10 in case this situation might occur.
I deal with this by calculating the average sales per day and std deviation of each product and using that to pull products that might go out of stock in the next day.
The hard case is a slow moving product with 1 unit, you want to list it because it might be weeks before it sells, but you can’t predict when/where it will sell.
That’s a really cool idea! I’ve been wondering how to participate on Amazon ecosystem without having to engage in Adversarial Interoperability - and this is one neat way. Congrats on figuring it out!
Its amazing how technology has failed at democratizing commerce , and everything really. In the early 2000s it was all about decentralizing, democratizing , empowering the small units. Nowadays, from tech stacks to marketing channels it 's as if there is a conspiracy to keep centralizing.
Consolidation happens in every economic wave, but this feels premature.
It's not a conspiracy, it's simply that centralization is highly efficient and thus extremely popular. It's the reason why engineers that want to run the business out of bare metal colos get laughed out of the room in favor of an AWS stack. Decentralization is more work.
That's not the case. Centralization has certain pluses and those pluses tend to be gigantic compared to the minuses. AWS/GC/Azure trounce colos because AWS/GC/Azure come with tooling that simply does not exist in the colos.
Atlantic.net blew minds of colo market when it provided API'able PDUs in early 2000s. Not the "SSH via this place into the APC with your username and a password see the status and trigger a power cycle" but "Send this payload to the following end point". PXE boot without manual tweaks is still basically non-existent in the colo space. I could continue with these examples but it should be enough.
That's the reason why AWS/GC/Azure win, not because they are centralized.
The minuses for AWS/GC/Azure is that no matter how big you are, unless you are Netflix or Snapchat you are still a very small customer which means that AWS/GC/Azure organization cares less about your happiness than Comcast does about the happiness of a random cable TV customer spending $180 a month on a triple play.
> for AWS/GC/Azure is that no matter how big you are, unless you are Netflix or Snapchat you are still a very small customer which means that AWS/GC/Azure organization cares less about your happiness
That truism is often repeated, despite the fact that it contradicts Netflix's own strategy[1]:
> We would prefer to be an insignificant customer in a giant cloud.
Netflix may want to be a small fish in a big pond but its spend makes it a very large fish in a very small pond.
This means that its problems are addressed first regardless of what kind of general rules the "cloud" has. One can see it everywhere -- the larger and the bigger the customer the more important it is.
> AWS/GC/Azure trounce colos because AWS/GC/Azure come with tooling that simply does not exist in the colos.
Yes, out of the box tooling is part of the "centralized" platform. In a decentralized world you stack some adhoc open-source tools and web dashboards atop your hand-rolled infrastructure. This is more work than a centralized solution that provides the metal and everything else you could possibly need (and everything you will never need) as a single centralized package.
> PXE boot without manual tweaks is still basically non-existent in the colo space. I could continue with these examples but it should be enough.
Those examples support my position.
> That's the reason why AWS/GC/Azure win, not because they are centralized.
They could not do this without being centralized, that's precisely the point.
Nope. It does not have to do with centralization. It has to do with what the companies decided to do.
Servint, Erols, DedicatedNow, DigitalNation, etc started before Amazon. So did EV1 or Choopa. They simply played a game of hardware rather than software tooling. As the hardware became more and more commoditized the software became more and more important. C/Panel and Plesk did not cut it. That's why Amazon/Google/Azure won.
Why do you think the mall destroyed the downtown? It’s not because people wanted a decentralized store owners. It’s because consumers want centralization.
Same thing happening in ecommerce. People want everything in one place.
But the trend is also already shifting. People are tired of the big stores so much like malls have started to die, so too ecomm is increasingly about personal relationships.
Amazon also has its hooks in consumers even deeper with Prime. Sure, another store might be willing to sell me an item for a couple bucks cheaper, but then when I factor in the extra shipping costs, Amazon comes out ahead - and they defray that cost for the consumer with value-added services like Prime Video and Twitch Prime, so that I don't really feel like I'm paying for the shipping, but rather for a bundle of services that happens to include the free shipping that keeps me tied to Amazon over other e-commerce sites.
It's also interesting because this means that it's not only less convenient, but also more expensive to use other platforms - and in a Capitalist society, anti-giant-corporation ethics can't really stand against the need to not live on the street and the desire to own nice(ish) things.
Same thing keeps happening to software. When a platform first launches, its sponsor works overtime recruiting indie developers to launch their own apps on the platform. They know that users will only come to the platform if it has content/apps that they want.
Then at some point, the platform gains "critical mass." People stop buying the platform as a way to get a specific app, and start buying the platform for the platform, confident that it will provide whatever they need.
Soon thereafter, the platform sponsor begins either buying up apps on its platform or making its own competition for apps on its platform.
the independents are squeezed out because the platform no longer needs them to be successful.
