I think their point is simply that "it's their store" - and to be brutally honest, I agree.
Two not-entirely-random examples of similar behaviour:
Supermarkets place their own brand merchandise where they feel it'll sell best. Undeniably good business, and certainly no reason for concern.
Perhaps more questionably, but bare with me - Google place AMP content, which is to say content they have made their product by merit of some ToS/caching slight of hand, front and center. Is it exactly the same as what Amazon are doing? Well, no. Is it placing content they want consumed above other content irrespective of merit or consumer benefit? Probably.
Similarly Amazon are doing what businesses do and promoting their most profitable products, straddling both the above examples. Whether it's best for the customers is open to debate, but it doesn't change that it's entirety their prerogative.
Yeah, the search vs shop tension is the big question.
The difference being that Google are ostensibly a search engine, who are looking to monetize and leverage their ubiquity - Amazon are a book store grown to titanic proportions looking to maximize profits.
The same, but different.
I fully support Amazon's divergent empire being broken up into sperate companies, but for the moment Amazon.com - the online marketplace - is still an internet shopfront.
I am curious if there actually are any laws relevant to this situation. As far as I can tell, this is exactly like Walmart or BigBoxCo pushing their own brands. It's not illegal and, generally, it's not even a bad thing for the consumer (in the short term).
It really feels like most of the people taking issue with this are doing so because of their personal sentiments rather than legality.
I have lukewarm feelings on the issue, but the difference to me is that BigBoxCo isn't selling counterfeit products in their stores, which means their brands have to compete on price/quality with the rest of the store, even if they are "pushed". With Amazon, the presence of counterfeit items, especially due to shared inventory, etc. means that even if I wanted another brand, I can't guarantee that I will even get a genuine item. This gives Amazon brands a huge advantage they wouldn't have at a big box store.
I think it's downvotes because Amazon is not a store, it's a marketplace. And it's well different than BigBox because there is way less capital outlay for both property and goods.
It's a similar problem to why we have antitrust laws.
If this was you or I, there wouldn't be a problem. If you are the only / pretty much the only store used then it (to me) would clearly be a problem for consumers. You'd be using your monopoly in one area (marketplace) to benefit you elsewhere (selling USB cables) rather than competing on a level playing field.
In between it becomes trickier. At what point are they too big? How dominant would they need to be?
I think there are differences to physical stores partly due to scale. If a shelf has 10 different variations of basically the same thing that's the equivalent of all products being on the front of the search results. If there are hundreds, then the ranking becomes vital.
Walmart has an interesting approach. They let whichever supplier has the best sales in a category design the shelving layouts for ALL suppliers in that category. If you abuse your rights you lose your category captain status. That means if Pepsi has the best sales they decide where Coke goes on the shelf. Pretty clever.
At one point when coffee wasn’t a big section, the category captain of coffee actually helped bring in competitors to increase the overall size of the shelf space and thus attract more passing customers.
>Amazon’s lawyers rejected an initial proposal for how to add profit directly into the algorithm, saying it represented a change that could create trouble with antitrust regulators, one of the people familiar with the project said.
I wonder in what was they tweaked it so that the lawyers approved this change? I wonder if regulators will care if it skirts the letter of that law when the intention was to attempt to sneak by oversight by the FTC and the DOJ?
Later on in the article they explain that the initial approach was to include the profitability of an item directly in its metadata so that the algorithm could use that in its ranking criteria.
They changed their approach to instead measure how much profit Amazon makes on a given search. This allows them to analyze whether various changes to the search algorithm increase or decrease profit, and optimize for those that do.
It's a subtle distinction but it means that instead of explicitly promoting their products in search, they are instead making changes based on other product attributes that naturally boost the ranking of their products (and thus increase their profits).
It's kind of like a blind study: they're telling the engineers, "we won't tell you which products are ours, but we'll see if you can figure it out based on these 100 other traits."
It's not surprising that, given this kind of power, they would use it. What's a little unsettling is how little concern they have for people selling on their platform. If they treat their vendors like shit, and compete with them directly, that will incentivise said vendors to look for alternative platforms. You might say "who cares, there is no real competition for Amazon", but competition will come. What is Amazon going to do, are they planning to make their own version of every single product out there? I don't think that can scale.
They are betting that when competition comes, they'll be subject to the same ~greed~ fiduciary duty forces. The market only has room for a handful of megacorps. They'll all highly likely to implement skewed algorithms to promote their own wares. If you don't like it, go build your own [TM].
I would compare this to a supermarket allocating shelf space to maximize its profits, either by placing its own brands front and center or by featuring brands that have made a deal for prime shelf placement. I don't see this as scandalous or even new.
Coincidentally, Amazon brand products are usually pretty good in my experience, so this might not be a terrible outcome for users who have already decided to come shop at Amazon's store.
Is it really? I don't see how this comparison works at all. Amazon gives you distribution, traffic, logistics, etc, with zero risk. They just take a fee if you sell. The only upfront cost is if you pay the premium FBA and that's still a like a 40 bucks per month fee.
I'm not trying to defend Amazon, but I don't think that comparison makes sense.
At a mall you pay a fixed cost in terms of rent, regardless of sales. Amazon doesn’t charge you to simply list your product, right? If vendors were being charged a fee just for the listing itself without any sales, your argument would be more valid.
If amazon does charge a fee for simply listing a product, tell us. They don’t as far as I know.
No analogy is perfect. Amazon obviously isn't a mall, but it's not a grocery store either.
A grocery store owns the goods in their possession even if they have agreements for sellers to buy some unsold product back. Amazon does not own the 3rd party goods in their possession.
You’re dismissing the mall call by saying no analogy is perfect since it doesn’t work for your argument but then you’re comparing against grocery stores, which is a pretty gross simplification.
Amazon isn’t a grocery store. The majority of their catalog isn’t even available at most grocery stores, maybe excluding WalMart.
My family owned several convenience stores growing up. Some products were bought and it was your problem to move them off shelves. Some were displayed on shelves and you only paid for what was actually sold. This was common with one of the distributors who gave us Frito Lay products. Other products had strict terms - for instance, Pepsi and Coke distributors wouldn’t give you competitive pricing unless you agreed to purchase Y in X quantity, place their mini coolers next to the refrigerator, place signage within x feet, clearly visible from the front entrance, etc. suddenly, you’re the only store in town who sells 16 oz soda for $1.59 just to break even while everyone else is selling the same soda for $1.09 or just 99 cents.
It’s a different model than Amazon and you’re taking liberties to simplify it
Really curious. How are the other guys selling for $0.99, if they didn’t get the competitive pricing? (Presumably because they didn’t go through the sign within X feet antics)
They did get competitive pricing, but they have a lot more wiggle room because they’re a giant company with far more revenue, marketing, and branding than a couple ma and pa stores. These distributors may or may not have the exact same terms, but at the end of the day, these other corporate stores had enough foot traffic that provided them ammo to help define their own terms. You just didn’t have that leverage as a smaller shop.
> You’re dismissing the mall call by saying no analogy is perfect since it doesn’t work for your argument but then you’re comparing against grocery stores, which is a pretty gross simplification.
No I'm saying it has very important distinctions that make the grocery store analogy inappropriate and that the mall or flea market analogy is closer in some respects, but not all.
>Amazon isn’t a grocery store. The majority of their catalog isn’t even available at most grocery stores, maybe excluding WalMart.
Of course it's not. That's a big part of my original point.
> Some were displayed on shelves and you only paid for what was actually sold.
My dad worked for Lance (and frito lay for a while). I could be wrong and you could have had a very unusual distributor. But my guess is you misunderstood what was happening.
Companies do sometimes offer buyback guarantees and you might even be able to buy items on credit, so that it appears you're only paying for what sells, but that's not actually how it works. Those items are the property of the store while they are on the shelf.
You have a point but I think the fact that grocery stores sell private label goods is the counter-point. Grocery stores re-package goods like rice, beans, paper towels, etc. to compete with their vendors all the time. We call them supermarkets, right? A grocery store is simply a more organized open market. Which is very comparable to Amazon.
I think the problem is that they present the results on good faith that "these results are the best match for you based on your search", not the most profitable for them.
I just ran a search and the default search filter was "Featured", which is so ambiguous it could mean anything, so it seems like a classic bait and switch that played out over the course of a decade of consumers getting the best search results based on reviews and sales.
I would argue that a grocery store is a combination store and marketplace in that case. Stores have plenty of in-house brands, they also have racks of goods that are stocked and sold by third parties wherein they get a cut.
To be fair, I think I would be more comfortable comparing Amazon to Sears in it's heyday.
All of the ones around here do. Used DVD racks still exist. Soft drink vending machines. Seasonal items. Newspaper racks.
In the case of items actually run through the register, I'm not sure how that's dealt with from an accounting standpoint. I do know that the stores have the ability to return 100% of unsold goods in those cases.
>, they also have racks of goods that are stocked and sold by third parties wherein they get a cut
I'm sure that exists, but it's not common. Grocery stores often charge slotting fees, but that's not the same as renting shelf space--the store still owns the product (even if there is an agreement to buy it back if it doesn't sell).
Also retail stores take on more product liability than marketplaces like flea markets do.
> A grocery store is simply a more organized open market.
That’s not true though right? Don’t grocery stores buy the products that are on their shelves and they are reselling them? That’s fundamentally different from a marketplace.
Exactly. Stores like Kroger use their data, make generic versions of popular items, and sell right next to the brand at eye level.
Amazon just does it at a larger scale.
I think that's true for most goods, but there were definitely brands that stocked their own shelves at Publix when I worked there.
That said, what brands got that special treatment was very much decided by Publix, so they were still curating the selection, they just weren't paying up-front for the goods or responsible for keeping those shelves looking good.
Generally Publix still owns that inventory though (even if they have a buyback guarantee) My dad worked for Lance snacks when I was a kid. He stocked the shelves, but the stores paid him for the product.
Did they pay him for the product before or after it was sold? I never really knew which way it went, but assumed that since the entire thing, except checkout, was handled by the rep, Publix never really owed the product, they just sold it as if it were on consignment.
They paid him before. But really big stores would buy the whole thing on credit.
They definitely owned the product, while it was on their shelves.
Even if a vendor has a buyback guarantee for expired product, if someone were to break in and steal all the product, its the store who is liable not the vendor.
> Coincidentally, Amazon brand products are usually pretty good in my experience, so this might not be a terrible outcome for users who have already decided to come shop at Amazon's store.
So it's fine they're shafting other vendors on their platform because their products are good?
Why not? If I search and find a reasonably priced product that fits my needs that is a success. Squeezed vendors is just how the world works, do you think Walmart just sits back and lets its suppliers dictate pricing or promotion?
Sorry, no, that's not the argument I was trying to make. I was trying to show this by starting the sentence with "Coincidentally." It was just a separate observation about the same topic.
I am frustrated by plenty of things that Amazon does, by the way...I just don't think that this is a particularly bad feature of theirs.
Supermarkets purchase the inventory from suppliers so they have an incentive to move everything that's in their stores. It costs amazon nothing to host 3rd party inventory so they get to prioritize whatever maximizes their profits, including screwing over their top sellers.
A better analogy would be a walmart in a small town hosting a bunch of small business to showcase their products, then kicking out the top sellers and replacing them with a store brand version. You could argue that those producers should just open their own store but most people won't go out of their way to a different store to buy paper towels.
Well yes and no. Most grocery chains have more than enough weight to make sure they can return whatever they can’t sell. And the pay their suppliers so late that 99% of the time they’ve already made the sale before even paying for the inventory
The product is still taking up their limited shelf space so it's in their best interest to see it get moved. Amazon made their business on the long tail of products that rarely get bought but in aggregate add up to a large portion of total sales because they don't have the same physical constraints.
Amazon also has an equivalent of shelf space: search results. They are just as incentivized to maximize revenue per customer search as super markets are incentivized to maximize revenue per shelf space.
