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This reminds me of the predicament that young'ish hardware component supplier companies get into. They win a huge contract with a prominent customer, but then that one customer represents 60%+ of their revenues (ex: winning a Cisco, Nintendo, or Apple contract).

I've worked at a few such companies, and they all work extra hard trying to diversify their revenue sources, for both customers and industry. If it's a startup, then such revenue dependence can mean the difference between being able to go IPO or not.

For the situation you describe for restaurants, they'd have to be vigilant about catering to multiple platform providers, and not neglecting their in-person customers (I've definitely seen a restaurant cater more to delivery rather than sit down, and slowly deteriorating in reputation among customers as order times became longer).

It's just like managing an AAPL supplier contract. Some will thrive, and others will suffer, like the sapphire supplier in Arizona.

The sapphire supplier is GTAT, and they were actually a sapphire glass manufacturing equipment manufacturer that Apple contracted to manufacture sapphire displays (a completely new business for them), then un-contracted afterwards, dropping their market cap from $1.5bn to $175m and shuttering three plants (whose workers Apple pledged to find new jobs for).

http://www.businessinsider.com/gt-advanced-files-for-bankrup...

I used to work for a company that did software development work for the local subsidiary of a multinational corporation. The corporation was their sole customer.

At some point the corporation decided it wouldn't outsource software development work anymore. They hired some of the key people at my former employer (by then I had already moved somewhere else), and almost overnight they had to close shop because they didn't have a source of revenue anymore.

This kind of thing happens in Advertising all the time. Agencies will get that ">50% of the business" account that they are utterly dependent on. LOTS of layoffs if they lose the business.

Wise agencies try to diversify - but any new business brought in will have to deal with The Big Client being the squeakiest of wheels (... that get the grease).

I can't say I've see an agency that has made the "grow other business" transition successfully.

It's just part of the natural growth process of B2B companies.

All you can do is hope that you can nail down the next large customer before your existing golden egg figures out they can push you around.

I've seen quite a few restaurants list themselves across multiple platforms lately; Uber Eats, Eat24, GrubHub, etc.

I've often wondered how well a restaurant would do in areas where those platforms are popular if it just dropped its customer-facing storefront entirely and went entirely online delivery.

The drop in operating costs versus the lack of walk-ins ...

I've started seeing this in the bay area. There are definitely places in SF which are lunch-catering only (via ZeroCater/Zesty) with no retail presence. Also there's a pizza delivery company in the East Bay (pizzamatador.com) which has no phone number, no store front (shopify website only) and will deliver you a par-baked pizza in <20mins. SpoonRocket (R.I.P.) was also delivery via app and their kitchens were in West Berkeley instead of a more expensive location that allowed foot traffic.

I expect you'll see more non-traditional kitchen locations and alternative delivery transport methods (e.g. scooters or Postmates bike couriers) to combat the high rents, congestion and parking issues common to most dense cities.

That story is just...insane. I'm glad I have a separate account for my maybe-one-day-business and one for personal use but still they need to let them talk to a real PERSON before locking out an account like so.

I can only imagine what would have happened if he didn't post to a website where it gained traction. If it wasn't upvoted out of reddit's new, would he just be completely screwed? Damn...

It's very disturbing how often we're seeing stories of someone's whole life being ruined due to some trivial error followed by poor / nonexistent customer service at Amazon or Google, and only getting their life back after they 1) plead for assistance from the general public on social media and then 2) happen to luck into getting upvoted rather than buried.

I agree many companies could do a better job of being accessible. Providing good customer service is challenging, especially at large scale. I am reminded of when Postmates first launched, and they provided a customer service phone number for assistance with orders. Eventually that number was replaced with a message saying "phone support is temporarily unavailable while we migrate to a new system" and asked you to send an email instead. Temporary must have become permanent, because it's impossible to reach someone if you have a problem now. (Part of me wonders whether their claim about it being temporary was even true at the time, or was a deliberate falsehood intended to placate customers until they'd had a chance to try the new email-only solution.)

Anyway, one thing I'd like to add, that I think is important to keep in mind, is that there are two (or more!) sides to every story. This is especially true for stories we hear from an aggrieved party on the news or social media.

We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause:

https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r...

A similar situation happened to GitHub founder Zach Holman when he got ousted from the company -- his accuser had a soapbox in the form of her blog and Twitter; the general public only learned more sides of the story when employees decided to post some of their behind-the-scenes perspectives anonymously online.

Be careful drawing conclusions about any particular situation without hearing all sides of the story.

> We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r....

That's an awful example. The employee completely stopped responding after that so we don't know how much of the truth it was (like you said there are two sides and there were tons of rumors he was advised by his lawyer to stop talking; who knows what happened after that).

What's worse is this type of behavior by the CEO was downright despicable. Why? Two scenarios.

1. The employee was correct and it showed other employees that the CEO is willing to lie and berate them in the open public should they have a dissenting, public opinion about the company. Feedback, even if encourages, would completely stop after this event.

