The anti-competitive bit is they have all the sales information that would typically be a trade secret for a company.
Go ahead, call up your local 7-11 and ask them what their sales were for the quarter. They'll tell you to fuck off.
Go ahead, call up your local 7-11 and ask them what their sales were for the quarter. They'll tell you to fuck off.
The FBA middlemen are more like traveling salesmen - they take an order, send it in to HQ, and HQ ships it to the 7-11. They don’t do anything but take orders. They are Tom Smykowski - they take the plans to the engineers!
You’re complaining that the storefront that the goods are sold through has its own sales information. The amount of sales you have through Amazon may be a trade secret, but it is not a trade secret from Amazon.
It's hard for me to say Amazon shouldn't be able to do it while every grocery store can, but there seems to be a quantitative difference because of the ridiculous number of options online vs the finite shelf space of a brick and mortar.
All the same economic games are played. Items are placed on specific shelves to drive specific sales, etc. Sale numbers are known by the store and they get their cut.
The distinguisher is supposed to be in the quality. Premium vs generic. That doesn't seem to play out healthily in Amazon's marketplace.
Maybe one difference is the consumable nature of the grocery products vs what one typically buys online (Amazon batteries as opposed to an animal carrier). Or maybe we have given up too much with the consolidation of grocery chains the last few decades and that is equally problematic.
I’m all in favor of suppliers competing with each other, as that’s in the best interests of society overall. But when the platforms/marketplaces themselves participate in that competition they have tremendous advantages, which is anti-competitive, and it benefits no one but themselves.
Amazon is actually more open than other stores about this information, giving product rankings so that you could decide to knock off popular products too.
Edit: Also companies like Google scan emails for information. Amazon stopped including prices in their emails because Google was getting a direction stream of sales data with full costing info.
On amazon, if you want to browse "electric bike tires with motors" you will have to browse through dozens of full electric bikes, electric scooters, hoverboards, tires without motors, tricycles, and all sorts of close but not quite what you're looking for items to find 1 that you might be interested in.
Want to price shop them? Good luck finding others to compare with.
It would be like looking for a 5 lb bag of white sugar in the grocery store so you go to the sugar isle and finding 1 half pound bag of brown sugar amongst all of the flour and seasonings and honey and agave nectar and sweet n low in the first 100 feet.
Any grocery store organized like that would fail and be replaced by a company with decent organizational flow.
But amazon makes money by charging the vendors on its market for visibility, in addition to listing fees, storage fees, and whatever else.
Amazon has a perverse incentive to not show you, the customer, what you are looking for when there is anything else close enough to what you are looking for that they will make more money for selling to you.
There isn't a better word than evil for this, even if it is the benign sort of evil that only added to the chaos and misery of the world without directly harming anyone.