Search results are an interesting comparison because their consumer-facing functionality is the same: They both have some limited consumer attention while they are present, and they both want to guide that attention to products that make them more profitable.
Except the analogy falls flat when you actually compare the implementation: Amazon's costs to host listings is negligible to negative (they may get more value from having extra listings than it costs to serve them), but that is far from true for grocery stores.
Grocery stores have a very small, finite, shelf space compared to Amazon; you can put a lot of items in the "..." after page 3, but grocery stores have to expend labor to count and organize each item at least once a month.
Yes stores may be able to return non-selling items for a refund, but do you think it cost them nothing while it was sitting on the shelf? What about the labor of stocking them, cleaning them, heck even packing them back up to return? On Amazon anything that doesn't sell well automagically gets shunted into the depths of page 10+, and they can keep them there indefinitely, at no cost.
Stores have a fixed cost associated with every item stocked, this gives them an inventive to sell every item they stock even if they prefer to sell some items over others. But they still want to sell it, even in they have to discount it by huge margins to get rid of it. By contrast Amazon doesn't give a piss about any one of your items in particular getting sold, it can stay there forever as far as they're concerned.
I like to say, a sufficiently large quantitative change manifests as a qualitative change. By that, I mean yes the only "real" difference between these scenarios is some of the costs are different, but how those costs become incentives when you have multiple parties actually matters.
I agree that online retailing is fundamentally different, overall. But it is similar in a way that was relevant to the comment I was responding to: Amazon also has an incentive to optimize search results do sales revenue.
EDIT: I didn't explain this well at all because I couldn't find the episode and haven't listened since it came out, I highly suggest someone better than me find the episode because it makes much more sense and has WAY more information than me.
There was a planet money episode about this exact comparison the other day. Basically it comes down to:
When a grocery store puts something on it's shelves, the store itself bought it from the manufacturer. They have already made their money. On Amazon, manufacturers don't make money when the item is listed, they make it only if and when a customer buys the product.
When a grocery store makes its own novel product and puts it on the shelf, it's taking a risk. If they make those products, but they don't sell, they just lost a bunch of money. Or, if their product is a competing one with an existing product, they know that products like that can sell, but now they have to focus on outselling the original product. When Amazon makes its own product, most of the risk has been removed. They pretty much already know it sells well on their platform, and they have enough money that knocking 5 dollars off the price, making it prime recommended, and putting it at the top of the list will cause it to beat the competition 9 times out of 10.
I'm not saying any of this is fair or unfair, because I'm not an economist so I don't believe I have a full understanding of the situation.
I tried to find the exact episode but it seems I can never find them when I need them.
> When a grocery store puts something on it's shelves, the store itself bought it from the manufacturer. They have already made their money. On Amazon, manufacturers don't make money when the item is listed, they make it only if and when a customer buys the product.
It's way more complicated than that. Manufacturers pay stores to carry their products, feature their products in special places in stores, get forced to take buy back unsold product, get paid way later on invoices, etc etc.
Only certain big box retailers do that, like Best Buy, whose business model have them leasing floor space in their physical locations, which has tangible scarcity.
Amazon is not leasing retail floor space, so to GP's point, any comparisons between Amazon's open platform and traditional physical retail spaces are moot.
I think retail stores controlling what you see based on how much money they get which is quite similar to Amazon controlling what you see in a search result based on profitability, but I guess we can agree to disagree. However, it's not just stores like Best Buy. Your local grocery store almost certainly makes a large percentage of their profit from companies paying for shelf space. End caps don't come out of thin air.
Again, comparisons with physical retail are moot because, in your grocery store, nobody can walk in off the street and start selling off the shelves. The grocery store is not an open e-commerce platform but a curated service with physical scarcity.
People don't have an issue with Amazon default sorting to best selling either. The problem is that Amazon is slowly pushing out the competition on their platform to focus their own products and labels. If there's any analogy, it would be similar Google removing search result links to Bing or Yandex.
> Again, comparisons with physical retail are moot because, in your grocery store, nobody can walk in off the street and start selling off the shelves. The grocery store is not an open e-commerce platform but a curated service with physical scarcity.
So, if Amazon marketplace was an invite-only, curated marketplace and not an "open" marketplace, this wouldn't be a problem?
>When a grocery store puts something on it's shelves, the store itself bought it from the manufacturer. They have already made their money. On Amazon, manufacturers don't make money when the item is listed, they make it only if and when a customer buys the product.
That's not how it works for a some perishable products in grocery stores. For example, bread is stocked daily by the bakeries themselves. Same thing with potato chips.
If a grocery store has their in house bakery up front right when you walk in selling bread, and the vendors bread is all the way in the back, is that unfair to the vendor?
>If a grocery store has their in house bakery up front right when you walk in selling bread, and the vendors bread is all the way in the back, is that unfair to the vendor?
That would be for the vendor to decide when planning out where to sell their product I guess
Right, just like all of the sellers on Amazon know that they have to take potential competition from Amazon into account when deciding how to participate in Amazon's marketplace.
> For example, bread is stocked daily by the bakeries themselves. Same thing with potato chips.
The store still buys those items from them. Some bigger stores will force the vendor to offer a buyback guarantee, but while the product is on their shelves, the store owns them.
> When a grocery store makes its own novel product and puts it on the shelf, it's taking a risk. If they make those products, but they don't sell, they just lost a bunch of money. Or, if their product is a competing one with an existing product, they know that products like that can sell, but now they have to focus on outselling the original product. When Amazon makes its own product, most of the risk has been removed.
The grocery store's risk on store branded products is about the same as Amazon's risk for Amazon brand products. They have the data to know what sells and what doesn't, they have control of the store layout, and they also have pricing data. There's really no major differentiation besides the physical store front and how manufacturers "rent" space.
This isn't true in most cases. Amazon does buy stuff wholesale through their Vendor program. Almost all sellers are also buying wholesale apart from manufacturers going direct to consumer.
If it is shipped & sold by Amazon, Amazon already paid for it from their supplier. If it is shipped & sold by SomeOtherStore, generally they bought it already from someone. There are a lot of dropshippers also and that is a different story.
Amazon similarly protects itself with onerous contracts that can force suppliers to eat the cost of unsold products at times, and does whatever it can to avoid buying unproven products.
Grocery stores and other retailers in general can be protected by refund policies and buyback policies so they are not necessarily taking as much risk especially on packaged products with long expiry dates. They can also liquidate stuff that doesn't get purchased to recoup some money.
But the shelves of Grocery stores are different: you cannot just change things around all the time without your customers complaining or going to another market with better offers. The amount of shelves is more or less constant throughout the life of a store and promoting your own brand often means you lose out on the money others offer you to get a good spot.
On Amazon there are as many shelves as there are product categories and the thing has much much more fluctuation.
What that means is, that a "promoted" product is sometimes the only one which stays at a fixed spot, while all all the others are to be found on the miscellaneous-pile.
It's also understood by all who pass by store isles that the store is giving its own products prominence. Tweaking an algorithm that historically featured products based on users purchasing behavior to instead favor its own products without disclosing it is doing so is misleading.
It should be scandalous in those cases too. Having a company be both the distributor and producer and have a monopoly is problematic. This is sort of the problem of cable TV also, where companies like comcast tries to be a producer and distriutor and have a monopoly. In the past we have had unions fight against this sort of thing but unions have been busted to hell in this country over the last few decades to the point where even smart people don't even understand why its bad for a company like amazon to do this, we don't remember why.
Your argument may have held weight in the past, but now, anyone can distribute video without going through the cable providers regular cable distribution. It’s quite simple technically to provide on demand video at scale, including creating apps for all the platforms. The only issue now is when/if cable companies as internet providers start deprioritizing competitors.
I would like it if when you specifically bought “sold by Amazon” products or chose that as an option you were guaranteed a genuine item but with “shipped by Amazon” that ship (hah!) has unfortunately sailed. They won’t be accepting anything from third party sellers that has Amazon branding on, so it’s safe.
> "They won’t be accepting anything from third party sellers that has Amazon branding on...."
I feel like that assertion has to be tested.
Amazon demonstrably cannot weed out counterfeits of other well-known brands. If it can weed out counterfeits for it's own brand, we will know that it has chosen not to expend the effort for anyone else, and therefore cannot be trusted to sell those brands in its marketplace. If it cannot, we then know it lacks the capability, and therefore cannot be trusted to sell those brands in its marketplace.
Sadly everyone want’s to be a marketplace, and online shopping has become devided into two categories. Stores are either extremely niche with good quality and high prices or they have become caught in a race to the bottom, selling as cheaply as possible with no regard for how that might affect quality. There’s no mid-range anymore.
That creates a horribly perverse incentive to never fix the counterfeit problem, and should be illegal on that basis alone without even considering the anticompetitive aspects.
If you want genuine products lobby your government for criminal consequences for willfully ignoring counterfeit products. Then lobby your government for antitrust action so vendors don't have to worry about Amazon themselves making the duplicates when they get jealous of the profit margins on counterfeits. Genuine products will be much easier to find without Amazon clones and Amazon-supported counterfeits and an Amazon-empowered criminal black market intermingling with the real one.
Considering how shopping at Amazon now feels like shopping at an electronics bazaar in Singapore with giant bins of random knock-off products of suspicious quality, tweaking the algo to push name-brand options (even if it's their own name-brand) would be a welcome move to me as a buyer.
Obviously it's grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it's an improvement.
Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.
I've seen Amazon prices go up while Walmart Online has been cheaper for household items. On speciality electronics, I don't think anyone would be surprised to know Amazon is more expensive.
It's an ancedote sure, but back in 2012, we shopped only at Amazon. Now they are no longer King.
I've noticed this on many occasions in the last month. I bought a mouse that Amazon had listed for $39. I walked a block and bought it from Office De/Max for $10 cheaper.
I wanted to get a sweater shaver. Amazon had it for 22. I bought a NIB one from Ebay for $12.
As far as I am concerned, the only thing Amazon has going for it right now is that it is a a one stop shop. That's worth something… how much? I'm not sure, but I know I'm buying a hell of a lot less stuff from Amazon now than 2 years ago.
Also you knew it was Genuine. I'd love Amazon to do a "Guaranteed Genuine" label or something, but I can see why they don't. I used to buy everything on Amazon, now I only buy stuff that I'm willing to accept might be counterfeit.
With Amazon, you sit your butts at home and get what you want without getting stuck in traffic and waiting in line to check out in-store just to get a $20 keyboard.
Nevertheless, it remains questionable how this change would be a fair competition for Amazon sellers, not just the Alibaba private label sellers but also all the sellers with popular products.
Amazon is far from unique there. As the OP says, Walmart has a sturdy online offering, though it also relies on "marketplace" sellers. I've started ordering a lot of online stuff from Target and I've been very happy with it. Cheap shipping and reliable quality.
I was attracted to Amazon only because of lower prices. That was it and now it is no longer the case. As soon as another big player steps up and offers lower prices and simple UI there won't be a need for me to shop on Amazon.
The free shipping is weird....I recently noticed that my father was looking up something he wanted me to order for him....his price was less, same item and amazon seller. I logged in and boom my price was $3 higher on a 20 dollar item. So, I'm not sure how "free" the shipping is anymore.
I do agree that fast shipping is a big part of amazon but I think another big player could match the processing speed.
Amazon has multiple sellers with different shipping options and prices for most items, and always tries to show you the best "deal". This sometimes includes the likelihood that you prefer the two-day shipping.
The listing being offered to you father probably wasn't eligible for prime (not shipped by Amazon) so the price+shipping was lower than Amazon's price+non-free-shipping (and the third party was likely intentionally undercutting Amazon to be shown first). Once you signed it, it offered you the one with prime shipping because the total was cheaper.