2. The employee was a liar and really was terrible. The CEO now has created a permanent remark that cannot be taken back regarding this person's work ethic. Now the employee can't redeem themselves. They can't learn from past mistakes. Every employer in the future of his employment can google search him and have this come up. Unfortunately this is likely to come up more and more as kids grow up with Facebook, post photos of themselves being drunk or otherwise and then seeking employment as they grow up.

Both sides were awful in this example.

It seems like you are responding as if I'm holding up those situations as examples of how people ought to behave -- as if I'm for or against what happened in them. I'm not. My purpose in pointing out those examples is solely to demonstrate by example that there are multiple sides to a story.

If you look at trends, people to tend to tell their story in a way that's favorable to them, while making their opponent look like a villain. Certainly not everyone tells the truth, because stories told by different people about the same event are incompatible! I find the examples I mentioned so shocking and interesting because they are examples of high-conflict situations where you can (to different extents) see both sides, where you can meaningfully evaluate a theory of what happened.

If you have ever logged into both accounts with the same IP, they can tie the accounts together. That is not a hypothetical if, they will ban an account if someone logs into Seller Central from an IP of a previously banned account.

Source? While they could certainly do this IP addresses are shared quite frequently due to NAT. It seems inevitable that a banned IP address will login to another account at some point.

I can't imagine they ban IP addresses lightly.

I've seen it happen and also have spoken to people within amazon who have confirmed. They might do it with cookies instead of IP addresses but if you log into a banned account from a computer that regularly logs into a non banned account, your account will be banned, period.

I can understand locking accounts, since it's all automated, and they probably get a ton of bogus stuff programmatically submitted all the time. That said, as soon as someone has over a thousand dollars in your warehouse or over a $1000 pending payment to them, it should get shunted to a person for review and resolution. At that point it's obviously not some automatically submitted account and form, and what's more it's likely to quickly escalate to legal action against Amazon (regardless of what their contracts say, getting Amazon lawyers to respond is expensive, so they should want to avoid that).

Even if you have separate accounts, you may have to be careful around backup e-mail addresses

> One user reported that an account that hadn’t been used to purchase a Pixel was suspended, apparently because it was listed as a back-up address for an account that had.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...

> How can a restaurant owner turn them down when all the short-sighted owners nearby are happily signing up?

Sign up for all of the services: OpenTable, Doordash, Amazon Restaurants, GrubHub, Postmates, everything. That way, when one service does something terrible, you aren't crippled by the single point of failure, and as long as it wasn't terrible enough to sever the relationship, you can take your time rectifying the issue.

This works until one company monopolizes the market. See TripAdvisor.

I've worked with seven different resorts/hotels doing web-dev and every single one of them absolutely hated TripAdvisor and wished it didn't exist and they didn't have to be on it to survive.

Every time I get a little worried about a big player like Amazon having too much control in a market, I think the solution is actually another big player - Google. Not that I want google to compete, but if the knowledge graph gave info about the restaurant including delivery services that it supported, that would make it easier for everyone. The restaurant could list a few services, and you could choose the one you have an account with, or trust to serve you well. This takes the control that exposure a big player like Amazon has and really reduces how effective it is at corralling suppliers.

Now, I don't really care that it's google, but they are the biggest and most likely to be seen. Preferably Bing and Yahoo and DDG would have an equivalent.

Is signing up for an Amazon service any different to opting into something like DoorDash or Seamless? Amazon is big/established and probably has the data necessary to understand exactly when they can screw you. They also have a large enough customer base that they will take steps to automate a large percentage of day-to-day operational decision making which will occasionally go wrong such as detecting and shutting down fraudulent seller accounts as exemplified by your reddit link.

A funded startup on the other hand could go under at moment when their next round of funding doesn't come in. It's also a sure bet that any success you're seeing from them early on will diminish over as they attempt to actually make a profit.

While that is an unfortunate situation, I would actually imagine Amazon's entry to this market (which they actually entered over a year ago), would be good for the restaurants. Many thought they had some diversity in the early days with Grubhub and Seamless until they merged. Now there are dozens of services overlaying to deliver for restaurants, companies like Uber Eats, Foodler, Doordash, Postmates, and many more.

Amazon here is a me-too play here, and I'd be shocked if they reached the concentration to sink a restaurant given so many incumbents.

I think you're overlooking a key feature of Amazon's offering: FREE.

UberEats is free too, at least if you order a minimum. (Used to be $20 where I am, now it's $30.) Even when you pay a fee, it's only $4, which beats out BiteSquad's typical $10+ fee. In a contest for who can live the longest on tiny margins, I'm betting on Amazon -- hopefully they start signing up restaurants just a little bit east from Seattle so I can use them... When UberEats hiked their minimum I was a bit miffed.

Amazon is well versed in surviving on negative margins.

It's not possible to operate an online business (any business?) without being dependent on a platform. There is no scenario under which you can build anything that functions as a serious revenue generating business without being in that position.

Search discovery: Google, Bing

Social promotion: FB, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc

App & software stores: Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Steam

General commerce: Transaction networks, Paypal, banks, etc

Online commerce: eBay, Amazon, Etsy, Craigslist, Zillow, Priceline, Airbnb, Alibaba, hundreds more

There's nothing new about this. All businesses utilize platforms they don't control. There are no exceptions.