Then another platform launches, and its sponsor screams "developers, developers, developers..."
Maybe there are better references, but, in January 2000, I wrote up a bunch of notes on the experience of building a PC from parts, as the various resellers and shoppers were still in the early stages of figuring things out: https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/
Wow, I remember the having the exact same deliberation and selecting the Abit BP6 at the time for much the same reasons.
The ability of that motherboard to run dual Intel Celeron CPUs was unique at the time as it was a feature Intel had disabled on these chips and required some magic from Abit to enable the dual CPU functionality. This was arguably really the board that made dual processor configs affordable for enthusiasts on a budget for the first time, I loved mine.
It's easy to see the potential technology has to fulfill your values.
It's harder to see the potential it has to fulfill other people's values (which may be very different from yours).
Overall, what technology does most readily is magnify what people or societies are inclined to.
So, in a capitalist/corporate economy where scale is incentivized and rewarded, technology will tend to magnify that. It can also magnify the chances early adopters have to make a new entry into the market for a certain window, but it won't alter the overall dynamic (this is a descriptive commentary, not necessarily normative).
And boy, I remember when I thought the main obstacle to well-balanced political discussion was a lack of easy access to thoughtful, reliable information.
I thought that the internet was about disintermediation not about adding 1001 me to comparison sites with identical products with identical copy from the same wholesalers.
On the contrary, I've seen a lot of great smaller stores be able to set up their own web stores much easier thanks to tools like shopify or stripe. There is still a decent amount of work going towards allowing the smaller guys to have a presence online.
I run a small online store, we focus on a particular niche tech, LoRaWAN. It's specific enough (at the moment) that there aren't many other folk in this area.
We started out with Shopify, but that's actually really limited in functionality unless you spend many $100s per month on apps to add basic stuff (like VAT handling). We switched to a self-hosted shop, which feels totally old skool but is working out pretty well. We're happily charging cards and shipping stuff all over the world.
Our thing is knowing the products and providing support, so I think that has some value. If you want a boxes shifted cheap then Amazon's your answer. Anything cleverer, then specialist retailers still have some real value.
Got a link? Having gone from zero to keen this afternoon as a result of the "Crazy LORA ranges" post, I'm interested in acquiring a ”The Things Node" or if possible a cheaper device which will let me test if my nearest Things Network gateway is in range.
How do you handle the logistic? Using third-party storage and shipping? Creating and running self-host shop is not difficult, but I found the logistic of handling inventory and shipping that tie you up.
It can take a huge amount of time, but actually, that bit I won't outsource yet. We do it all in house.
A friend of mine with a similar business in a different field tried outsourcing that a few years ago and it didn't work well, I didn't really understand why until I started.
We sometimes pre-configure gateways and devices for customers, so we need to pull them off the shelf and work on them first, then pack all the other stuff they ordered into the box and ship it. It's invaluable having the stock close to hand.
My solution - hire someone to help with the logistics.
Anything related to electronics and photography and supplies I buy at BHPhoto.
Why - because BHPhoto:
- Has excellent support, refund and matching policies.
- Does not charge sales tax (imagine that!) if you use their Payboo card. Actually they officially charge sales tax but it gets immediately refunded so you don't pay it.
- Does not carry counterfeit junk or faked-up crap with fake reviews from shady sellers like Amazon or ebay does.
- Offer free shipping
Smaller e-tailer and retailers cannot compete with BHPhoto refund policies and cannot compete with sales tax compensation policies (thanks government for enforcing sales taxes all over).
Support and guarantee of quality products is more important to me that 2 days shipping.
A legitimate mom-and-pop is never going to compete with larger retailers for commodity items like PC components. They don't have the buying power, they don't have the economies of scale and they can't offer meaningfully better support or curation. The "mom-and-pop" retailers who can compete are generally doing something shady, from grey imports to outright counterfeiting.
That's far from the case in all verticals. I have bought tons of stuff from small specialised online retailers, because they can meaningfully compete in niche markets. If I want a woodworking tool, my first port of call is Workshop Heaven, because they sell a carefully curated selection of extremely high-quality products. Everything they ship has been QCed by someone who actually knows about tools, so I'll happily pay a premium in the knowledge that I'll never get a dud. I'll buy a tool from a brand that I've never heard of, because I trust their curation. I look forward to seeing their newsletter in my inbox, because it usually highlights cool new tools that I haven't heard of.
IMO, the future of mom-and-pop retailing doesn't look like mom-and-pop retail - it looks like a boutique. A small selection of carefully curated products, a fanatical commitment to quality and genuinely useful pre- and post-sales support. To survive in a post-Amazon world, small retailers need to evolve into niche brands in their own right.
They maintain a Youtube channel where they break down pretty much anything you'd ever want to know about how to intelligently buy a fountain pen.