Was the shipping time the same? Perhaps the seller is closer to your father than you. Was it prime 2-day? Or was it FBA i.e. Shipped by Amazon? I think you'll need to provide more details before we can conclude Amazon is price gouging.
I've been told that amazon might do "personalized pricing". Friends have told me their friends come up with lower prices in other locations.
Target was caught doing this. People with location services turned on using the target app would find pricing for an item jump up as they approached their local store.
search for "The Target app price switch: What you need to know"
I am pretty positive amazon is doing "personalized pricing". It was the exactly same item, sold by amazon. I'm already at the point where I want to cancel it, so as soon as someone remotely competitive comes along I will jump ship.
> Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.
It literally is. All these products are cheap stuff that marketers find on aliexpress. They buy them in bulk, stamp a logo on it, import in the US/EU, stock in logistic centers and then sell on Amazon. It's the same stuff, but it comes from an English seller and a warehouse in US/EU.
It's exactly the same thing that Amazon does with its product lines though (like Amazon Basics), so not really rooting for their own name-brands either.
To be fair, Samsung had to scrap a whole phone model because of battery problems. The Boeing 787 suffered with problems of batteries catching fire (and according to some reports still does). It's a tricky problem to avoid.
Anecdotally I've spoken to people who compete with Amazon private label in electronics and they tell me Amazon doesn't care about quality, and that the factories they were buying from were known to be lower quality.
I've also heard the opposite about Anker - that they always get the best quality.
AmazonBasics isn't any more trustworthy than any of the junk you find on AliExpress or at Wal-Mart/Target/Best Buy. (Except that it has a good return policy backing it, I think)
Amazon is at least liable (theoretically, at least) if they sell an AmazonBasics product that winds up giving my kids lead poisoning, and will have a lot harder time disappearing into the wind to avoid a lawsuit. They disclaim any liability for third-party sellers.
Unless Amazon is currently testing products for lead before recommending them, which somehow I doubt, then the potential of a lawsuit against Amazon isn't actually protecting your child.
People buy Samsung phones because they're good phones, people buy Anker batteries because they're good batteries. If they start exploding people will find some other, better battery brand.
Admittedly a phone that explodes is a bad phone, but Samsung can still sell its "good phone" brand the same way Apple can still sell its laptops.
Samsung also has a very long track record of producing cell phones that are deemed safe which neither Anker nor Amazon can match in batteries. You either need an extensive positive record to easily bounce back or need to be willing to write it off as an auxiliary business (e.g. if Amazon had battery issues).
Anker are difficult to gauge, I've a few products of theirs, mostly bought a few years ago, with nothing recent - those have been excellent quality and value. Yet I've also started to notice precisely identical unknown brands for most of their products on Amazon.
So I no longer have any certainty. Are Anker merely badge engineering some random white label product, or are Amazon / Anker just not caring or able to do anything about dozens of clear counterfeits?
Are those identical products being sold as Anker, or under different brands? If it's different brands then it's not counterfeit just to make a product that looks similar to another one.
There's similar and completely indistinguishable, except for brand name and logo. e.g. their desk lamps, also their mice. Seems to be the case for almost every Anker product I remember looking at recently.
I appreciated your response but as far as I can tell, they were asking whether Anker is badge engineering generic products or is a victim of counterfeiting, which I think is a slightly different question that I'm also looking for the answer to.
The only way it would be counterfeit is if they sell it as an Anker product or print Anker on the product.
My assumption would be that the same factory that makes Anker products is also selling the same designs to competitors - it's also possible that a different factory just cloned it.
Note that even if it's the same factory, they could have different quality control for different clients. So quality can differ even on identical designs.
You don't need a patent to protect a design. There's trademark, copyright and design protections, not just patents.
So maybe Anker are uniquely incompetent in selecting suppliers. Not specifying in the contract with factories not to copy whatever widget they produce for Anker, not registering any of their designs. Yet aside from a) products within the same group ostensibly from different brands and b) same idea but clearly made by someone else, few other companies seem affected. They'll have a few products counterfeited. Not most. It's the sort of thing that might encourage you to be very careful on third, fourth and subsequent products.
I suppose it makes a case to avoid Anker and the identical copies, as clearly inept. Few other companies appear to be quite so afflicted. I'm not convinced it's the answer though. Outside the purely generic: white T shirts, tungsten light bulbs and such, you see very few precisely identical products.
You said they were not copying the brand, so it's not trademark infringement nor counterfeit.
You keep using the word counterfeit when it does not apply. Copyright is also not applicable unless there's a work of art printed on the product (like cell phone cases).
Most brands making commodity products don't get protection for the design, because the design isn't that unique. Search for "fast chargers for Samsung" and you'll see tons of chargers identical to the Samsung charger except with a different name. Same for Apple.
Which protects "the appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials of the product itself and/or its ornamentation". It applies if they are novel and/or if they have unique character.
The issue, then, is how do I guarantee that the Anker branded product I'm buying through Amazon is genuinely Anker manufactured. I'm of the understanding that Amazon comingle stock from different supply chains in their warehouses so presumably I can't trust them to be supplying genuine hardware.
My understanding, and this might just be marketing PR I honestly don't know, is that Anker sends their own QA people to the factories in China, so they're able to meet a higher standard. I always rely on them for battery stuff, and now USB cables since apparently no one else can make cables that reliably work to connect my phone to my car except them. I went through half a dozen different brands before theirs finally worked and remained working.
With a power-supply it's not a hard problem to avoid. You have to hire independent engineers to evaluate the product design and establish testing procedures to verify that the product isn't unsafe. And you have to do QA and design verification during receiving on all batches of product to confirm that the manufacturer followed the design. I've never had a power supply catch fire and I've done some really dumb stuff in my lab. Frankly it's a matter of paying for UL/CE marks(including testing) and actually looking at the component layout, and Amazon doesn't strike me as the kind of company to respect that kind of QA/Verification work.
Batteries are a different story because they're basically tiny plastic bombs. Somehow Samsung managed to deliver almost 15 years of Android phones before having their batteries catch fire, and that was almost certainly a result of skipping essential QA/Verification processes because they've never had a problem before.
I do hear chargers with a large number of ports called "power banks" - I think the implication is that it's like a line of ATMs serving many customers.
Ah, I read "power bank", as that's what ikeyboy mentioned above. And when you search (google) "power bank" the results are all about portable batteries for topping up phones and whatnot. Does Amazon even brand/re-sell power supplies like jschwartzi is talking about?
Most modern rechargeable batteries have fairly sophisticated chemistry and thus charge controllers needed -- you don't just dump electricity into them blindly and then take it out. It's not quite rocket surgery, but there's a reasonable level of engineering involved, especially if you want optimal performance with the newer standards (which increase voltage on devices which support it, etc.)
Often times that "reasonable level of engineering" only needs to be slapping a ten cent IC on a board with some manufacturer default application circuit.
Its really not though, its just that between insurance and the courts its currently cheaper to enter products into the stream of commerce that will catch fire x% of times and hurt Y people costing $z, than it is to manufacture/supply/distribute/retail a product that won't catch fire in 100% of cases.
Hell even when z exceeds the cost of proper manufacturing, these companies are significantly more likely to spend money lobbying for changes to insurance and/or products liability litigation than fix the products to make the current formula work rather than spend more money on the cost of the product(s).
You’re assuming nothing bad ever happens with the “name brand” product, which is patently bullshit. Every consumer product I. The shelves is cost engineered to death.
I replied to a comment talking about defective Samsung and Boeing products...those are name brand products.
However, knock off products are usually worse, at least if you are burned by an exploding Samsung or die in a defective Boeing...you and/or your family will be compensated as these companies are identifiable and insured. If you are burned by an exploding knock off, odds are: 1) you won't even be able to identify the manufacturer or seller; 2) you won't have jurisdiction to sue the manufacturer or seller; and 3) they probably aren't insured and will just fold up shop and start anew.
To be fair, "bringing manufacturing back to America" would bring these problems back as well. Yes, it's the manufacturer's fault. It's really the company hiring the manufacturer who's at fault, though. Cash Rules Everything Around Me and all that.
If the company writing the checks can write checks to people who are going to cut corners, people will die. Full stop.
Amazon take egregious shortcuts on oversight for counterfeit goods, which they are compelled by law to not sell, so expecting them to suddenly practice due diligence on stuff coming out of a factory in China is just laughable.
>While China has a large counterfeit market, it's mostly restricted to inside the country
There are a huge number of online retailers where you can purchase chinese counterfeit items in the US. If you're in Seattle I can take you down a few streets where you can openly buy counterfeits as well, and I experienced the same in LA and New York. It definitely isn't mostly restricted to China, there is a massive market for counterfeit goods from China in the US
Compared to China, there really isn't. Literally everything in the stores in Chinese markets is counterfeit. I've been there. Fake gucci, fake airpods, fake drones, fake action figures, etc. I doubt you'll find any of this as wide spread, even in major cities, in the US.
And most of counterfeit items online are obviously from China or from Chinese sites. They aren't from the US.
And considering nearly all US clothing comes from China and is not considered fake and is largely the same with electronics and even toys, it isn't so much a quality issue when you get things from China. It more has to do with what company you get it from.
Amazon almost certainly has better quality control that most of the sellers on their platform. The vast majority of their sellers are extremely low effort, one or two person companies who take advantage of how easy it is to source and ship goods in the modern age.
I'm not sure about Amazon Basics, but with Amazon's Choice products they're plainly not evaluating products before selecting them. LockpickingLawyer on youtube has done reviews on several Amazon's Choice locks and safes and they've all been abysmal borderline fraudulent products.
Amazon's Choice is a purely algorithmic tag decided by the computer. It's utterly meaningless. I guess they change periodically on some reason known only to the code.
Amazon Basics must have had at least a couple of humans involved to agree getting it branded Amazon.
Presumably it was humans who signed off on the premise of Amazon's Choice in the first place. If Amazon is so careless with their brand in that case, as a consumer I'd feel like a sucker if I trusted there brand to mean much when their employees are evaluating products rather than algorithms.
Maybe the algorithm seemed like a good idea at the time but later turned sour. If that's the case, why hasn't Amazon yanked the program? If they don't terminate this program when it performs poorly, I don't trust them to keep other programs in line either.
Well I might have had trust in Amazon as a brand maybe a decade ago, as it got to the brand and product I wanted to buy pretty effectively. They've intentionally diluted it by filling their site with endless marketplace shite, and dodgy searches that hide brand leaders to show no-name garbage, and littering it with adverts for other no-name garbage. It's quite often I struggle to find the listing for the market leader directly, but end up there via a few "customers also bought/looked at" links. I go to Amazon less and less as a result.
So assuming Bezos isn't a complete numpty, that's intentional. Maybe Amazon's brand is completely disposable to fund Blue Streak.
Today I got more trust in Poundshop and eBay that I will get the right product easily than I do in Amazon. The old department stores, many now failed, sank or swam on the strength of their brand being a real indicator of quality.
Amazon employees have complained to Bezos about the state of Amazon's search. Bezos' response every time I've heard it is along the lines of "meh, I think our search is pretty good, quit your complaining."
Maybe it's intentional, or maybe he's deluded. I don't know. But either way, I doubt it's going to get fixed any time soon.
Maybe an urban legend, but I thought I read somewhere that the version of Amazon that Bezos personally sees is quite different than the one you and I see, due to all his various little one-off complaints and product micromanagement. Legend has it that engineering gave up trying to make sense of the requests and just gave him his own environment that does everything he thinks it should do. If true, then the search he sees might actually be pretty good for him.
Something seems off about that story. What's the point of requesting changes to a version of the site only he uses? I can't imagine he spends a lot of time surfing amazon.com as a regular user. Plus, not seeing the regular site means he might miss issues with the public website that he would want to change. Unless the point of the story is that Bezos doesn't realize the devs made a site just for him, but that's almost impossible to believe.
