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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

> They’re frustrated with Amazon, which they say is making money off the failures of people like them.

Wait what... I can't even. It's not Amazon's fault you bought something no one wanted then tried to sell it. You wanted easy money and it doesn't exist. You CHOSE to ship directly to Amazon so you didn't have to handle shipping, you CHOSE a quality item that kept breaking, they CHOSE to use Amazon, any they CHOSE to order a huge quantity of crap.

I simply cannot understand people who think like this. They plopped down a ton of money on something they didn't fully understand in a get-rich-quick-scheme and then blame the marketplace for their failures.

Can you make money doing this? Absolutely but it takes more research, time, and effort all of which they decided was beneath them and then got all mad when it didn't result in them raking in the money.

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I think the source is zero sum thinking and shallowness of thought. Amazon is profitable while they are not therefore it is Amazon stealing from them. There is a logic there that could be circumstantially correct but is loaded with fallacies and self-serving thinking.

Naive economic intuition has proven shockingly bad - especially historically. It is one thing not to grok rate of returns or market direction or make poor investments. Those people would be geniuses compared to historic economic fallacies.

We are talking things like the Ancient greeks thinking wealth could only be earned by conquest (logically implying that someone who conquered the entire world and enslaved it would be very rich but would not grow wealthier) and medieval thinking that merchants had to be frauds to sustain themselves given that goods had a value the same everywhere - despite the fact travel was known to be slow risky and expensive meaning just being a transporter is clearly an honest service even with the fallacious universal value assumption. Even if you are a lord who can afford something you may not have the time to travel to exotic locales to buy it directly from the source.

If goods have the same value everywhere, it would be impossible to make money transporting it because transportation costs would make the product cost more than it was worth to the manufacturer and seller.

Yes, that's why the above commenter used it as an example of incorrect medieval economic thinking...

>I simply cannot understand people who think like this.

Such people are the subject of several Coen Brother movies, including Fargo, Burn After Reading, Ladykillers, and so on...

(Not that I don't feel for them though. It sucks to lose your savings, even if you did it by being greedy/stupid).

It’s a re-hash of the “start an Internet business and make millions of dollars from home” scam [1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/10/03/654124255/epis...

Pretty much. The WFH crews all went to doing amazon instead of affiliate marketing as it has a brand attached to it and makes it easier for them to sell the courses.

It seems like this comment was anticipated in the article:

> One of the constant themes is the silent sucker—the person who was taken in but doesn’t want anyone to know,” Balleisen told me. Today’s America is very pro-entrepreneur, anti–big government; many Americans don’t have sympathy for people who lose their money to these kinds of schemes, he said. We celebrate the self-made man who starts a successful business from scratch, but mock the people who get duped trying to do the same thing. No one wants to admit that they’re the only one who can’t make it work.

Is there really any money left to be made? Reselling from China on Amazon such a crowded space I don't know if it's possible to get in the game at this point without employing shady tactics. Especially now that the Chinese are selling direct on Amazon.

Yes, but it’s not easy, and its not conducive to a “passive income” model:

1. Find, maintaining, and keeping a high quality manufacturer in China is hard but doable.

2. Building a brand and audience is hard but doable.

3. Creating intellectual property and protecting it is hard but doable.

The folks I know who sell a lot on Amazon do all of these three things decently, and one (often more) extremely well.

From the sound of it, the folks in the article made a lame attempt at #1 and maybe a token attempt at #2 via Amazon ads.

This low level of effort simply will not cut it for most products.

I've been selling on Amazon for the past few years and there is money still to be made. However the landscape is always changing whether the economy or Amazon's own internal plans so for how long, I'm unsure. It's a great place to easily and quickly find customers, build a brand, and launch a company though.

I helped turn a sinking Amazon small business around last year. They did a little over $2m revenue. One of our promotions became so viral that we had $2000+ in orders with less than $20 in ad spend within a few hours. In this sense, things are always changing but I don't think it has ever been this easy to start a business with so little.

Information changes quickly so you can burn a lot of money on outdated information or pure ignorance. For example, my $2m+ client would probably have failed or were on the verge of failing because they weren't able to adapt to Amazon's increased competition in the last year. They had no idea what keyword ranking was, how to identify keywords, drive traffic, or launch products because they never needed to in the past. Because things change so quickly it is very hard to find experts who maintain their expertise... However once you understand the fundamentals, learn how to surf, riding the Amazon waters gets a lot easier.

If you can learn quickly and adapt, Amazon is still a gold mine, some risk involved, but with great payouts.

> it takes more research, time, and effort all of which they decided was beneath them

Or it's above them and they fell victim to a Dunning-Kruger situation?

That's not what Dunning-Kruger is about, so, no. D-K doesn't say ignorant people consider themselves experts.

I feel like you're replying to a troll comment. Wasted energy. :D

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