They've got a usable site where I don't have to worry about getting scammed or even creating an account -- last time I bought a pen from them, the package even came with a handwritten note; it was just a really nice experience.
Pretty much all of my ink/pen related needs go through Goulet, specifically because I trust them more than Amazon.
To give you an anecdotal customer perspective I won't buy anything from Amazon that isn't Prime-enabled and fulfilled by Amazon. To me that's the only upside of Amazon - fast, reliable and free (if the subscription fee doesn't count) next-day delivery of the goods I ordered.
I can get similar prices and often better seelction elsewhere. Fulfillment is Amazon's greatest strength in my opinion.
Its big fish eating smaller fish. Most commerce goes like this: Person A buys from person B who buys from person C. Put yourself in between and take a cut, or run a service to make the chain more efficient/convenient. Or add a link to the chain.
An amazon business story from Germany. I’ve opened a brand new amazon business account for a brand new company (VAT number present, HRB number present). I wanted to link a bank account to this amazon account, as one would do in Germany. This did not work, for whatever reason.
However, amazon offered my company a €1500 credit line. I had to immediately buy a printer and a couple of 27” screens. I used the credit line. I also used a director’s home address as a delivery address because, you know, why would you sit at an empty office and wait for shipment.
They have shipped the order, the invoices have been paid. One day after the invoices have been paid, I received the email that the business account has been suspended because of “reasons”.
Obviously, they did not say what the reasons were. They asked me to FAX to them director’s personal information (passport scan, proof of address), without giving any info on what are they going to do with info. I contacted them via their support website, because there is obviously no number to call or an actual person to contact. I have no idea how do they run their business in Germany without this kind of info, their business unit has an office in Germany, Regensburg, I believe.
In response to my contact, they sent me just blanket emails repeating their requests.
I just dropped it and stopped buying via Amazon. No more personal or business purchases anymore. Bye amazon.
The best was 6 weeks later, their business manager sent me a request for feedback on what my experience with amazon business is like. Well, they never came back to me after receiving a sour, detailed comment.
I avoid doing any kind of business with amazon AND aws since then. I give money to German businesses. I will never send them any official documents via scans. All the info they need is in commercial register but they are too lazy to figure things out.
Bye amazon, only when the hell freezes.
* Edit: I’ve been a loyal amazon and aws customer for 7 years. Burned thousands of Euro with amazon and aws over the years through different ventures. However, their attitude and behaviour regarding the info which only governmental organisations should be asking for, turned me completely away.
I understand they have a fraud department and what not, and maybe they have a good intent. However, this being amazon “business”, I expected them to know how to do business. Companies have registered addresses, phone numbers, list of shareholders and names of directors are publicly available. There are more suitable channels than blanket emails, faxes and scans.
The only option for contact available on my account was a support ticket. I know they have numbers in the US. But this is EMEA, US does not deal with that. Edit: here’s a Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/rad_g/status/1117811252493996034?s=21
I just went to amazon.de and while the interface isn't the same (they make it harder to find the contact us form it seems), I still had the option to pick "call me" and then pick a german number.
the biggest hurdle is that when you're banned from amazon, you can't log in, so you can't choose that option.
it's a chicken and egg problem: you can't get support for your banned account because you can't log in, but you can't log in because your account is 'banned'
There are many edge cases on dimensions other than product.
I live on a small island that enjoys US Postal Service by boat. Amazon will ship to me. The high number of mom-and-pops that aren't set up to ship to me creates a situation where, if I need something Amazon doesn't have, I usually have to send it to someone in the US and once enough stuff builds up, they ship a package to me. This holds true even for international shippers (e.g. an Etsy seller in Europe is more likely to ship to the US than to me).
I love shopping at smaller retailers that sell great products. In fact, my main problem is finding them. Does anyone know of a website or something that promotes niche retailers in different categories?
This could be a fun project idea. How would you imagine yourself finding what you are looking for?
Would you see yourself going to a website like "momandpops.com" and choosing from categories like "Household" "Clothing" "Outdoors" and subcategories like "Clothing > Men's" "Clothing > Kid's"? When you select the categories, you'd be shown a listing page of smaller retailers that sell products in that category.
YES! I would love a site dedicated to quality products, with an emphasis on smaller shops or startups. I just want something curated by people with decent taste. Stuff that everyone already buys, but want a more quality/special offering. I love places that don't sell their stuff on amazon and are too small to get in department stores. I've seen a couple websites that do this, but it's mostly aimed at a niche(ex. Stuff for artsy moms, or toys for super single rich guys).
I'll post some links to give you an idea of the kind of stuff I'm into. Honestly I just want a website curating cool websites that sell physical products.
It’s some deja vu that Walmart was branded as the place that killed mom and pop stores some 10+ years ago, and now Amazon is the place killing online stores (and partly Walmart) since ecommerce has taken off in recent years.