> Unless the point of the story is that Bezos doesn't realize the devs made a site just for him, but that's almost impossible to believe.
Yea that was the gist of it—when you log in as Jeff you (unbeknownst) get a different frontend, with all his various special cases and bad ideas that the PMs wanted to keep out of the real Amazon. It does sound incredible so probably false, but amusing to think about. I admit to having wanted to do something like that a nonzero number of times.
Like all urban legends, there is likely a core of truth in the story. Certainly Bezos is known for micromanaging and arbitrarily overruling employees' decisions on everything from strategy to product design. Now, if a leader really does have great instinct, this can work out for the better (like Jobs). And I think in some areas, Bezos does (he has done surprisingly well with their IT strategy). But I know that in others he doesn't, and he just botches stuff (like many horrible Kindle design decisions).
This sounds like a fable invented by someone familiar with the story of the phony villages that Grigory Potemkin built along the Volga to impress Empress Catherine II.
> Presumably it was humans who signed off on the premise of Amazon's Choice in the first place.
On the premise, sure. But on the individual items, I've always assumed "Amazon's Choice" meant "Best for Amazon", i.e. high margin, low number of returns (which would reduce margin).
Why do you need to trust Amazon? Just look at the reviews. Most AmazonBasics stuff has thousands of 4+ star reviews. It’s clearly distinguishable from the products with 15 questionable reviews.
Amazon reviews have become almost entirely useless once they began bundling like items. I've had cases of ordering an item only to receive a similar item from an entirely different manufacturer or seller. Looking at the reviews you'll find a number of different products being reviewed all under one product page which makes it impossible to actually gauge the quality of what you're going to receive
I really enjoy the LockpickingLawyer's videos, but I'd imagine that the threat model of the average Amazon (or Walmart/Home Depot/etc.) buyer is such that any basic lock is enough deterrence for 95%+ of scenarios. It could just be that their evaluation criteria don't match his.
That should really be the takeaway from any of his videos. Anything you buy consumer-grade can be cracked instantly by a skilled locksmith or within maybe a few tens of minutes by an average thief. The number of locks that I've ever really seen him struggle to pick can probably be counted on a single hand.
Like a safe - a lock buys you time, and hopefully the thief chooses a loud method of entry that attracts attention.
I get the "thieves don't pick locks" thing, but I really think it's sleazy as hell if a lock marketed as "high security" can be raked open in one second. That's a low-skill attack. In this case he didn't even have to rake it, because the locks were unshielded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ1_P5oqf6Y An unshielded padlock may as well be a warded lock like you'd find on a child's diary.
> LockpickingLawyer on youtube has done reviews on several Amazon's Choice locks and safes and they've all been abysmal borderline fraudulent products.
So basically Amazon's Choice locks are about the same as 95% of consumer locks on the market.
>they've all been abysmal borderline fraudulent products.
Isn't this just a property of most locks in general? I was under the impression that there are very few consumer locks that will stand up to someone with tools and a weekend of practice.
They're the only brand of USB-C cable I'm willing to buy right now for my MBP chargers. The Apple branded ones all heat up too much and do the yellow discolorment thing, the Anker branded ones didn't hold up for more than a couple of weeks, and I had bad luck with some of the random brands I found, too.
My only complaint is I charge at 65W instead of 87, but it seems to only be slightly slower in practice.
But, it's also the nylon braided stuff, so it's probably built to different quality standards and by different people than the vanilla USB cables.
Amazon Basics are white label products or specifically contract manufactured for Amazon. I am using an Amazon Basic keyboard right now, works great and was a few bucks cheaper than the Logitec Model. So far, I am a fan of them.
For most (70-80%) of the Amazon basic products I've tried, the quality and durability has been significantly lower than the product that it tried to copy. Not to mention no one wants wants their gear branded with Basic on it. I usually try to avoid Amazon basic products if possible.
Not sure about that. 2 out of 3 Amazon Basics speakers I bought (cheaper, USB powered) died within a year. And none of the Amazon Basics USB cables I've ever tried support quick charging properly.
I think at one point, it was the case that they were made in-house, when they had a limited, well-tested selection of AB products, but recently (as the emphasis on profit over brand reputation has increased) they've begun also slapping it on white-labels.
HN seems to have had an influx of incentivised accounts (via third-party services). They're putatively gaining some sort of credits. That's been discontinued at HN's request to at least some such services.
Best response is to flag the comments/posts, and if you see egregious abuse, email the mods: hn@ycombinator.com
It's exactly the same thing that Amazon does with its product lines though (like Amazon Basics)
That's pretty much what Monoprice does too -- it contracts out to Chinese manufacturers for it's products (sometimes copying existing products [1]), but their stuff is generally pretty decent quality.
I used to wonder why amazon didn’t prioritize “name” brands as a proxy for quality but then I realized all they are doing is sourcing cheap crap too. So what’s the difference if it’s a one man shop or a big name if the original source is the same crap. Amazon is merely a exaggerated reflection of just how bs the retail marketplace is these days unfortunately.
Amazon's reputation is pretty damaged in my eyes. I have rarely used them for electronics anymore as you can't trust anything. Even at work we used prime to buy certain items and I stopped it.
Example: Last week two symbol barcode scanners used in the erp system died. I look up the same model on newegg and see that sold and shipped by newegg it was about $120. Amazon had multiple listing in the $60 range and checking reviews I see things like "died in two weeks", FAKE, "died and returned to symbol only for them to say it was a fake and they were refused service or replacement". How do you build trust with shenanigans like that? No thanks, Newegg got my money.
Amazon seems to be playing oblivious to all this mainly because people are STILL using them. So as long as they are making money they can afford to lose a few "picky" customers here and there. The rest are happy to buy trash because they save a buck. Capitalism at its finest.
Sadly Newegg is following in Amazon's footsteps with it's affiliate program. You have to choose Newegg as the seller or you run into the same issues.
As soon as Newegg starts mingling stock like Amazon does, then we'll have to go back to big box retailers to ensure we're getting the item we're paying for.
Small nitpick, but what you are referring to is not an affiliate program. An affiliate program is where a website gets a cut of the sales for providing links to a retailer's site. So, The Wirecutter makes money by using affiliate links to Amazon and other retailers on their product review articles.
In 2016 a company called Liason Interactive bought a majority stake in Newegg, personally I think to try to turn newegg into an electronics version of amazon.
Since around then Newegg has been garbage, and continues to become worse.
I think any seller like amazon or newegg that turns into a marketplace/platform is trading their reputation for the potential of a cut from a much larger market, and they probably do this knowingly.
I don't buy from Amazon simply because they've become a dump of all things crap for years. Their UI is horrid an tricks you into clicking on ads by putting them in product listings. And they treat their employees like dirt.
It’s odd to me to think that something which is user-centric could be “grossly unfair” to vendors.
If you view vendors on the platform as existing to serve the users (as I do), the contradiction evaporates. If you view users as existing to serve the vendors, then it’s possible.
I'm mostly referring to established companies that have reputations as-good-or-better-than AmazonBasics and I would be more than happy to see them in the same premium position.
"the customer is always right" means the customer has the money in his pockets to spend, and you can't argue with the sales figures at the end of the day. It sounds like guidance on dispute resolution but isn't exactly.
Still, they are the monopoly marketplace online. They should be doing _everything_ to avoid looking like they are abusing their monopoly position to muscle into other fields. The fact that they don't seem too bothered just seems to indicate to me that regulators are not prepared to act on them.
Really the rule should simply be that if you operate a market place you can't sell on it. Full stop. Then we could simply be happy that amazon is finally improving it's search and/or the quality of its listings.
I think a lot of people are missing the point that Amazon controls so much market share now that actions that aren't anti-competitive if you have 1% market share are when you control 50%+.
Exactly, great point. All other arguments are moot. They have a monopoly. This is an example of abuse of power. The argument that they do it in the name of user experience is an example of the double speak of SV giants. This will not hold up under justice department scrutiny. I hope the tech giants are "brought to heel" as HRC would say.
Amazon still has quite a ways to go. Consider that Microsoft had:
- 96% of worldwide OS marketshare. Even Amazon doesn't come close to this level of domination in retail or cloud.
- Forcing OEMs to purchase Windows licenses for all PCs sold regardless of whether or not customers wanted a PC without Windows.
- Not only pre-installed IE, but provided IE with inaccessible and undocumented Windows OS APIs to give it functionality that just wasn't possible for Netscape to implement (like ActiveX).
I'm done with buying stuff from third party sellers on Amazon. If the seller is not amazon.com, I am not buying from Amazon. Fulfilled by Amazon is not good enough. Unfortunately, the only way to get a seller option is to pick an item department. I wonder why they would bury such a useful feature. It should be a box you can tick for the whole site.
Some advice (from a company that sells our own products on Amazon): buy only from Amazon or the manufacturer. When buying from the manufacturer, look at the 1 and 2 star ratings. They will be the best barometer of product quality.
In my opinion, it's pretty safe to assume that sellers misrepresenting themselves as the manufacturer won't last long on any platform. Manufacturers are all pretty aware of Amazon at this point.
I think your comment illustrates exactly why this is a win-win for Amazon: on the one hand they take a cut out of (cheap, low-quality) third-party sellers on their platform; on the other, quality-conscious consumers like yourself simply filter for "sold by Amazon" instead of leaving for a non-Amazon website. So Amazon wins either way.
Are items where the seller is Amazon immune from commingling [1]?
[1] OT: I wondered why it is "commingling" instead of "comingling" (like "cohabitation"), or "colmingling" (like "collaboration"), "conmingling" (like "concur"), or "cormingling" (like "correlation"), so looked up the rule.
The com-, co-, col-, con-, and cor- prefixes all mean "together". Which is used generally follows this rule: "Com- is used before b, m, p, also occasionally before vowels and f. The following variant forms occur: co- especially before vowels, h, and gn; col- before l; cor- before r; and con- before other consonants". See https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/com-
word-forming element usually meaning "with, together," from Latin com, archaic form of classical Latin cum "together, together with, in combination," from PIE *kom- "beside, near, by, with" (compare Old English ge-, German ge-). The prefix in Latin sometimes was used as an intensive.
Before vowels and aspirates, it is reduced to co-; before -g-, it is assimilated to cog- or con-; before -l-, assimilated to col-; before -r-, assimilated to cor-; before -c-, -d-, -j-, -n-, -q-, -s-, -t-, and -v-, it is assimilated to con-, which was so frequent that it often was used as the normal form.
One thing I run into after filtering by seller is where Amazon is selling one color or size of a product, but if you change the size or color options, the seller changes.
Hence why Amazon seems to be their darndest to hide that an item is a third party seller in search results. Last I looked there was no way to filter search results to only have Amazon seller.
Yeah, like I said, you have to pick a department first, before the option to filter by seller appears. (Which is extra annoying, because it is not always clear which department something is going to be in!)
> Amazon used to have the best service, best quality products, and best prices
They used to usually have the best prices on the products they had, and the widest selection of products. They didn't always have the best quality products (which were sometimes exclusive to non-Amazon channels), and outside of return policy (which was very generous, probably specifically to cover all the other glitches) their service was nothing special at its best.
Let's not view past Amazon through rose-colored glasses.
I'm not disagreeing with the premise that Amazon has issues. But I do not see a similar pattern with other companies and services. Of course, this is anecdotal, but it does seem significantly higher with Amazon itself.
It is possibly that most HN users purchase a lot via Amazon?
Is it a small but vocal group of HN users that have a grudge because they had an unsuccessful drop shipping operation that was harmed via Amazon?
Is there some competitor(ie. Walmart) that is trying to push an agenda?
It just seems high compared to other services, so I'm curious into additional insight into why Amazon, specifically, has this pattern when other services with issues do not.