Radio, TV, newspapers, mail catalogs were discovery and promotion before Google search was. The dependency was just as high.

Want to open a hotdog stand or a gas station? The absolute minimum platform you'll be dependent on will be local political system/s in dozens of ways (infrastructure, zoning, health laws, employment regulations, and on and on).

Don't be obtuse. The grandparent poster was talking about the problem of being locked into an individual vendor's platform - a problem which does exist in many market sectors but can also be mitigated by the ancient strategy of not putting all your eggs in one basket [1]. Defining a problem out of existence is not really illuminating.

1. This is a metaphor, in case anyone else is feeling pedantic and wants to challenge the notion that eggs are commonly transported in baskets...

You could say the same of yelp, or google. Or a higher end restaurant losing a michelin star. What happens when they get bad reviews and their ranking drops? You can diversify and get traffic from other platforms, work through the platform to either fix the problems, respond to complaints, or just get more reviews.

I think the parent's worry deals with cases like we've seen with Google and other large companies where automated systems sometimes get inappropriately triggered and customer support is either ineffectual or non-existent until the user is able to make a viral stink on social media (think malicious/bad copyright flags on youtube causing channels to get demonetized). With reviews, the restaurant theoretically at least has a reasonable deal of influence in most cases.

Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business? Yelp reviews are also intregal to the success of a restaurant and similar complaints are lobbed at them for destroying revenue at small companies. Have you ever gone to a restaurant that is poorly ranked on yelp? I have. They tend to deserve the poor ratings.

This is a valuable service to the consumer and good restaurants will thrive while bad ones will fail.

Also, any halfway decent owner/marketer knows you need to capture email addresses for people you want to sell to. Never rely on social media alone. Just use it to get them to give you an email.

> Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business?

Transparency has nothing to do with it.

Amazon has a history of shutting down Fulfillment By Amazon seller accounts in an extremely arbitrary and capricious manner.

If they only shut them down due to legitimate complaints then sure, you might have a point. The story I linked proved that's not the case, and there are many more like it. That man's life would still be in ruins if he hadn't (luckily) gotten so much attention through Reddit and HN.

It'd be fine if it were simply transparency, if the companies that get kicked off had all done something legitimately "bad" in some sense.

The problem is that Amazon often doesn't seem to really investigate issues in any depth at all; they just kick the seller off reflexively. It's trivially easy to be kicked off the platform for reasons other than doing something legitimately "bad," such as software error, human error, or even a deliberately orchestrated fraud campaign conducted by your competitor -- and many other sellers don't get kicked off for doing the same thing, or worse. It's all very random.

> Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business?

Yes, because people are poor at dealing with selection bias. A data source with 100% real and true complaints and favorable reviews can tell any story you want it to with the right filtering, so especially in the presence of a malicious adversary you have to completely discard this data from your decision making.

> Yelp reviews are also intregal to the success of a restaurant

That's really only on the West Coast. People don't live or die by Yelp here on the East Coast. Frankly, I'm always surprised to see people are still using it after all the revelations of extortionist behavior they were engaging in against restaurants.

Is it such a bad thing for society if a business fails when transparency is added to how they conduct their business?

That's a false premise, which assumes any and all complaints are made in good faith. Some people are assholes and will leave a bad review because they disliked the person who delivered a meal or any number of other spurious reasons. You really sound like the sort of person who has never worked in any other field than IT and has a naive and largely illusory view of business conditions.

My SO has lots of experience working in businesses selling stuff on-line and while negative comments "out of spite" happened rarely to her, what she often told about is how dishonest employers made workers bribe people so that they cancel/remove their negative reviews. Hearing the stories that I did from her, I no longer treat lack of negative ratings / reviews as a strong quality signal.

EDIT: Oh, and speaking of Amazon, Google and their automated bans, my SO's company's work account got temporarily blocked by Google recently, apparently for the sin of sending several files in quick succession to her boss' account. Apparently "atypical usage" is grounds for a ban now. Fortunately, the account was unlocked few hours later, and I didn't have to make fuss about it here on HN...

I'm not sure I want Yelp being the arbiter of factual information about restaurants:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237102

I think the only answer is to diversify as best you can, build a reputation of customers who love you to get word of mouth, and save as much as you can.

For an interesting view of where this has happened before, look no further than FB subsuming publishers via Instant Articles and Google recently doing the same with Amp. They stole all the control of the audience data from publishers, and give out whatever cut they feel is appropriate from ad revenue. Publishers refused to adapt or couldn't adapt fast enough and are royally screwed as a result.

We're forgetting the biggest offender, Twitter.

Speaking of them, I think we're overdue for the next cycle of them killing off API access...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10427530

One difference is that restaurants don't have to rely on delivery only - people still like to go out and eat, so optimizing for that experience can decrease the risk.

As many as you hear, they are still anecdotes. And anecdotes are of the political realm not the business realm. Resolving such disputes is also therefore done in the political realm (assuming there is no breach of business contract)

Amazon learns fast. I wouldn't be surprised that x years from now, they run their own restaurants with typical french|italian|asian food.