Amazon’s golden goose has been their logistics. It creates a company that is like ebay+ups together. Mom and pops may have the same wares as amazon, but the shipping and order efficiency is a tough gap to close against amazon. Getting an order packaged, to the courier, and in transport for delivery still takes time and people for most ‘mom and pops’. It’s like trying to build a faster locomotive to compete with the company that owns the railroad.
134 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadThis is incorrect and shows the author does not understand the topic. The primary reason people don't want to sell to Amazon sellers is that it leads to price erosion. Amazon sellers compete on price, which has negative effects for other channels; retail stores will see products selling cheaply on Amazon and won't be willing to pay your regular wholesale price.
Obviously, selling wholesale to someone who sells on Amazon doesn't make the counterfeit issue any worse.
This is obviously a horrible deal for the legit producer who also gets saddled with a terrible reputation.
>counterfeiters get access to sell the real products to minimize returns and thus issues with credit cards etc.
Not following. Amazon knows which unit was sold by which seller, so they can attribute returns to the correct seller even if was actually sold by another.
However, that does not mean Amazon hasn't been keeping track. They explicitly say that they keep track of which seller originally shipped each item.
See https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/200141480?...
That's entirely consistent with them tracking it. If you report that, they'll know who actually shipped it in and will punish them.
Second, I don't see anywhere in that link where they're talking about commingling and its related issues. I think that was already a well-publicized issue back in December when this link was published, so I assume that they didn't mention it in order to curry favor with either Amazon or with the various entrepreneurs in the Amazon ecosystem who agreed to be quoted. This link certainly doesn't establish that malignant comminglers are ever punished in any way.
You just asked me how Amazon punishes sellers, so I provided some examples. You can find many more by searching.
Obviously the sellers that were actually selling counterfeits aren't going to be doing interviews.
2. " If they did, they'd be able to return your units to you" no, because they may have sold already. If I ship 100 units in, sell 50 myself, then someone else sells 50 and Amazon ships my units for their sales, then Amazon can't return my units for me, even though they know exactly which 100 orders my units were shipped for.
And they've been saying that for years, and basically nobody keeps inventory for years because Amazon charges huge fees for doing so. If your position is they switched over years ago then it's not an issue now.
If every lot of units were individually tracked, why would barcodes even matter?
If you as a seller want to be able to get the same units shipped back, then don't use the manufacturer barcode program.
Barcodes matter so the warehouse can scan and know which product has been shipped in. Every product in the system requires a barcode of some sort.
Day A, they ship X fakes to Amazon. Day B, they sell at slightly below market rates to sell as quickly as possible. Importantly as they have the lowest price they should get the bulk of orders. Selling off a mix of real units from others and fake units from themselves.
If they are a fairly low percentage of the market it could take a while for any significant number of their fakes to be shipped. Now it’s a race if they get paid by Amazon before Amazon catches on.
Obviously this works best if the fakes are close to the real product so it takes a while before a significant number of people notice. Think functional but substandard USB cables etc.
If a brand new seller is selling they're likely not to commingle their high risk products until they've proven themselves.
It's not nearly as easy as you think.
Some categories have commingling turned off completely.
Sure, but it does not have to be successful to harm the reputation of a manufacturer. The issue is it’s a cat and mouse game with some actual winners which get others to try and do the same.
[0] https://icanpriceit.com/
I have sold on Amazon to the tune of hundreds of thousands of units, and am very familiar with the system.
In fact everything thats more expensive than ~100€, I‘ll search for on my favorite price comparison website. Very rarely Amazon has the best offer and ordering from a small E-Store isn‘t any more effort than ordering from Amazon, when they offer payments via PayPal or Amazon Pay.
When ordered before 18:00, almost all vendors nowadays will ship the same day and the products will arrive on the next one, just as when ordering from Amazon.
Pretty sure this is why amazon created amazon basics. To go that last mile on cutting out the high margin products they can’t source themself.
Amazon does seem to be using their basics system in a very different manner, from observing what products they're pushing and the prices they're charging.
Walmart didn't create or innovate store brands (aka private label) for food; they didn't even start selling food until 1988 or launch Great Value until 1992. Private labels date back to the mid-1800s. [1]
[1] https://plma.com/PRIVATELABELSSTOREBRANDSANDGENERICPRODUCTSC...
I entirely disagree with your premise that Walmart's primary leverage against the large brands is their scale. The reason I was so specific on pressure on brands, is because that's where Walmart has the weakest position versus the core brands in cases of segment dominance. Kraft for example is an extraordinarily large and powerful supplier at what they do. Without the very cheap, near zero margin version of their Great Value competing products, Walmart has few good options for applying pressure to a supplier the size of Kraft that dominates so many spaces. There are no replacement products that can blanket fill up their thousands of stores coast to coast and always meet demand as the sole supplier. You can't get that kind of supply & guarantee from small mom & pop labels that are heavily regional.