I personally feel like it may just be that most HN users are, or were, heavy purchasers from Amazon. But I'm just looking to see if maybe there is a more insightful take on things.
I'm one of the naysayers. I have ... probably a north of $15k lifetime spend on Amazon? For a period of years, particularly as I got busy with my career, Amazon was where I shopped by default. And I had a pretty shocking problem with a charger with a fake Intertek (UL competitor) mark. I told Amazon; they refunded me and kept selling the product. My partner also received obviously fake makeup from Amazon.
Chargers and chemicals that go on your face and inevitably get ingested are obviously some of the most dangerous things to be fake, and Amazon clearly doesn't give the tiniest shit.
I repeat the story around here in hopes of saving someone else (potentially quite a lot!) of grief.
I used to order a ton from amazon, I now strongly dislike the company. Why is that?
-Prices used to be universally pretty good so I could pick an item and order without much outside research. Now the prices are universally bad to the point that I have to do lots of outside research before ordering which ruins the convenience that I previously enjoyed
-The review system is awful. Previously you could click a product and trust that the reviews were for that exact product, now sometimes reviews and products are bundled together under a single page (even if the products/manufacturer are not really the same) making reviews virtually useless. Again ruining the convenience and requiring more research
-Shipping used to be reliable. Towards the end probably half my prime shipments showed up a day later than the "guaranteed delivery date" and I live less than 30 minutes from their Seattle office
-I don't at all trust the people they use to ship. My last package some idiot in a complete junker filled entirely with boxes drove very quickly over the sidewalk and parked partially at an angle in my lawn and proceeded to throw the box onto my porch and then sit in the car for another 15 minutes on my lawn
-The product bundling has led to me getting items entirely different than what I actually ordered, which again ruins the convenience that I appreciated and forces me to make returns and wait even longer
-And on a personal note, based on what I've read and heard from amazon employees, I dislike bezos as a person and businessman and don't want to support his business
I think the big changed needed on Amazon is the "Seller". With their commingling of all products with the same SKU, "seller" is an irrelevant term. If people could review actual sellers, it could put a dent in the knock-offs. I'm not sure if there are just enough people who can't tell the difference or don't want the trouble of returning it to make this a profitable strategy for everyone.
I ask because I'm unclear if shared SKU is a physical thing, a logical implementation detail, or some mix.
Is there a bin full of white 3' USB cables of the same type, regardless of supplier?
I had the impression that fulfillment centers weren't organized by product. Everything is everywhere. The robots retrieve the bins of whatever from wherever for the pickers to grab from. If this is mostly true, I'm not clear how similar white 3' USB cables get commingled.
This doesn't sound right. Even if two different sellers are selling the exact same brand manufactured product (say, an Android Phone), via FBA, when a customer buys from seller1, they should get the Item1 which was actually supplied to FBA by Seller1. They cannot get Item2 which was supplied by Seller2. When the customer returns the Item1 for manufacturing defect etc reasons, it has to go back to the Seller1. This is because Item1 has "manufacturing date and batch number", may have "imported from" etc that are different from Item2 by Seller2. Seller1 may have gotten it with different pricing terms etc.
When you say "right", you need to distinguish between "accurate" and "reasonable". The OP has correctly described Amazon's approach to commingling (claimed) SKU's. And you have correctly concluded that policy is likely to lead to bad outcomes for both buyers and sellers. Whether it's a bad policy for Amazon as a corporation remains to be seen.
They do care about the quality of their own products. I posted a negative review on an Amazon product, and they called me(!) so that I could further elaborate. It was very odd because they called within an hour of the review. At some point I must have given them my phone number.
This was a review for their TV Cube. I was trying to buy something with good voice control to allow a paralyzed person to browse YouTube, and TV Cube could not do it (maybe it will be better in the future..).
I suspect the only reason I got the call is that TV Cube is in active development.
I posted a negative review on a FBA product (~$100) that arrived super late and damaged. I got called to offer me $20 to take the review down. Didn’t respond, they somehow got my review taken down anyway. That was the first time I realized how bad Amazon was getting. Kind of surprised this is something Amazon does too though; I figured only crappy dropshippers would engage in that
I once posted a negative review on their Basics HDMI cable, which had absymal shielding. It went "under review" immediately, and a few days later the review just silently vanished without a trace.
What is wrong with Amazon (or any vendor) following up on a bad review? If they’re offering incentives to take it down, of course that’s a problem. But engaging with the customer and identifying faults in detail seems like a plainly good, consumer-friendly and win/win behavior that every brand should practice.
That said, I’m not sure a third party seller can get my contact info as easily as Amazon can, so that part seems a bit unfair.
The problem is not "following up on a bad review" the problem is "I got called to offer me $20 to take the review down. Didn’t respond, they somehow got my review taken down anyway"
I was hoping from something like Roku- basically an appliance, not a computer. It should be always listening (not tap to listen), and screen should be far away for casual viewing, not in front of your face like a laptop which causes eye strain.
The TV Cube is almost there, the problem was that the voice commands are not built into its OS, instead each app has to implement them and the YouTube app didn't. It means the voice commands only work well with the Amazon native apps.
Voice is really in an abysmal state on all platforms. Pretend you can't touch anything, then read this for the fun:
For appliances, you have the usual problem of not being able to accept terms to use institutional WiFi (lack of a good web browser).
Also for computers with a screen in front of your face, there already is a better solution: eye tracking.
But there is an annoying secondary problem with YouTube on a laptop: I can't lend my YouTube Red account (for an ad-free experience) to someone without also being fully logged into Google (they would have access to my email). With something like YouTube on Roku, this does not matter since you are only logged into only a single app. Google does have a family plan, but it's not cheap.
The extension can always listen- it has a wake-word just like Alexa, Siri et al. "hey LipSurf" in the premium version. It can be used on a media PC/TV, you would just need to setup your microphone to listen from wherever you sit or wear a wireless headset.
That's a great example of how Amazon abuses their monopoly power as a marketplace provider to boost their vendor business. "Calling you" is something that they do for their benefit, but go to great lengths to prevent 3rd party vendors from doing, by blocking vendors from getting access to your phone number and not providing a formal opt-in if you want to share it.
(I can only guess you are American) - American experiences with Amazon are so different to mine over here in the UK it's incredible. I buy tonnes of different stuff from Amazon(multiple hundred orders last year) and I have never ever gotten anything counterfeit or had any issues. In fact every time when their 1-day delivery arrives late they just extend my prime by a month, no questions asked. And yet every time I go on HN it's 100% negative, stories about unreputable sellers selling fake stuff - this is just not happening outside of US for some reason.
According to the Youtuber "serpentza", EU law requires Amazon to display the country of residence of an Amazon seller, whereas the US has no such law (and Amazon chooses not to display the information in the US). If counterfeiters are concentrated in a few countries with bad reputations among consumers, counterfeiters have an incentive to choose Amazon's US store.
US Prime member here. Never had any problems with fake stuff. One time, my order was stolen and replaced with something of similar weight. I called Amazon right away, and they refunded my purchase. When I need to return something, it's easy.
I live in the US and buy a ton of stuff on Amazon for my business and haven’t noticed a counterfeit problem. I think there are just lots of loud voices from people that have gotten counterfeits or just in general don’t like Amazon.
Same here, have placed hundreds of orders on Amazon UK in the last few years and have never really had any problems. The rare few times i've had problems then a call to customer support has usually had the issue resolved right away and quite often with a discount voucher for the next shop.
Amazon India has a counterfeit problem if you are not careful. I’ve had counterfeit batteries, chargers and skincare items. Though delivery issues have never happened.
I’ve to keep my guard up when ordering from Amazon. It’s no longer the easy convenient and cheap option.
I don't know specifically about the UK, but the zero cost shipping from China isn't a US thing. It's an international agreement, and I've seen things being shipped for free from China to both Europe and the Middle East.
I've certainly had fake products from Amazon UK. Certain categories of products are very likely to be counterfeit, while others aren't. For example there were lots of apple replacement headphones which are much too cheap.
I don't know about Amazon UK, but pretty damn sure my Amazon DE (Germany) is similar. Degraded. I used to shop a lot on Amazon a decade ago. Now I am losing time scrolling through search results filled with garbage sellers which get promoted in the results. In the past year I went with Amazon Choice 3 times and got low quality products. I go to other online stores for electronics and other stuff. I only buy books on Amazon now.
Amazon France is filled to the brim with Chinese rubbish that makes searching for anything a chore. It's still fine when you've got a specific item in mind, though. Amazon pricing and parcel delivery is still top notch.
Amazon: fast shipping, easy returns. That's literally the beginning and end of their entire value proposition. If any other company can fill that niche, they can have my money with no regrets.
I've had the misfortune of needing to run some FB and Twitter ads recently, and it baffles me how completely unusable and unfriendly these platforms are for the only thing that makes them any money.
I was so annoyed by the promoted products and expert recommendations that I wrote a Chrome/Firefox extension that hides them. It needs to be updated but mostly works as expected: http://mdolon.com/projects/shopsuey
As someone who works in search this is unsurprising, and happens all the time. Search is a two sided sales exercise both to show you good products and also to products that make the e-commerce business money. Search is the e-commerce businesses sales person - not a neutral broker. You don’t expect the blue shirt at Best Buy to be entirely neutral do you?
It’s actually a pretty understudied microeconomics case
Side rant: Where is my Amazon branded phone case?!? This weekend I placed a half dozen searches for "iphone 11 case" and was only presented with super shady, low quality vendors.
Floveme? Tendam? Donse? Spigen? and my favorite: Vapesoon.
Is it just too early for the legit brands to have a case ready? Or am I doing it wrong?
Cool, thanks for that! Beyond Speck and OtterBox I actually couldn't name any other legit brands. I had an easier time finding seemingly "legit" brands via Google.
I agree the brand names sound ridiculous, but I bought a Spigen phone case from Amazon for a Moto X4 and I'm very happy with it. Fits perfectly, looks fine, good access to buttons etc.
I sympathize with your rant but wanted to point out that Spigen is in fact a pretty well known and recommended brand for phone cases. I suspect part of the reason for this is that a lot of Chinese manufacturers are able to get their hands on leaked prototypes / information regarding new iPhone models due to them being manufactured in China. This gives them a valuable headstart in getting phone cases to market so they can maximize sales in the first few weeks while a lot of the more reputable companies are busy building out their cases.
I've always considered Amazon's search system as pretty bad, often ignoring keywords to get more search results. It does look like their sort by price mechanism has improved. eBay has my favourite search system because it's willing to admit if there are no results and allow me create an e-mail alert. It also allows negation and lets me use parentheses to define a logical "or" as part of the query.
If you’re a manufacturer without a strong brand, it’s incredibly risky selling through Amazon. They will take your sales data to evaluate ROI of building it themselves , and then undercut you.
Similar if you’re a retailer.
This is why Shopify’s new model is better for D2C and retail (but very difficult for them to pull off).
Also, a factory can produce a counterfeit of your product and sell it on Amazon on the same listing as your genuine product, with no way the customer can tell which they're buying.
Read between the lines: "Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Lower Customer Satisfaction." That's less obvious because Amazon traditionally has been a customer-focused company, and this is a step away from that.
"After the Journal’s inquiries, Amazon took down its A9 website, which had stood for about a decade and a half. The site included the statement: 'One of A9’s tenets is that relevance is in the eye of the customer and we strive to get the best results for our users.'"
I'm glad they do this! I publish books on Amazon.com using Amazon KDP, and it's impossible to compete on a level playing field in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Distributors won't touch self-published titles. And I can't offer them at a cheaper price, due to the nature of print on demand (much pricier to print compared to doing a print run in China).
The ONLY advantage I have is that my titles are more promoted by Amazon in the search results (since they make a killing off the higher margins, even when they decide to discount it themselves). If Amazon wasn't boosting KDP self-published titles in the search results, it wouldn't work... period, in my opinion. I wouldn't even try.
