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Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

You have proposed a strawman. What does this have to with Amazon forcing sellers to use Amazon's warehousing and logistics service and ensuring that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price.

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There were a lot of basically scams for a while where because people trust amazon so much, they buy amazon. So sellers would take something that sells for $99, and sell it on amazon for $199 or sometimes for even more ($299 etc).

In the short run amazon makes more money (commission on the sale) but in the long run this hurts Amazon's brand.

I manage an amazon business account where this is a particularly bad issue because buyers are not spending their own money. They will literally spend $500 on something that is $50, because they like Amazon's reliability around delivery, the purchasing is very smooth, returns are smooth etc. I feel like they cracked down on this maybe 4-5 years ago? But still stuff slips through.

So yes, I very much like that they don't allow sellers to mark up crazily on Amazon's site.

> They will literally spend $500 on something that is $50, because they like Amazon's reliability around delivery, the purchasing is very smooth, returns are smooth etc.

I tried to avoid Amazon a couple times, to give other stores a change and all. Wasn't that great, and it was more expensive.

Bought something on Best Buy, thought about returning it. On the product page and invoice, didn't say the date I could return. It only said the return periods where on a FAQ. FAQ didn't have a specific category for that product. I thought it was something (with 30 day), but when tried to return it, got a 'no' because it was 14 days. Why not add how many days in the product page? Why not show me the exact date on my order details?

Also tried the same with books, buying on Indigo. Bought an extra book to get free shipping. The price of the books where already a dollar or 2 higher than Amazon. 10 days delivery, and one of the books has some marks like someone put a paper over the book and scribbled on it. Never had a problem with Amazon, and it's cheaper and delivery is like 2 days.

Not sure why downvoted, but to each their own I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Do you have an example of a product that is $500 on Amazon but can be found somewhere else for $50? Seems to be way far off.

Yeah, I think that's the thing that's missing from the narrative in this article - if certain goods on Amazon are really heavily marked up compared to other sites, it's better for Amazon's long-term reputation if people don't don't automatically buy from Amazon and maybe get them from other sites because of the reputational damage when those people realize they got screwed, and so Amazon have an incentive not to add a default buy box button under those circumstances. (Usually this seems to happen with in-demand items that are out of stock from Amazon themselves, and the sellers that aren't allowed in the buy box are third party ones. So basically, it mainly screws over canny middlemen who hope to resell things bought at retail elsewhere at a big markup, maybe even literally getting them shipped direct from places like Walmart to the purchaser.)

Yes, the whole drop-shipping scam that get-rich-quick types were pushing on instagram had to do with buying merchandise at market price then marking it up for sale on Amazon. Amazon seems to be using many more third-part merchants and pricing, which was originally a great deal on AMZN, has become more of a buyer-beware thing. Amazon is no longer necessarily the best price for merchandise.

I certainly didn't intend to do that. It's hard to write a comment addressing an entire article, but perhaps I should have quoted the tagline specifically. I was only rambling on about the 'trick of free shipping', not so much the bad practices mentioned.

As far as using AMZ logistics, that makes complete sense. I've come to expect a high standard from items I buy from them regarding when I'll get the item. If that starts varying wildly...well what's the point of Prime? Fast delivery is AMZ's entire schtick.

The price fixing I can't defend or make an argument about.

That’s an accusation the author just kinda throws in at the end without explanation. It’s a big problem if true, but what’s the evidence for it?

The evidence is in the linked NY Times article, in the section titled "Price Control." They also cite a paywalled Bloomberg article.

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