Every regional grocery store chain has private labels from which they get roughly the same stuff; store brands are a mid-1850s innovation for exactly the same leverage over suppliers as Walmart want to get. Walmart making a decision to vertically integrate an element of their supply chain as opposed to regionally contract also isn't an innovation: it's simply an obvious and logical step at scale. Finally, dismissing regional contracting as a possibility is silly: Florida and Washington state having their generic mac-n-cheese rolling out of different factories is not a deal breaker.
When they sourced some products locally in the 90s, they would pay the farmer I worked for immediately for his products, like within 2-3 days of receipt. The local chains were on net-30 terms and were always late.
Usually, it was better to have $0.95 for pumpkins on Halloween than $1.00 at Christmas.
If Amazon really wanted to muscle in on the third-party sellers, how can you explain the huge amount of third-party sellers who sell shoes, clothing, electronics, toiletries, and other stuff in direct competition with Amazon's own store, and who joined Amazon after Amazon has been selling those same things for years?
https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...
Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin, but never managed to collect much in royalties because carpenters everywhere just made them.
The Wright Bros. invented and patented the airplane, and spent the next decade more or less fruitlessly suing copiers.
> It's understandable that sellers love the high reach they can get on Amazon, but by selling on the platform they provide Amazon all the information they need to eventually kill their business
Has that ever happened?
If your company is merely selling cupcakes or the like - I find it very difficult to be sympathetic - those kinds of companies only exist by the virtue of selling people useless junk they'd be better off without, or even worse, being a middle-man in between a manufacturer and the consumer that needn't be there at all.
I have a side project that monitors mom n pop sites -- take for example vintage clothing store sites in New York City. The landscape has become a ghost town, with hundreds of previous sites now abandoned. They've largely moved to platforms like Etsy or Instagram.
Funnily enough, my wife has a niche within a niche within a niche website selling German vintage items to Japan. The unexplained drop in traffic was quite sharp around oct-nov 2017 if I recall. She’s promoting things on Instagram and has some loyal followers, but it’s still quite a struggle.
The #2 issue Shopify sellers face is fulfillment, but IIRC they are investing $1B+ in building out their own FCs across the US. (Which is peanuts, but a step in the right direction)
I don't see the appeal. I really, really like Shopify as a seller and would always recommend it to someone looking to sell online, regardless of volume. However as a customer I couldn't care less about a Shop's backend as long as I have a pleasant shopping and ordering experience. And Shopify alone doesn't guarantee that.
A general search engine and price comparison for online stores/products, regardless of platform, is more appealing, but I think we already have that, at least here in Germany with Idealo, Geizhals or Google Shopping.
Of course, when Shopify can provide fast, Prime-like shipping with their new fulfillment plans that's an actual appeal worth searching for.
For hobbyist materials, eBay is still great. For bespoke goods, Etsy is unbeatable and you can even build relationships with the sellers.
Six days later, it arrived.
From an Amazon warehouse. In an Amazon box. Sporting a bright white ASIN sticker.
Hmmmmmmm.
These manufacturer fulfilled network (MFN) orders cost the manufacturer a premium in shipping fees over FBA orders (orders sold/fulfilled through Amazon), but don't carry the referral fee (8-40%).
Given this, it is almost always cheaper for the manufacturer to sell off Amazon and ship MFN... if you ignore customer acquisition cost.
Referral fees for the vast majority of items is 8% to 15%, which in and of itself is a massive range. I believe this is mostly due to the typical margin on each item. Perhaps the typical cost of customer acquisition also plays a role.
The minimum is 6% for personal computers, which historically have super slim margins anyhow, and 45% for Amazon Device accessories, probably because Amazon wants to maintain a major advantage over third party accessories (and possibly because they dominate the market for Amazon device accessories, so they're able to charge a major premium)
The march towards efficiency is a never ending one, for better or worse. Mom and pop e-stores were a go-between that except for specific niches are likely casualties of that march.
One of Amazon's biggest problems is that, since they sell everything, and even more everything through third party vendors, they understand very little about most of what they sell. This is why their search is so terrible in many verticals, and probably part of the reason behind the counterfeit goods problem they have. Ship them live weevils in boxes marked "Galaxy S10"-- nobody in recieving will know the difference.
It's a problem with no good solution for them-- even benign stuff like removing obvious duplicates from their catalog would probably cost them precious search results and require huge manual efforts. Going so far as to actually cut off products that sell just because they suck would shake their business model to pieces.
If you go to a "mom-and-pop" shop that's dedicated to one specific niche, they're probably not going to be full of the "noise" products Amazon will have. The specialist enthusiast PC shop won't be stocking weird off-brand SSDs and heatsinks too anemic for modern processors. The camera store doesn't push those $35 Vivitar cameras with a three-megapixel sensor interpolated to 48.