And if anyone from Amazon is reading this, you guys should allow the authors to purchase the title in bulk at a much cheaper rate, so that reselling to local bookstores is a viable option.
According to the book 'The Everything Store,' Amazon's search engine is a matter of internal contention. Years ago, when people noticed that Amazon's search engine was terrible (as it is), someone from another group in the company developed a new search system based on Elasticsearch and more modern technologies. He presented the new search to Bezos. But there was an existing team whose primary responsibility was the search functionality. And the man who led that team was one of Bezos' personal friends. That man was, apparently, petty and status-seeking, so pushed back against adopting the new search engine. Bezos proposed that there would be a contest between the old and new search engines. Judged by his friend, head of the current bad search engine team who didn't want the new search because it threatened his status. Predictably, the new search 'lost.'
This sort of thing makes me sick, and I'm familiar with the feeling because I've seen this several times in my career. But the older I get, the more a tiny kernel of respect grows in me for the kind of person that can parley a modicum of technical understanding into an unassailable political position in a large company, and succeed -- at least in terms of money and influence -- despite the opportunity costs I've witnessed. You just kind of have to hand it to people like this. I guess. Maybe that's the only way I stay sane at this point.
My problem with Amazon is that I dont know what to trust anymore. For every product I buy off Amazon, I spend time reading "verified purchase" reviews, 1 star and 2 star reviews and may be then find an item that seems legitimate and durable. I only recently learned that "Amazon's Choice in category X" label does not necessarily mean that Amazon has actually vetted that item. So my experience shopping at Amazon has drastically changed.
Without getting into whether what Amazon is doing is right or wrong, as a vendor, you have to accept reality for what it is and come up with a business plan that gives you an “unfair advantage”.
Selling physical goods is a three part process - manufacturing, marketing, and selling. At each part of the process, you have to know what helps you stand out.
Manufacturing - is there something that enables you to manufacturer a product that can’t easily be copied or that allows you to create the product cheaper than competitors?
Marketing - are you depending on SEO and Google ads just like all of your competitors?
Selling - Are you depending on Amazon just like all of your competitors?
You have to be able to optimize on at least one of those areas or you’re going to find yourself competing on price at either slim, no or negative margins or being lost in a marketplace where everyone is doing the same thing.
It's too bad that Sears never really got into online. They were once the top catalog retailer, and known for consistent quality, good warranties, and boring products. Somehow they missed the Internet, retiring from catalog operations just as Internet shopping got going.
I cannot for the life of me understand why Sears didn't become a major online retailer. They not only had a physical catalog system that could be fairly easily converted into an online catalog, they have physical stores that could be used as pickup points and warehouses for customers who don't want to wait until things are mailed.
In the UK there's a company called Argos that worked ENTIRELY as a catalog store. Their physical locations were basically a warehouse with a lobby that had the catalogs and computers where you could look items up and order them. THEY should be a major competitor to Amazon... but according to my UK friends, they're not.
Among other things, Sears was afraid of cannibalizing their in-store sales and didn't understand the potential of the internet. They had a very B&M-centered mindset.
That's insane, though. In reality, these things can coexist just fine, but even if they couldn't... why wouldn't you want to have a business model with lower overhead?
Because they didn't know how to run the new business.
It's the same story as when Sears rose to prominence: they saw a business model the other mail-order retailers didn't understand.
The irony is Sears started as a mail-order catalog but couldn't get back to the old model in time. But of course their large management structures couldn't move as fast as small company with somebody like Bezos at the helm who could just make calls on the spot.
For sure. Even when they went online the experience was _bad_. Ordering would almost never ship when it said it would and one time I ordered something for pick-up at a store and when I got to the store an employee their said another employee took the tags off of what I purchased and sold it to a customer.
They missed the internet and when they tried to get into it, they just failed at every turn.
Because Sears was a company in the process of being looted and trashed for at least the last couple of decades. I've had experiences in Sears of spending 15 minutes just looking for an employee. It had become a company so actively not interested in revenue that it actually became difficult to buy things there. At least they kept the stores clean; it seems like after they bought K-Mart, K-Mart literally stopped mopping the floors.
>I've had experiences in Sears of spending 15 minutes just looking for an employee
Reminds me of an anecdote someone told me more than 15 years ago of him searching for a Sears employee and finding one literally hiding/crouching behind/underneath his register to avoid having to do his job. I would have thought it were an isolated thing.
437 comments
[ 176 ms ] story [ 6969 ms ] thread> Amazon has adjusted its product-search system to more prominently feature listings that are more profitable for the company
Unthinkable. A store trying to make a profit selling things. How crazy.
Two not-entirely-random examples of similar behaviour:
Supermarkets place their own brand merchandise where they feel it'll sell best. Undeniably good business, and certainly no reason for concern.
Perhaps more questionably, but bare with me - Google place AMP content, which is to say content they have made their product by merit of some ToS/caching slight of hand, front and center. Is it exactly the same as what Amazon are doing? Well, no. Is it placing content they want consumed above other content irrespective of merit or consumer benefit? Probably.
Similarly Amazon are doing what businesses do and promoting their most profitable products, straddling both the above examples. Whether it's best for the customers is open to debate, but it doesn't change that it's entirety their prerogative.
The difference being that Google are ostensibly a search engine, who are looking to monetize and leverage their ubiquity - Amazon are a book store grown to titanic proportions looking to maximize profits.
The same, but different.
I fully support Amazon's divergent empire being broken up into sperate companies, but for the moment Amazon.com - the online marketplace - is still an internet shopfront.
Amazon claims they are a marketplace, not a store. Amazon itself is only one player on that marketplace, according to Amazon.
I am curious if there actually are any laws relevant to this situation. As far as I can tell, this is exactly like Walmart or BigBoxCo pushing their own brands. It's not illegal and, generally, it's not even a bad thing for the consumer (in the short term).
It really feels like most of the people taking issue with this are doing so because of their personal sentiments rather than legality.
Downvotes for bad information, not snark
AFAIK US antitrust law does not have any concept of “marketplaces.”
If this was you or I, there wouldn't be a problem. If you are the only / pretty much the only store used then it (to me) would clearly be a problem for consumers. You'd be using your monopoly in one area (marketplace) to benefit you elsewhere (selling USB cables) rather than competing on a level playing field.
In between it becomes trickier. At what point are they too big? How dominant would they need to be?
I think there are differences to physical stores partly due to scale. If a shelf has 10 different variations of basically the same thing that's the equivalent of all products being on the front of the search results. If there are hundreds, then the ranking becomes vital.
At one point when coffee wasn’t a big section, the category captain of coffee actually helped bring in competitors to increase the overall size of the shelf space and thus attract more passing customers.
I wonder in what was they tweaked it so that the lawyers approved this change? I wonder if regulators will care if it skirts the letter of that law when the intention was to attempt to sneak by oversight by the FTC and the DOJ?
They changed their approach to instead measure how much profit Amazon makes on a given search. This allows them to analyze whether various changes to the search algorithm increase or decrease profit, and optimize for those that do.
It's a subtle distinction but it means that instead of explicitly promoting their products in search, they are instead making changes based on other product attributes that naturally boost the ranking of their products (and thus increase their profits).
It's kind of like a blind study: they're telling the engineers, "we won't tell you which products are ours, but we'll see if you can figure it out based on these 100 other traits."
Also some alliances like Target + Shipt are nipping at their heels with same day delivery. https://www.target.com/c/shipt/-/N-t4bob
Coincidentally, Amazon brand products are usually pretty good in my experience, so this might not be a terrible outcome for users who have already decided to come shop at Amazon's store.
Amazon is more like shopping mall that decides to start operating their own stores and competing with their tenants.
I'm not trying to defend Amazon, but I don't think that comparison makes sense.
>Amazon gives you distribution, traffic, logistics, etc, with zero risk.
Not everyone uses the distribution, and a mall or flea market also provides traffic to tenants.
If amazon does charge a fee for simply listing a product, tell us. They don’t as far as I know.
A grocery store owns the goods in their possession even if they have agreements for sellers to buy some unsold product back. Amazon does not own the 3rd party goods in their possession.
Amazon isn’t a grocery store. The majority of their catalog isn’t even available at most grocery stores, maybe excluding WalMart.
My family owned several convenience stores growing up. Some products were bought and it was your problem to move them off shelves. Some were displayed on shelves and you only paid for what was actually sold. This was common with one of the distributors who gave us Frito Lay products. Other products had strict terms - for instance, Pepsi and Coke distributors wouldn’t give you competitive pricing unless you agreed to purchase Y in X quantity, place their mini coolers next to the refrigerator, place signage within x feet, clearly visible from the front entrance, etc. suddenly, you’re the only store in town who sells 16 oz soda for $1.59 just to break even while everyone else is selling the same soda for $1.09 or just 99 cents.
It’s a different model than Amazon and you’re taking liberties to simplify it
No I'm saying it has very important distinctions that make the grocery store analogy inappropriate and that the mall or flea market analogy is closer in some respects, but not all.
>Amazon isn’t a grocery store. The majority of their catalog isn’t even available at most grocery stores, maybe excluding WalMart.
Of course it's not. That's a big part of my original point.
> Some were displayed on shelves and you only paid for what was actually sold.
My dad worked for Lance (and frito lay for a while). I could be wrong and you could have had a very unusual distributor. But my guess is you misunderstood what was happening.
Companies do sometimes offer buyback guarantees and you might even be able to buy items on credit, so that it appears you're only paying for what sells, but that's not actually how it works. Those items are the property of the store while they are on the shelf.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/clb-percentage-rent....
Amazon is totally within their right imo, those sellers can go back to eBay if they dislike amazon.
I think the problem is that they present the results on good faith that "these results are the best match for you based on your search", not the most profitable for them.
I just ran a search and the default search filter was "Featured", which is so ambiguous it could mean anything, so it seems like a classic bait and switch that played out over the course of a decade of consumers getting the best search results based on reviews and sales.
That was the original point I was arguing against.
My point is that grocery store is not a good analogy because Amazon is not the same as a retail store, they are a combination store and marketplace.
To be fair, I think I would be more comfortable comparing Amazon to Sears in it's heyday.
In the case of items actually run through the register, I'm not sure how that's dealt with from an accounting standpoint. I do know that the stores have the ability to return 100% of unsold goods in those cases.
I'm sure that exists, but it's not common. Grocery stores often charge slotting fees, but that's not the same as renting shelf space--the store still owns the product (even if there is an agreement to buy it back if it doesn't sell).
Also retail stores take on more product liability than marketplaces like flea markets do.
That’s not true though right? Don’t grocery stores buy the products that are on their shelves and they are reselling them? That’s fundamentally different from a marketplace.
No, not usually. Usually the seller pays the grocery to carry items, and the seller owns the items until sold.
For some products the seller even stocks the items on the shelves.
That said, what brands got that special treatment was very much decided by Publix, so they were still curating the selection, they just weren't paying up-front for the goods or responsible for keeping those shelves looking good.
They definitely owned the product, while it was on their shelves.
Even if a vendor has a buyback guarantee for expired product, if someone were to break in and steal all the product, its the store who is liable not the vendor.
Amazon does all of these things. They have unlimited shelf space, which reduces constraints.
But vendors can have amazon handle returns, they can be kicked off the platform, and amazon decided how to present vendors.
more like a big box store that allows other stores to operate in them so long as they get a cut.
So it's fine they're shafting other vendors on their platform because their products are good?
They own the store. Shopify is a thing.
The game is Feudalism on the Web and in E-Commerce.
I am frustrated by plenty of things that Amazon does, by the way...I just don't think that this is a particularly bad feature of theirs.
A better analogy would be a walmart in a small town hosting a bunch of small business to showcase their products, then kicking out the top sellers and replacing them with a store brand version. You could argue that those producers should just open their own store but most people won't go out of their way to a different store to buy paper towels.
