Hacker News Reader

Comment by reading-at-work | Hacker News Reader

I don't like it, but I don't fault them for it. My exact thought when browsing their Cyber Monday deals was: "Oh, looks like they're mostly promoting their own stuff. Meh." close tab

I don't get all the fuss over it I suppose. I don't expect Amazon to be impartial. If I want an unbiased source for the best deals, there are plenty of shopping blogs that aggregate that information.

EDIT: Actually, I guess I could see the argument that 3rd party sellers are getting the shaft due to this behavior. I'm not sure what the solution is though, as I still feel Amazon should be able to promote their own products on their own platform. Tough call.

View on HN

Are 3rd party sellers entitled to fairness? They choose to use Amazon as a platform, they could use ebay, etsy, woocommerce, shopify, bigcommerce? There is also not much but complexity and time stopping them from using a bunch of those services. Theres also things like ecomdash.com that let you treat all the platforms as just another sales channel of your business.

Im not sure how much I feel for the "I sold my soul to the devil for a quick buck and he turned on me, woe is me" crowd. If you dont like the deal, and you dont want to list your product at one of the biggest stores in the world, nobody is forcing you to.

There may absolutely be some anti-competitive behavior happening. Im not sure how I feel about amazon watching trends and then cloning products. Being paid by their competitors to be fed market research. But its not a unique business model to Amazon, Wal-mart has been doing it forever. If this behavior type needs correcting, correct the rules, not haphazard sanctions after the fact.

I'm honestly not sure if they're entitled to fairness. Sure, I guess they choose to use Amazon so they could just as well choose not to. But Amazon's massive market presence means that small sellers could take a huge hit by not being a part of it. Sometimes their livelihood depends on their Amazon sales.

But now that I brought it up, I feel like that's a different issue than what's being mentioned in the article: Amazon gadgets getting promoted on Cyber Monday. By itself, the whole issue the article gets after doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

>But Amazon's massive market presence means that small sellers could take a huge hit by not being a part of it.

Does Amazon have a social responsibility. Do they own people the opportunity to profit as reseller

>Sometimes their livelihood depends on their Amazon sales.

Get a different job? Not trying to be too curt but, if you cant be profitable without amazon, maybe something else is wrong. If you want to dance with amazon for MORE profit, that is your choice.

I tend to agree with you, but I think this lends itself to a bigger philosophical debate of how much social responsibility a company has when it wields the incredible amount of power that Amazon does. And to that I have no answer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com