In a way, you're selling confidence-- if I buy any random product in this store, it's much more likely to be an authentic and non-garbage product.
While obviously not a mon-and-pop store, I've definitely heard this argument thrown around about Costco-- they don't have 75 TVs on the store floor, but the 20 they have are probably all reasonable selections in their price range.
I believe there is an inevitable tension between centralization and decentralization. The former gives you:
- Usability. Look at fifty product pages on Amazon and you can easily scan each one since they all have the same layout and user experience. You don't have to hunt through fifty different web designs trying to find the price. You don't have to figure out if this page includes the shipping in the price while this one doesn't. Consistency is one of the keys to usability, and centralization gives you this.
- Economies of scale. A mom and pop store likely can't afford to roll their own crypto, fraud prevention, 24/7 support, etc. But when a single organization moves enough product, these kinds of things enter the realm of affordability.
- Predictability. Consumers can accurately predict how their experience is going to go. Fewer unpleasant surprises because they are likely dealing with the same branch of one giant organization every time. Walk into a McDonald's anywhere on Earth and you mostly know what you're going to get. That can be a real relief when you just want a safe experience.
But you lose:
- Innovation. If changing the layout of a design affects a hundred million pages and a billion users, it takes a hell of a lot of work to get everyone on board to ship it. It's much harder to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
- Resilience. A centralized organization is basically a monoculture, and suffers the same risks as biological monocultures. A single vulnerability or bug can take down the entire system because every part of the system is identical, including having the same weaknesses. When you have a lot of diversity and redundancy in the system, much like genetic diversity, the system is more able to respond to a surprising condition. There may be some winners and losers, but the whole system won't lose, and then can learn and adapt from the winners that remain.
- Novelty. When it's all the same, the time you spend interacting with the system becomes less personally enriching. No one writes an entry in their diary about the 523th burger they had from McDonald's. The stories people remember about their lives -- especially when interacting with businesses -- are almost always unique experiences with small enterprises. The family-owned hole in the wall restaurant, the tiny labor-of-love tabletop game store, the three-partner law firm that helped them navigate a crisis.
The important part is that each of these pairs of points are diametrically opposed. Gaining one sacrifices the other, so there is no perfect solution. Just trade-offs. Which means what we probably need is a meta-diversity -- a range of businesses at all scales. Accept that some big businesses are good. Sometimes you just want to complete a transaction or eat a damn burger. But also support a thriving set of small and medium-sized businesses for when you want something more lively.
One thing I really worry about the US is that government and incentives today clearly push towards a mono-scale where almost all successful business are big. I see few forces to combat the economies of scale and the power that large corporations wield, so we're heading towards a world where there are only giant mega-corps.
> Predictability
Interestingly as Amazon becomes the front of so many sellers, there is a lot of edge cases they are supporting that end up breaking these two.
For instance some products are listed and have a price, but only come from third party, non integrated vendors so you won’t know the shipping price or conditions until choosing a specific vendor.
Or they’ll list an item and contact you for adjustments after a purchase attempt (I had that for a business printer, and there was options for maintenance plans etc.)
Or there will be items that can only be shipped for free above some total amount, when that limit don’t exist for others.
Basically I think that by absorbing so much of the market, amazon also inherited the complexity to some point.
Shameless plug: I work on Trunk [0] which helps businesses sync their inventory in real-time across everywhere they sell. The long-term vision is to make selling on multiple places just as easy as selling on one!
[0] https://www.trunkinventory.com
Thankfully that hasn't been an issue so far (although my largest customer only does 500 orders per day at peak). The current strategy is to just make inventory syncing as fast as possible (making use of webhooks or polling very often).
There is something on the roadmap though that will introduce minimum stock levels such that even though you have 10 in stock within Trunk's centralized inventory, Trunk can add a buffer for high-volume products such that it will sync a stock level of 7 to sales channels instead of 10 in case this situation might occur.
The hard case is a slow moving product with 1 unit, you want to list it because it might be weeks before it sells, but you can’t predict when/where it will sell.
Consolidation happens in every economic wave, but this feels premature.
Atlantic.net blew minds of colo market when it provided API'able PDUs in early 2000s. Not the "SSH via this place into the APC with your username and a password see the status and trigger a power cycle" but "Send this payload to the following end point". PXE boot without manual tweaks is still basically non-existent in the colo space. I could continue with these examples but it should be enough.
That's the reason why AWS/GC/Azure win, not because they are centralized.
The minuses for AWS/GC/Azure is that no matter how big you are, unless you are Netflix or Snapchat you are still a very small customer which means that AWS/GC/Azure organization cares less about your happiness than Comcast does about the happiness of a random cable TV customer spending $180 a month on a triple play.
