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Comment by nck4222 | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, while I agree this a problem, large box retailers (Whole Foods before the Amazon acquisition, Walmart, etc) are well known for doing this as well.

So if that's the line you draw, it extends further than just tech giants.

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It's a little bit different though, because Amazon has 2 streams of how they get products: Amazon can buy branded from vendor and control price and selection, or those same vendors could list directly on Amazon (as FBA) and the vendor controls price and selection.

Pop sockets got in a fight recently with Amazon, because they wanted to stay FBA in order to have better control of selection and pricing, but Amazon was trying to force them into a more traditional vendor role.

Right, and Walmart only allows products in its store under their terms which is far more restrictive, so I'm failing to understand how this model is worse for competition than Walmart's.

And what happened with PopSockets didn't quite work that way. They were already a vendor on Amazon, and they wanted to remove themselves as a direct vendor and designate a single reseller as their "approved" FBA on Amazon.

So they wanted to change the terms of the agreement, Amazon said no, and that was that.

Perhaps grocery stores have done well to keep their brands on lower shelves and not end cap their own stuff. Amazon brands will often appear first in the list of results, which would be akin to putting Great Value products front and centre on all Walmart shelves.

CVS and Walgreens put their branded products right next to the name brands they are copying. They even color the packaging the same.

But Amazon just fullfils orders on most of the products while collecting data , where as brick and mortar stores resell the competitions products

Don’t brick and mortar stores collect inventory and trend data too? Amazon isn’t the first one to do this, they just put the data closer to the center of their business so it’s more public that they collect data.

Until recently, brick and mortar really just knew what people tend to buy together. They can't tell, like Amazon, than a single customer buys XYZ over their lifetime. Brick and mortar now employee ways to aggregate using credit card numbers across stores.

Yes, and what is the problem with Amazon just employing better tools to do the same?

Yes and collecting data is a lot more expensive and less detailed for brick and mortar stores Also Amazon is less likely to have an issue with respect to stock since they do not buy most of the stock they just store it, where as brick and mortar stores invest in their inventory which gives them an higher incentive to promote them. And this also gives them an incentive to have disfounted sales on slow moving products that are either of slightly lower quality to a comparable product or it is a new Unknown brand resulting in a win for the customer. In case of Amazon if a new Unknown product is not selling it is all up to the seller to manipulate the algorithm to move up the seller ranking( we already see all the way sellers manipulate reviews and change products to have a high number of reviews) this is a big loss for the customer. And if the seller puts in all the effort and succeeds Amazon can just copy the product and say MY PRODUCT NOW, and show an Amazon basics product for the exact same price as the buyer and bump him Lower than its own product.

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