Except the analogy falls flat when you actually compare the implementation: Amazon's costs to host listings is negligible to negative (they may get more value from having extra listings than it costs to serve them), but that is far from true for grocery stores.
Grocery stores have a very small, finite, shelf space compared to Amazon; you can put a lot of items in the "..." after page 3, but grocery stores have to expend labor to count and organize each item at least once a month.
Yes stores may be able to return non-selling items for a refund, but do you think it cost them nothing while it was sitting on the shelf? What about the labor of stocking them, cleaning them, heck even packing them back up to return? On Amazon anything that doesn't sell well automagically gets shunted into the depths of page 10+, and they can keep them there indefinitely, at no cost.
Stores have a fixed cost associated with every item stocked, this gives them an inventive to sell every item they stock even if they prefer to sell some items over others. But they still want to sell it, even in they have to discount it by huge margins to get rid of it. By contrast Amazon doesn't give a piss about any one of your items in particular getting sold, it can stay there forever as far as they're concerned.
I like to say, a sufficiently large quantitative change manifests as a qualitative change. By that, I mean yes the only "real" difference between these scenarios is some of the costs are different, but how those costs become incentives when you have multiple parties actually matters.
There was a planet money episode about this exact comparison the other day. Basically it comes down to:
When a grocery store puts something on it's shelves, the store itself bought it from the manufacturer. They have already made their money. On Amazon, manufacturers don't make money when the item is listed, they make it only if and when a customer buys the product.
When a grocery store makes its own novel product and puts it on the shelf, it's taking a risk. If they make those products, but they don't sell, they just lost a bunch of money. Or, if their product is a competing one with an existing product, they know that products like that can sell, but now they have to focus on outselling the original product. When Amazon makes its own product, most of the risk has been removed. They pretty much already know it sells well on their platform, and they have enough money that knocking 5 dollars off the price, making it prime recommended, and putting it at the top of the list will cause it to beat the competition 9 times out of 10.
I'm not saying any of this is fair or unfair, because I'm not an economist so I don't believe I have a full understanding of the situation.
I tried to find the exact episode but it seems I can never find them when I need them.
It's way more complicated than that. Manufacturers pay stores to carry their products, feature their products in special places in stores, get forced to take buy back unsold product, get paid way later on invoices, etc etc.
Amazon is not leasing retail floor space, so to GP's point, any comparisons between Amazon's open platform and traditional physical retail spaces are moot.
People don't have an issue with Amazon default sorting to best selling either. The problem is that Amazon is slowly pushing out the competition on their platform to focus their own products and labels. If there's any analogy, it would be similar Google removing search result links to Bing or Yandex.
So, if Amazon marketplace was an invite-only, curated marketplace and not an "open" marketplace, this wouldn't be a problem?
That's not how it works for a some perishable products in grocery stores. For example, bread is stocked daily by the bakeries themselves. Same thing with potato chips.
If a grocery store has their in house bakery up front right when you walk in selling bread, and the vendors bread is all the way in the back, is that unfair to the vendor?
That would be for the vendor to decide when planning out where to sell their product I guess
The store still buys those items from them. Some bigger stores will force the vendor to offer a buyback guarantee, but while the product is on their shelves, the store owns them.
The grocery store's risk on store branded products is about the same as Amazon's risk for Amazon brand products. They have the data to know what sells and what doesn't, they have control of the store layout, and they also have pricing data. There's really no major differentiation besides the physical store front and how manufacturers "rent" space.
If it is shipped & sold by Amazon, Amazon already paid for it from their supplier. If it is shipped & sold by SomeOtherStore, generally they bought it already from someone. There are a lot of dropshippers also and that is a different story.
Amazon similarly protects itself with onerous contracts that can force suppliers to eat the cost of unsold products at times, and does whatever it can to avoid buying unproven products.
Grocery stores and other retailers in general can be protected by refund policies and buyback policies so they are not necessarily taking as much risk especially on packaged products with long expiry dates. They can also liquidate stuff that doesn't get purchased to recoup some money.
On Amazon there are as many shelves as there are product categories and the thing has much much more fluctuation.
What that means is, that a "promoted" product is sometimes the only one which stays at a fixed spot, while all all the others are to be found on the miscellaneous-pile.
It’s unfair.
That content can be uploaded to YouTube.
I feel like that assertion has to be tested.
Amazon demonstrably cannot weed out counterfeits of other well-known brands. If it can weed out counterfeits for it's own brand, we will know that it has chosen not to expend the effort for anyone else, and therefore cannot be trusted to sell those brands in its marketplace. If it cannot, we then know it lacks the capability, and therefore cannot be trusted to sell those brands in its marketplace.
Obviously it's grossly unfair to their vendors, but from a strictly user-centric view it's an improvement.
Otherwise, Amazon feels like AliExpress with faster shipping and better English.
It's an ancedote sure, but back in 2012, we shopped only at Amazon. Now they are no longer King.
I wanted to get a sweater shaver. Amazon had it for 22. I bought a NIB one from Ebay for $12.
As far as I am concerned, the only thing Amazon has going for it right now is that it is a a one stop shop. That's worth something… how much? I'm not sure, but I know I'm buying a hell of a lot less stuff from Amazon now than 2 years ago.
Also you knew it was Genuine. I'd love Amazon to do a "Guaranteed Genuine" label or something, but I can see why they don't. I used to buy everything on Amazon, now I only buy stuff that I'm willing to accept might be counterfeit.
Nevertheless, it remains questionable how this change would be a fair competition for Amazon sellers, not just the Alibaba private label sellers but also all the sellers with popular products.
I was attracted to Amazon only because of lower prices. That was it and now it is no longer the case. As soon as another big player steps up and offers lower prices and simple UI there won't be a need for me to shop on Amazon.
Living near a metro area, I can get items from Amazon items within 24-48 hours (with Prime). Sometimes it even arrives later the same day.
Plus the whole free shipping (as long as you're Prime) thing..
I do agree that fast shipping is a big part of amazon but I think another big player could match the processing speed.
The listing being offered to you father probably wasn't eligible for prime (not shipped by Amazon) so the price+shipping was lower than Amazon's price+non-free-shipping (and the third party was likely intentionally undercutting Amazon to be shown first). Once you signed it, it offered you the one with prime shipping because the total was cheaper.
I may be wrong. I will try to take some screenshots another time, as it seems like nobody else noticed, therefore, i may be in the wrong here.
Target was caught doing this. People with location services turned on using the target app would find pricing for an item jump up as they approached their local store.
search for "The Target app price switch: What you need to know"
It literally is. All these products are cheap stuff that marketers find on aliexpress. They buy them in bulk, stamp a logo on it, import in the US/EU, stock in logistic centers and then sell on Amazon. It's the same stuff, but it comes from an English seller and a warehouse in US/EU.
It's exactly the same thing that Amazon does with its product lines though (like Amazon Basics), so not really rooting for their own name-brands either.
Everybody uses the same factories and Amazon doesn't have better quality control than anyone else.
I've also heard the opposite about Anker - that they always get the best quality.
Unless Amazon is currently testing products for lead before recommending them, which somehow I doubt, then the potential of a lawsuit against Amazon isn't actually protecting your child.
If Amazon's batteries start exploding, it's not quite the same magnitude. People will still shop at Whole Foods.
Admittedly a phone that explodes is a bad phone, but Samsung can still sell its "good phone" brand the same way Apple can still sell its laptops.
So I no longer have any certainty. Are Anker merely badge engineering some random white label product, or are Amazon / Anker just not caring or able to do anything about dozens of clear counterfeits?
My assumption would be that the same factory that makes Anker products is also selling the same designs to competitors - it's also possible that a different factory just cloned it.
Note that even if it's the same factory, they could have different quality control for different clients. So quality can differ even on identical designs.
So maybe Anker are uniquely incompetent in selecting suppliers. Not specifying in the contract with factories not to copy whatever widget they produce for Anker, not registering any of their designs. Yet aside from a) products within the same group ostensibly from different brands and b) same idea but clearly made by someone else, few other companies seem affected. They'll have a few products counterfeited. Not most. It's the sort of thing that might encourage you to be very careful on third, fourth and subsequent products.
I suppose it makes a case to avoid Anker and the identical copies, as clearly inept. Few other companies appear to be quite so afflicted. I'm not convinced it's the answer though. Outside the purely generic: white T shirts, tungsten light bulbs and such, you see very few precisely identical products.
You keep using the word counterfeit when it does not apply. Copyright is also not applicable unless there's a work of art printed on the product (like cell phone cases).
Most brands making commodity products don't get protection for the design, because the design isn't that unique. Search for "fast chargers for Samsung" and you'll see tons of chargers identical to the Samsung charger except with a different name. Same for Apple.
Examples:
https://www.amazon.com/Pantom-Adaptive-Charging-Compatible-S...
https://www.amazon.com/Adaptive-Charging-Charger-Compatible-...
https://www.amazon.com/Panmy-Foldable-Portable-Charging-Comp...
https://www.amazon.com/ByCallMax-Adapter-Original-Certified-...
Here's the EU's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design_rights_in_th...
Which protects "the appearance of the whole or a part of a product resulting from the features of, in particular, the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture and/or materials of the product itself and/or its ornamentation". It applies if they are novel and/or if they have unique character.
Batteries are a different story because they're basically tiny plastic bombs. Somehow Samsung managed to deliver almost 15 years of Android phones before having their batteries catch fire, and that was almost certainly a result of skipping essential QA/Verification processes because they've never had a problem before.
Its really not though, its just that between insurance and the courts its currently cheaper to enter products into the stream of commerce that will catch fire x% of times and hurt Y people costing $z, than it is to manufacture/supply/distribute/retail a product that won't catch fire in 100% of cases.
Hell even when z exceeds the cost of proper manufacturing, these companies are significantly more likely to spend money lobbying for changes to insurance and/or products liability litigation than fix the products to make the current formula work rather than spend more money on the cost of the product(s).
However, knock off products are usually worse, at least if you are burned by an exploding Samsung or die in a defective Boeing...you and/or your family will be compensated as these companies are identifiable and insured. If you are burned by an exploding knock off, odds are: 1) you won't even be able to identify the manufacturer or seller; 2) you won't have jurisdiction to sue the manufacturer or seller; and 3) they probably aren't insured and will just fold up shop and start anew.
If the company writing the checks can write checks to people who are going to cut corners, people will die. Full stop.
There are a huge number of online retailers where you can purchase chinese counterfeit items in the US. If you're in Seattle I can take you down a few streets where you can openly buy counterfeits as well, and I experienced the same in LA and New York. It definitely isn't mostly restricted to China, there is a massive market for counterfeit goods from China in the US
And most of counterfeit items online are obviously from China or from Chinese sites. They aren't from the US.
And considering nearly all US clothing comes from China and is not considered fake and is largely the same with electronics and even toys, it isn't so much a quality issue when you get things from China. It more has to do with what company you get it from.
Amazon Basics must have had at least a couple of humans involved to agree getting it branded Amazon.
Maybe the algorithm seemed like a good idea at the time but later turned sour. If that's the case, why hasn't Amazon yanked the program? If they don't terminate this program when it performs poorly, I don't trust them to keep other programs in line either.
So assuming Bezos isn't a complete numpty, that's intentional. Maybe Amazon's brand is completely disposable to fund Blue Streak.
Today I got more trust in Poundshop and eBay that I will get the right product easily than I do in Amazon. The old department stores, many now failed, sank or swam on the strength of their brand being a real indicator of quality.
Maybe it's intentional, or maybe he's deluded. I don't know. But either way, I doubt it's going to get fixed any time soon.
Yea that was the gist of it—when you log in as Jeff you (unbeknownst) get a different frontend, with all his various special cases and bad ideas that the PMs wanted to keep out of the real Amazon. It does sound incredible so probably false, but amusing to think about. I admit to having wanted to do something like that a nonzero number of times.
