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Comment by hullo | Hacker News Reader

Completely deliberate. As others pointed out, they've already been doing it, on less popular products that caused no backlash. It's there in the article up top, pre roll-back:

UPDATE: Amazon has provided VideoGamer.com with the following statement in response to this story:

"One of the many benefits of Amazon Prime is access to exclusive selection on a number of great products. Customers who are not Prime members can sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, or they can purchase those items from a Marketplace seller."

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For a company that calls itself "The Everything Store", becoming the "Everything except if we think we can squeeze you for more money" is going to push people into the waiting arms of Walmart and Jet and Google Shopping intermediary.

Costco charges everyone $50/year. If Amazon wants to do that, just drop the non-Prime offering entirely, give everyone a 1 year free trial, and stop the nonsense games.

You still can buy from 3rd party though, but no free delivery from Amazon.

Amazon charges vendors up to 40 percent rake just to be fulfilled by Amazon. They are swindling the living crap out of 3rd party sellers while also maintaining their position as lowest price on most products within their own sham site. Very often these days Walmart or another online vendor will have cheaper prices than Amazon. The way Amazon treats its employees and the underhanded business tactics toward customers are going to be the end of them. They became a meme - just Amazon it Bob!! But Myspace was a meme too. Fuck up a phone, make your employees miserable, and foster a culture of dark doing customers.. and Amazon will fall just like Myspace. A name recognition can only take you so far. (fyi I recently worked as a dev for them in Seattle and left due to a hostile work environment so I do have bias but also a unique perspective.)

Interesting that Amazon is "swindling" third-party sellers.

How much do Home Depot, Walmart, Sears, Costco, and others charge the (zero) third party sellers that they allow onto their platform?

Most of the "oldbiz" buy the goods and sell them from their own corporation -- this is because they have actual retail stores. Amazon does not. I do not know how much their rake is for 3rd party online goods though -- I see "Sold by Pharmapacks", etc.. often on Walmart and the price is usually not competitive at all compared to "Sold by Walmart.com" items. Mostly has to do with the shipping price.

That's because Walmart doesn't offer third-party fulfillment (to my knowledge). They allow select third-parties onto the selling part of the platform (but again, not open like Amazon), but fulfillment remains the 3rd party's problem to handle, which is why the shipping price is still an issue there.

Amazon is providing far more of the value chain than other e-commerce sites, and it's no surprise to me that they're charging for that. If that doesn't work for a given seller, they shouldn't use Amazon. If enough people don't use Amazon, Amazon will have to adjust. I see no evidence that the latter is occurring in great numbers.

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