That truism is often repeated, despite the fact that it contradicts Netflix's own strategy[1]:
> We would prefer to be an insignificant customer in a giant cloud.
[1] https://sink.io/jmk/selfish-cooperation
This means that its problems are addressed first regardless of what kind of general rules the "cloud" has. One can see it everywhere -- the larger and the bigger the customer the more important it is.
Yes, out of the box tooling is part of the "centralized" platform. In a decentralized world you stack some adhoc open-source tools and web dashboards atop your hand-rolled infrastructure. This is more work than a centralized solution that provides the metal and everything else you could possibly need (and everything you will never need) as a single centralized package.
> PXE boot without manual tweaks is still basically non-existent in the colo space. I could continue with these examples but it should be enough.
Those examples support my position.
> That's the reason why AWS/GC/Azure win, not because they are centralized.
They could not do this without being centralized, that's precisely the point.
Servint, Erols, DedicatedNow, DigitalNation, etc started before Amazon. So did EV1 or Choopa. They simply played a game of hardware rather than software tooling. As the hardware became more and more commoditized the software became more and more important. C/Panel and Plesk did not cut it. That's why Amazon/Google/Azure won.
Why do you think the mall destroyed the downtown? It’s not because people wanted a decentralized store owners. It’s because consumers want centralization.
Same thing happening in ecommerce. People want everything in one place.
But the trend is also already shifting. People are tired of the big stores so much like malls have started to die, so too ecomm is increasingly about personal relationships.
I'm going to use this
It's also interesting because this means that it's not only less convenient, but also more expensive to use other platforms - and in a Capitalist society, anti-giant-corporation ethics can't really stand against the need to not live on the street and the desire to own nice(ish) things.
Then at some point, the platform gains "critical mass." People stop buying the platform as a way to get a specific app, and start buying the platform for the platform, confident that it will provide whatever they need.
Soon thereafter, the platform sponsor begins either buying up apps on its platform or making its own competition for apps on its platform.
the independents are squeezed out because the platform no longer needs them to be successful.
Then another platform launches, and its sponsor screams "developers, developers, developers..."
And the cycle begins anew.
The ability of that motherboard to run dual Intel Celeron CPUs was unique at the time as it was a feature Intel had disabled on these chips and required some magic from Abit to enable the dual CPU functionality. This was arguably really the board that made dual processor configs affordable for enthusiasts on a budget for the first time, I loved mine.
> http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/3q99/bp6/bp6-1.html
Fantastic performance for the money.
It's harder to see the potential it has to fulfill other people's values (which may be very different from yours).
Overall, what technology does most readily is magnify what people or societies are inclined to.
So, in a capitalist/corporate economy where scale is incentivized and rewarded, technology will tend to magnify that. It can also magnify the chances early adopters have to make a new entry into the market for a certain window, but it won't alter the overall dynamic (this is a descriptive commentary, not necessarily normative).
And boy, I remember when I thought the main obstacle to well-balanced political discussion was a lack of easy access to thoughtful, reliable information.
Rent-seeking is a basic force of Capitalism.
We started out with Shopify, but that's actually really limited in functionality unless you spend many $100s per month on apps to add basic stuff (like VAT handling). We switched to a self-hosted shop, which feels totally old skool but is working out pretty well. We're happily charging cards and shipping stuff all over the world.
Our thing is knowing the products and providing support, so I think that has some value. If you want a boxes shifted cheap then Amazon's your answer. Anything cleverer, then specialist retailers still have some real value.
We don't have the Things Node yet, but we do have the Things Uno (EU) which is a really handy dev board for experiments.
A friend of mine with a similar business in a different field tried outsourcing that a few years ago and it didn't work well, I didn't really understand why until I started.
We sometimes pre-configure gateways and devices for customers, so we need to pull them off the shelf and work on them first, then pack all the other stuff they ordered into the box and ship it. It's invaluable having the stock close to hand.
My solution - hire someone to help with the logistics.
Why - because BHPhoto:
- Has excellent support, refund and matching policies.
- Does not charge sales tax (imagine that!) if you use their Payboo card. Actually they officially charge sales tax but it gets immediately refunded so you don't pay it.
- Does not carry counterfeit junk or faked-up crap with fake reviews from shady sellers like Amazon or ebay does.
- Offer free shipping
Smaller e-tailer and retailers cannot compete with BHPhoto refund policies and cannot compete with sales tax compensation policies (thanks government for enforcing sales taxes all over).
Support and guarantee of quality products is more important to me that 2 days shipping.
I'm lucky to have some local stores I can still shop at though, and of course KEH for used equipment.
Everyone has their own priorities to choose shopping locations.