On the premise, sure. But on the individual items, I've always assumed "Amazon's Choice" meant "Best for Amazon", i.e. high margin, low number of returns (which would reduce margin).
Not necessarily what I would choose.
Like a safe - a lock buys you time, and hopefully the thief chooses a loud method of entry that attracts attention.
Probably something more like: locks marginally aid in diverting lazy / opportunistic thieves.
Curiosity and children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-9vWa-C44I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjHnklj6PAs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ViUdd-2LM
So basically Amazon's Choice locks are about the same as 95% of consumer locks on the market.
Isn't this just a property of most locks in general? I was under the impression that there are very few consumer locks that will stand up to someone with tools and a weekend of practice.
My only complaint is I charge at 65W instead of 87, but it seems to only be slightly slower in practice.
But, it's also the nylon braided stuff, so it's probably built to different quality standards and by different people than the vanilla USB cables.
haven't had much luck with their Amazon Basics keyboards... went through 2 and then gave up and bought an IBM one...
HN seems to have had an influx of incentivised accounts (via third-party services). They're putatively gaining some sort of credits. That's been discontinued at HN's request to at least some such services.
Best response is to flag the comments/posts, and if you see egregious abuse, email the mods: hn@ycombinator.com
(I've emailed re: the earlier thread.)
That's pretty much what Monoprice does too -- it contracts out to Chinese manufacturers for it's products (sometimes copying existing products [1]), but their stuff is generally pretty decent quality.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/monoprice-a-tech-consumers-best-fr...
Example: Last week two symbol barcode scanners used in the erp system died. I look up the same model on newegg and see that sold and shipped by newegg it was about $120. Amazon had multiple listing in the $60 range and checking reviews I see things like "died in two weeks", FAKE, "died and returned to symbol only for them to say it was a fake and they were refused service or replacement". How do you build trust with shenanigans like that? No thanks, Newegg got my money.
Amazon seems to be playing oblivious to all this mainly because people are STILL using them. So as long as they are making money they can afford to lose a few "picky" customers here and there. The rest are happy to buy trash because they save a buck. Capitalism at its finest.
As soon as Newegg starts mingling stock like Amazon does, then we'll have to go back to big box retailers to ensure we're getting the item we're paying for.
Since around then Newegg has been garbage, and continues to become worse.
I think any seller like amazon or newegg that turns into a marketplace/platform is trading their reputation for the potential of a cut from a much larger market, and they probably do this knowingly.
If you view vendors on the platform as existing to serve the users (as I do), the contradiction evaporates. If you view users as existing to serve the vendors, then it’s possible.
I get that US culture is heavy on "the customer is always right"[1], etc. but two-sided markets don't exist without recognizing both sides.
[1] In reality, that ends up being more of an employee control mechanism than a dedication to customers, but that's a different topic.
Really the rule should simply be that if you operate a market place you can't sell on it. Full stop. Then we could simply be happy that amazon is finally improving it's search and/or the quality of its listings.
Last time I checked there was a ocean of e-commerce stores on the internet all selling the same stuff
- 96% of worldwide OS marketshare. Even Amazon doesn't come close to this level of domination in retail or cloud.
- Forcing OEMs to purchase Windows licenses for all PCs sold regardless of whether or not customers wanted a PC without Windows.
- Not only pre-installed IE, but provided IE with inaccessible and undocumented Windows OS APIs to give it functionality that just wasn't possible for Netscape to implement (like ActiveX).
Disclaimer: ex-Amazon employee.
[1] OT: I wondered why it is "commingling" instead of "comingling" (like "cohabitation"), or "colmingling" (like "collaboration"), "conmingling" (like "concur"), or "cormingling" (like "correlation"), so looked up the rule.
The com-, co-, col-, con-, and cor- prefixes all mean "together". Which is used generally follows this rule: "Com- is used before b, m, p, also occasionally before vowels and f. The following variant forms occur: co- especially before vowels, h, and gn; col- before l; cor- before r; and con- before other consonants". See https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/com-
com-
word-forming element usually meaning "with, together," from Latin com, archaic form of classical Latin cum "together, together with, in combination," from PIE *kom- "beside, near, by, with" (compare Old English ge-, German ge-). The prefix in Latin sometimes was used as an intensive.
Before vowels and aspirates, it is reduced to co-; before -g-, it is assimilated to cog- or con-; before -l-, assimilated to col-; before -r-, assimilated to cor-; before -c-, -d-, -j-, -n-, -q-, -s-, -t-, and -v-, it is assimilated to con-, which was so frequent that it often was used as the normal form.
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirimasters/2019/03/07/amazon-v...
That's jerky.
Has anyone done any analysis on the HN posting dataset to see if that happens to be the case?
And if that is the case, does anyone have any insight into why that might be?
Now they're wavering on all three of those fronts, and I guess that fact really bothers most of us
They used to usually have the best prices on the products they had, and the widest selection of products. They didn't always have the best quality products (which were sometimes exclusive to non-Amazon channels), and outside of return policy (which was very generous, probably specifically to cover all the other glitches) their service was nothing special at its best.
Let's not view past Amazon through rose-colored glasses.
It is possibly that most HN users purchase a lot via Amazon?
Is it a small but vocal group of HN users that have a grudge because they had an unsuccessful drop shipping operation that was harmed via Amazon?
Is there some competitor(ie. Walmart) that is trying to push an agenda?
It just seems high compared to other services, so I'm curious into additional insight into why Amazon, specifically, has this pattern when other services with issues do not.
I personally feel like it may just be that most HN users are, or were, heavy purchasers from Amazon. But I'm just looking to see if maybe there is a more insightful take on things.
Chargers and chemicals that go on your face and inevitably get ingested are obviously some of the most dangerous things to be fake, and Amazon clearly doesn't give the tiniest shit.
I repeat the story around here in hopes of saving someone else (potentially quite a lot!) of grief.
-Prices used to be universally pretty good so I could pick an item and order without much outside research. Now the prices are universally bad to the point that I have to do lots of outside research before ordering which ruins the convenience that I previously enjoyed
-The review system is awful. Previously you could click a product and trust that the reviews were for that exact product, now sometimes reviews and products are bundled together under a single page (even if the products/manufacturer are not really the same) making reviews virtually useless. Again ruining the convenience and requiring more research
-Shipping used to be reliable. Towards the end probably half my prime shipments showed up a day later than the "guaranteed delivery date" and I live less than 30 minutes from their Seattle office
-I don't at all trust the people they use to ship. My last package some idiot in a complete junker filled entirely with boxes drove very quickly over the sidewalk and parked partially at an angle in my lawn and proceeded to throw the box onto my porch and then sit in the car for another 15 minutes on my lawn
-The product bundling has led to me getting items entirely different than what I actually ordered, which again ruins the convenience that I appreciated and forces me to make returns and wait even longer
-And on a personal note, based on what I've read and heard from amazon employees, I dislike bezos as a person and businessman and don't want to support his business
I mean, I prefer AmazonBasics products because I've been burned enough times (occasionally literally) by cheap off-brand "Chinesium" goods.
So putting them at the top of the search suits me.
I ask because I'm unclear if shared SKU is a physical thing, a logical implementation detail, or some mix.
Is there a bin full of white 3' USB cables of the same type, regardless of supplier?
I had the impression that fulfillment centers weren't organized by product. Everything is everywhere. The robots retrieve the bins of whatever from wherever for the pickers to grab from. If this is mostly true, I'm not clear how similar white 3' USB cables get commingled.
This is my understanding, yes. If something is "fulfilled by amazon" common stock has one bin/location and is not differentiated.
Here in Australia AliExpress feels like Amazon with faster shipping and more honesty.
Although Amazon now has an Australian entity, though I’m not sure how popular it is, maybe as (non-) popular as Amazon...
This was a review for their TV Cube. I was trying to buy something with good voice control to allow a paralyzed person to browse YouTube, and TV Cube could not do it (maybe it will be better in the future..).
I suspect the only reason I got the call is that TV Cube is in active development.
That said, I’m not sure a third party seller can get my contact info as easily as Amazon can, so that part seems a bit unfair.
Hope this helps.
The TV Cube is almost there, the problem was that the voice commands are not built into its OS, instead each app has to implement them and the YouTube app didn't. It means the voice commands only work well with the Amazon native apps.
Voice is really in an abysmal state on all platforms. Pretend you can't touch anything, then read this for the fun:
https://www.techhive.com/article/3373853/how-to-use-roku-voi...
For appliances, you have the usual problem of not being able to accept terms to use institutional WiFi (lack of a good web browser).
Also for computers with a screen in front of your face, there already is a better solution: eye tracking.
But there is an annoying secondary problem with YouTube on a laptop: I can't lend my YouTube Red account (for an ad-free experience) to someone without also being fully logged into Google (they would have access to my email). With something like YouTube on Roku, this does not matter since you are only logged into only a single app. Google does have a family plan, but it's not cheap.
I’ve to keep my guard up when ordering from Amazon. It’s no longer the easy convenient and cheap option.
(1) US market is largest "single-language * consumer spending" market, so almost everyone outside of US/UK market puts effort in US first.
(2) USPS/UPU offers nearly 0-cost shipping for China to US. Can you ship a 2oz packet from China to the UK for under $1?
I canceled prime some time ago, because I realized I was getting significantly lower quality products than Walmart. Its become a junk store.
Amazon pushing its own products drive 3rd-party resellers out of business and eventually, no other choices for consumers.
Why the heck does the ordering window have 2 or 3 “Confirm” boxes that I have to press?
And if I haven’t, why can’t it just tell me what’s not confirmed when I hit “Submit Order”?
Aliexpress - always been a Russian roulette.
It’s actually a pretty understudied microeconomics case
https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2017/07/04/optimizing...
Floveme? Tendam? Donse? Spigen? and my favorite: Vapesoon.
Is it just too early for the legit brands to have a case ready? Or am I doing it wrong?
Similar if you’re a retailer.
This is why Shopify’s new model is better for D2C and retail (but very difficult for them to pull off).
Huh, that's an interesting reaction.
The ONLY advantage I have is that my titles are more promoted by Amazon in the search results (since they make a killing off the higher margins, even when they decide to discount it themselves). If Amazon wasn't boosting KDP self-published titles in the search results, it wouldn't work... period, in my opinion. I wouldn't even try.
And if anyone from Amazon is reading this, you guys should allow the authors to purchase the title in bulk at a much cheaper rate, so that reselling to local bookstores is a viable option.
If you go into a candy store where the owner also makes their own brand of candy, what do you think will be the most prominent item on the shelf?
Amazon isn't exposed to the same risks in a lot of product listings.
Selling physical goods is a three part process - manufacturing, marketing, and selling. At each part of the process, you have to know what helps you stand out.
Manufacturing - is there something that enables you to manufacturer a product that can’t easily be copied or that allows you to create the product cheaper than competitors?
Marketing - are you depending on SEO and Google ads just like all of your competitors?
Selling - Are you depending on Amazon just like all of your competitors?
You have to be able to optimize on at least one of those areas or you’re going to find yourself competing on price at either slim, no or negative margins or being lost in a marketplace where everyone is doing the same thing.
In the UK there's a company called Argos that worked ENTIRELY as a catalog store. Their physical locations were basically a warehouse with a lobby that had the catalogs and computers where you could look items up and order them. THEY should be a major competitor to Amazon... but according to my UK friends, they're not.
It's the same story as when Sears rose to prominence: they saw a business model the other mail-order retailers didn't understand.
The irony is Sears started as a mail-order catalog but couldn't get back to the old model in time. But of course their large management structures couldn't move as fast as small company with somebody like Bezos at the helm who could just make calls on the spot.
They missed the internet and when they tried to get into it, they just failed at every turn.