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Comment by indopedia | Hacker News Reader

She forgets that the Amazon marketplace is made up of sellers and the prices aren't controlled by Amazon for a lot of their products. These are inherited from the distributor in most cases. Sure Amazon fulfills the orders but it's not like Walmart that controls the entire process. There is more freedom in Amazon.

Anyways, this is just the hip thing of today. How about making a service better than Amazon? No that's impossible?? Well you can bet there are a million people trying right now so there are and will be plenty more alternatives.

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> Anyways, this is just the hip thing of today

Observing that Amazon may be monopolizing isn't a new observation.

When they began competing against their vendors is when they crossed the line, in my opinion. The same goes for any marketplace. It is one thing to provide your vendors the tools and information they need to operate better, but then to act on that information yourself - the operator of the marketplace - that is pretty shady.

Yes but EVERY retailer does this. Every single store brand product you see (Costco, Target, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, etc.) is a result of this. Cheaper products that meet the same demand as brand name vendor goods.

In fact customers are already trained for this. I walk into a store and I immediately price compare against the store brand. So if people doing the same on Amazon, why shouldn't Amazon be allowed to fulfill that? This was a thing in retailers a long time before Amazon started doing it.

If you look around in retail stores today its easy to see how everyone strong arms vendors just the same. For example, ever notice that all of Target's pen section all have a certain color and text printed on the bottom of their packaging indicating the type of pen (Gel, ballpoint, etc)? Target has forced every single vendor (massive companies like Bic, Sharpie, etc.) that sells writing implements in Target to change their packaging, create new SKUs, do different production runs, and handle the logistics of different versions of the same pen. All to be undercut in price by the Target brand pen.

> why shouldn't Amazon be allowed

Antitrust law used to address this. Monopolies are not allowed to do things that non-monopolies are allowed to do, because the effects of monopolies doing them are different than the effects of non-monopolies doing it.

Of course, Bork rewrote monopoly policy in a way that opens the door to exactly the sort of monopolies we now have. But it isn't as if this is some new notion invented because people hate Amazon; it used to be the rule.

Monopolies weren't allowed to do things that non-monopolies are allowed to do because they would have an outsized ability to harm consumers as a monopoly. But Amazon has repeatedly shown that it isn't harming consumers. In fact, it's pushed other retailers to better the customer experience or go out of business. Should a company be split up just because it's doing its customers good and got too big because... they're doing their customers good and people like that and want to give them their money?

That is a reasonable restatement of parts of the Bork doctrine, yes.

Suffice to say this is a recent legal innovation, and many, many people believe ignoring other monopoly effects is myopic.

Agreed. It basically comes down to if you agree with his viewpoints on M&A and monopolies. Looks like thats where we differ :)

Never said it was a "new" observation. They could shut down all sellers in the Marketplace and take it on themselves. Would that suck? Yes. But is that legal for them to do? Also yes. This isn't a charity business people, we don't all own Amazon, this is some guys painstaking work remember.

Let's say you run a business. You're still supposed to abide by laws in your location of business, despite how hard you work. There are laws to protect vendors against marketplaces. They're called anti-trust laws.

Amazon is a very big business. It doesn't need your sympathy.

Every operator of a marketplace seems to compete with its participants. The iOS App Store. Amazon.com. Stock markets have "market makers".

Not saying it's correct by any measure, but it doesn't seem like an unusual practice.

> She forgets that the Amazon marketplace is made up of sellers and the prices aren't controlled by Amazon for a lot of their products.

1. Amazon requires you to sell your products at the price that is not higher than at any other channel you use to sell.

Even if there was a competitor that allowed you to offer a lower price because of lower fees (important on high price, low margin stuff like computers) you can't.

2. Access to many traffic/buyer driving features of Amazon is conditional on the product being offered at the lowest price it was ever sold

3. Buy box algorithm, which is a black box, is known for kicking out sellers who raised their prices.

Sellers are forced to cut deeper and deeper into their margins to account for inflation, new duties, new requirements from Amazon (prepaid return shipping) and Amazon fees (new long term storage fees, being charged a refund fee, even if Amazon shipped your product late from their warehouse).

> How about making a service better than Amazon? No that's impossible?? Well you can bet there are a million people trying right now so there are and will be plenty more alternatives.

How about creating a better mobile carrier or ISP? All US options are inferior and much more expensive than what you'd get in Europe.

Haven't happened because it's next to impossible to compete with big guys without first sinking many billions in infrastructure? who would have guessed..

> 3. Buy box algorithm, which is a black box, is known for kicking out sellers who raised their prices.

Why should you continue to win the buy box if you raise your prices? Another supplier didn’t, so now they win.

> 2. Access to many traffic/buyer driving features of Amazon is conditional on the product being offered at the lowest price it was ever sold

Amazon has lots of products to choose from to feature. It is no surprise that the best deals they can feature are at the lowest price a product has ever been sold.

> 1. Amazon requires you to sell your products at the price that is not higher than at any other channel you use to sell.

That is no longer the case, Amazon dropped the price parity requirement on US marketplace in March 2019 (and in EU in 2013).

However, I read recently that some sellers have instead started receiving notifications that they have been suppressed from buy box for selling at lower price elsewhere.

You are ostensibly correct but basically incorrect.

If you sell a product on Walmart and Amazon, Amazon forces you to sell it at the same price or they will not offer it immediately for sale. They change the page to make it look entirely out of stock.

More like "if you sell a product that they already have because it's from the same distributor and is the exact same product".

Well then what do you bring to the table for their consumers and why on earth would they pay more for yours. Don't like it? Try ebay.

> More like "if you sell a product that they already have because it's from the same distributor and is the exact same product".

"More like"? That is a completely different scenario.

> Anyways, this is just the hip thing of today. How about making a service better than Amazon? No that's impossible?? Well you can bet there are a million people trying right now so there are and will be plenty more alternatives.

Someone did try. Jet.com. Walmart bought them almost instantly.

Google has been trying for years with Express and has barely made a dent. If Google can't, then I honestly don't know who can...

That’s a weird thing to say. Google fails at like 90% of the things they do, especially when they try and do it from scratch. Some things they have even failed at multiple times.

> There is more freedom in Amazon.

I have a friend who has been an online merchant for many years selling through their own website, Ebay, and Amazon.

I suspect they would burst out laughing, fall down, and start rolling around on the ground in hysterics if I repeated that to him.

Did you even read what I wrote before that? It was comparing it to Walmart

I just found it to be very funny way of describing the Amazon marketplace. Didn't mean it to be some deep analysis of Amazon vs. Walmart.

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