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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Is this actually true? I am looking up several different products and the off-Amazon prices are all lower. I do not shop on Amazon because of cost.

> In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said California had the situation "exactly backwards." Third-parties still have control over prices, Amazon claimed, and inclusion in the "Buy Box" space supposedly shows that a deal is truly competitive. It further contended that the suit would raise prices. You can read the full statement below.

I know we should take official Amazon statements with a huge grain of salt, but after the Prop K fiasco, I am worried about people not actually bothering to research actual Amazon business practices before pushing something like this.

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Here is one data point.

I purchased a M.2 device from Amazon this morning. It has a warranty serviced by the seller, so I checked to see if the seller is likely to continue to exist during the timeframe of the warranty.

I discovered the seller indeed has been selling memory products since 2017. While checking out their website (in the Wayback machine, too) I noticed that they have a shopping cart mechanism and indeed the same product is available there.

I noted that Amazon lists the product as being shipped by the seller. I note that the seller actively answers questions on their product pages on Amazon. Sounds as if nothing would change for me if I buy from the seller's website vs. Amazon.

I decided to cut out the middleman. I speculate that Amazon would otherwise take a percentage and I'd prefer to support the small business.

Turns out the product is a few bucks more expensive on the seller's website.

I can only speculate as to why that would be the case.

I finish the transaction (on Amazon) and refresh HN. Here is this story. So, I for one believe the accusations leveled against Amazon.

> I decided to cut out the middleman. I speculate that Amazon would otherwise take a percentage and I'd prefer to support the small business.

Do you really want to give out your financial information on some shady overseas websites though?

yes. it takes 2 seconds to create a new virtual bank card. also most things on a non-centralized marketplace are cheap compared to the premium of Amazon's total hegemony

> it takes 2 seconds to create a new virtual bank card.

how do you do this? My bank used to have this back in the day but they yanked it.

Revolut offers this. They are available in the EU.

It seems Wise (ex TransferWise) offers this in the USA.

Yes. Credit cards have fraud protection.

Plenty of stores also support Google Pay, or Apple Pay. PayPal or Amazon Pay. Or are clearly basic Shopify stores. What is the alternative, only using "big name" payments? That's how you get monopolies rent-seeking.

About 8 years ago I was working with a retailer who had started selling on Amazon.

I don’t know if they still do this, but Amazon would detect if promotions for the products occurred on other sites. Amazon would instruct us to lower the prices to match or risk various penalties. I do not remember the exact penalties, but this article seems right.

Amazon would also detect those prices fast. I always assumed they had their own web crawler that checked for it. I saw some retailers trying to obscure their non-Amazon promotions, to make them less detectable by the crawler. E.g. splitting “Discount” into individual <span>’s

The page is skimpy on details but https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

> We constantly compare Amazon's prices to our competitors' prices to make sure that our prices are as low or lower than all relevant competitors

>I don’t know if they still do this, but Amazon would detect if promotions for the products occurred on other sites. Amazon would instruct us to lower the prices to match or risk various penalties. I do not remember the exact penalties, but this article seems right.

Yeah, that happened with my buddy and I about 5 years ago. We initially had some hacky workarounds but quite quickly they had a human go through and make sure there was nothing that the computer didn't pick up on. Scary quick, too. Even when we figured we could eat shipping/warehousing fees (we had part of our own website's stock shipping out of my friend's house) the Amazon rep complained that it would allow consumers to find a lower price.

Yes, it most definitely is true. The company I work for designs and sells somewhat niche products geared towards photographers which we sell via our own website, retail camera stores and on Amazon. Since we do not allow our retailers to sell on Amazon so we are the only official seller of our products on the marketplace.

We ran a sale for Labor day where we discounted our products on our website, but did not discount them on Amazon. Within 36 hours of the prices being reduced on our website we started to receive notifications from Amazon that our "offers" were ineligible due to not having the lowest price. Upon checking the listings, they had removed the buy box, essentially making it a multiple-click process for anyone to actually buy the products.

This happens anytime we, or any of our retailers that have an ecommerce presence discount our products without discounting them on Amazon. It's ridiculous.

does amazon scrape your website to automate this type of enforcement action?

just wondering if you could show their bot the higher price

Did they restore your buy box after you rectified the situation?

Re: Prop K

> The idea of taxing Amazon for guaranteed income was popular: the tax polled at 74% support, according to its supporters, and received more than twice the necessary amount of signatures.

What I don't comprehend is how these actions by regulators, while obviously popular, actually help people get elected. I don't understand why unelected regulators would be doing low-information nonsense at all.

The story itself is kind of wild in Prop K's case: https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-housing-todco-...

>“I never imagined that their cloud services or Prime video are more revenue than all the stuff I buy from them,” Elberling said. “I never imagined that to be true.”

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