Yeah. And the opposite of a highly specialized product is exactly the example the article gave--a piece of metal to hold up your laptop. I don't think there's anything we stand to lose from this happening to products so simple and generic. Or is there?
The genius in AmazonBasic concept was in realizing that building the better mousetrap doesn't always mean building the best mousetrap, it means building the best mousetrap for the price. There are so many goods with a market that falls into just two categories, ones that work and ones that don't. Whichever brand is able to gain consumers trust in knowing their offering will work will quickly rise to dominate such a market.
Personally for the product pictured - the Amazon version is gaudy - I don't want to see more AMZN branding on my stuff.
Ultimately, it is just a laptop stand, and it's a quality one. I'm just surprised that it took Amazon to come up with a lower priced competitor - I've been looking for something that wasn't $50 for a long time. All of its competitors other than Amazon are overpriced, flimsy pieces of plastic.
Seems like amazon is content to run razor thin margins, and if they jack up the price after competitors go out of business, that move would recreate a market for item X and burn some Amazon good will.
I also find the Amazon branding on that laptop stand to be really tacky, though!
Re: why - It's really basic monopoly theory - squeeze out competition, then raise prices. Are you certain that Amazon will always be content to run razor thin margins? At some point Amazon will have subsumed the buying habits of the consumers long after Rain is dead and buried. Will someone new really come along?
The thing you stand to lose is the original making of that product.
While making the laptop stand is "simple" (and I object to that statement as manufacturing anything is rarely "simple"), getting it in front of people, marketing it, and selling it is not. Amazon sits back and looks for any products that now sell over $X million dollars and then simply walks in.
So, now if I'm a manufacturer, I will do several things:
1) I might avoid Amazon. Ever. Decreasing choice on Amazon certainly hurts the consumer, no?
2) I might make a shitty product specifically for Amazon to sell so it doesn't cannibalize my good product. I hope you like wading through even more crappy products on Amazon. That hurts the consumer, no?
3) I might simply not make the product. If I think that Amazon might clone me, I either might not develop the product or I might artificially restrict the sales if I know that Amazon flags products above "n units sales or $m total revenue".
This is not new. WalMart was the offender last time. http://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart
Note that Snapper got bought by Briggs who then decided that Sears and WalMart were just fine. Quality seems to have suffered, as expected.
So, you're saying we stand to lose original making of products that are easy for Amazon to copy. That's exactly what I'm saying isn't that important.
You point 3 is what you should do if your product is not innovative or cannot compete with a generic AmazonBasics version. If it's truly better, or complex enough that it simply won't be copied by Amazon, then make it and you won't have issues.
I would argue that Amazon Basics is filling the niche between quality premium and questionable cheap products with reliable products at a fair price.
If you want a Lightning cable for your iPhone what are your choices? A $1 part from an unknown Chinese factory that might work, or the $29.99 cable from Belkin, Griffin or Monster that will work? You know the cheap cable is a roll of the dice but you can't stomach the alternative either. That's where Amazon Basics comes in, it's the Toyota Carolla of whatever it is you're looking for.
It's not like Amazon is edging out anyone, they're offering products in categories that are over saturated with thousands of competing choices and no way for a customer to distinguish a good deal from a rip off.
Still allows small new businesses, provides the user with the "garentee" they want, gives the business advertising, and keeps you on Amazon.
I understand why they went straight to making then themselves, but I can dream!
What a great comparison, exactly.
Corolla, not Carolla.
I'm fairly certain the AmazonBasics stand isn't the same quality, but that's not really the market they're going for. They're going for good enough and cheap - AmazonBasics cables are a good example of this - they're not high end, but they're affordable and when you just need an HDMI cable, they work fine.
Honestly, Amazon is in the perfect position to compete with their partners like this, and I don't see the harm. If anything the customer experience is even better because we now have reasonable low-priced options to buy that might not have been there before.
Yes, it's steel instead of Aluminum, which means it weighs around 3 lbs instead of the Rain's 2 lbs (it's thick). Otherwise, it functions perfectly well as a laptop stand, which is all I really wanted out of it.
Honestly, I don't think that's too likely as amazon's business model is built around razor-thin margins.
See: Walmart's Great Value brand products. Walmart has used it for a long time to hold consumer prices in check. If Nabisco attempts a large price hike, Walmart deploys their Great Value brand right next to said Nabisco product and undercuts them down to a price they regard as reasonable. Despite Walmart's extreme size and market dominance in traditional retail over the last ~20 years, they've never used - at a wide scope - their Great Value brand as an opportunity jack up prices or destroy competitors.