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Comment by cavisne | Hacker News Reader

Not an original thought but its fascinating how much extra information Amazon has in these acquisitions than a normal company. When such a big part of Ring's sales are through amazon they can figure out things like

* How many people search specifically for the brand Ring

* If a knockoff appears first do people buy that instead

* What is the growth in searches and purchases overall

* Why do people return the product

These are things even Ring wouldn't know. Its not too far fetched to think you could build a valuation engine off the information Amazon has and compare the cost of cloning the product line to acquiring the company automatically.

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I suppose you could go even further with it if they had things like hosting with AWS. With the product information you mentioned and any technical information they could pick up through AWS I'm sure they know exactly what to pay for something. Just gotta hope that an employee doesn't leak it one day.

Ring does host its video on AWS S3.

Oddly specific. Does Ring use AWS at all?

Yes, Ring hosts user videos on S3 as stated above.

Argh, sorry, I read 'does' as 'doesnt'

Is it legal to manipulate the market to test signals?

Eg. We may want to buy this company. Let's make their product appear after competitors and see how strong sales remain.

Manipulating search results for any reason is illegal and Google has faced heavy scrutiny for it in the past, so I would think it would be the same for Amazon.

Illegal? There may be scrutiny in a monopoly context, but there is no law that states that search results have to be fair and equitable.

How could they even be? For example Amazon might only stock four of six brands of video doorbell, so they're not going to be able to return neutral results.

Yes, as long as they only do it on Amazon.com. It's their website after all.

>Not an original thought but its fascinating how much extra information Amazon has in these acquisitions than a normal company. When such a big part of Ring's sales are through amazon they can figure out things like

Same can be said of any vertical integration

Amazon gives loans to sellers; they have more info on their suppliers’ businesses than a bank could ever dream of.

Not to mention Amazon was an investor through the Alexa fund as well.

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