That's far from the case in all verticals. I have bought tons of stuff from small specialised online retailers, because they can meaningfully compete in niche markets. If I want a woodworking tool, my first port of call is Workshop Heaven, because they sell a carefully curated selection of extremely high-quality products. Everything they ship has been QCed by someone who actually knows about tools, so I'll happily pay a premium in the knowledge that I'll never get a dud. I'll buy a tool from a brand that I've never heard of, because I trust their curation. I look forward to seeing their newsletter in my inbox, because it usually highlights cool new tools that I haven't heard of.
IMO, the future of mom-and-pop retailing doesn't look like mom-and-pop retail - it looks like a boutique. A small selection of carefully curated products, a fanatical commitment to quality and genuinely useful pre- and post-sales support. To survive in a post-Amazon world, small retailers need to evolve into niche brands in their own right.
Someone should put together a list of such retailers across various specialties.
They maintain a Youtube channel where they break down pretty much anything you'd ever want to know about how to intelligently buy a fountain pen.
They've got a usable site where I don't have to worry about getting scammed or even creating an account -- last time I bought a pen from them, the package even came with a handwritten note; it was just a really nice experience.
Pretty much all of my ink/pen related needs go through Goulet, specifically because I trust them more than Amazon.
I can get similar prices and often better seelction elsewhere. Fulfillment is Amazon's greatest strength in my opinion.
However, amazon offered my company a €1500 credit line. I had to immediately buy a printer and a couple of 27” screens. I used the credit line. I also used a director’s home address as a delivery address because, you know, why would you sit at an empty office and wait for shipment.
They have shipped the order, the invoices have been paid. One day after the invoices have been paid, I received the email that the business account has been suspended because of “reasons”.
Obviously, they did not say what the reasons were. They asked me to FAX to them director’s personal information (passport scan, proof of address), without giving any info on what are they going to do with info. I contacted them via their support website, because there is obviously no number to call or an actual person to contact. I have no idea how do they run their business in Germany without this kind of info, their business unit has an office in Germany, Regensburg, I believe.
In response to my contact, they sent me just blanket emails repeating their requests.
I just dropped it and stopped buying via Amazon. No more personal or business purchases anymore. Bye amazon.
The best was 6 weeks later, their business manager sent me a request for feedback on what my experience with amazon business is like. Well, they never came back to me after receiving a sour, detailed comment.
I avoid doing any kind of business with amazon AND aws since then. I give money to German businesses. I will never send them any official documents via scans. All the info they need is in commercial register but they are too lazy to figure things out.
Bye amazon, only when the hell freezes.
* Edit: I’ve been a loyal amazon and aws customer for 7 years. Burned thousands of Euro with amazon and aws over the years through different ventures. However, their attitude and behaviour regarding the info which only governmental organisations should be asking for, turned me completely away.
I understand they have a fraud department and what not, and maybe they have a good intent. However, this being amazon “business”, I expected them to know how to do business. Companies have registered addresses, phone numbers, list of shareholders and names of directors are publicly available. There are more suitable channels than blanket emails, faxes and scans.
That's weird, when I'm logged in I have the option to have Amazon call me. Perhaps only on consumer accounts not business accounts?
Did you try doing that, then asking to be transferred to the business team?
I just went to amazon.de and while the interface isn't the same (they make it harder to find the contact us form it seems), I still had the option to pick "call me" and then pick a german number.
https://pasteboard.co/IqF4F4q.png
There is no option to call anybody and have them call me back.
it's a chicken and egg problem: you can't get support for your banned account because you can't log in, but you can't log in because your account is 'banned'
I live on a small island that enjoys US Postal Service by boat. Amazon will ship to me. The high number of mom-and-pops that aren't set up to ship to me creates a situation where, if I need something Amazon doesn't have, I usually have to send it to someone in the US and once enough stuff builds up, they ship a package to me. This holds true even for international shippers (e.g. an Etsy seller in Europe is more likely to ship to the US than to me).
Would you see yourself going to a website like "momandpops.com" and choosing from categories like "Household" "Clothing" "Outdoors" and subcategories like "Clothing > Men's" "Clothing > Kid's"? When you select the categories, you'd be shown a listing page of smaller retailers that sell products in that category.
https://www.amazon.com/Handmade/
I imagine companies like Shopify could easily compete in this market too by curating stores that use their service.
I'll post some links to give you an idea of the kind of stuff I'm into. Honestly I just want a website curating cool websites that sell physical products.
https://ramaworks.store/ https://ghostly.com/ https://www.muji.us/store/
Amazon’s golden goose has been their logistics. It creates a company that is like ebay+ups together. Mom and pops may have the same wares as amazon, but the shipping and order efficiency is a tough gap to close against amazon. Getting an order packaged, to the courier, and in transport for delivery still takes time and people for most ‘mom and pops’. It’s like trying to build a faster locomotive to compete with the company that owns the railroad.