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Comment by libertine | Hacker News Reader

The boom of white-label, or retailer-brand products was definitely fueled by sales data.

What may have started as a simple analysis to evaluate share of shelf, easily could turn to "what if we sold these"?

The main difference vs Amazon is the Reviews data (that's worth what's worth with all of the fake reviews), and you can't buy on Amazon without using your account so every sale is bound to an specific person. In that regard no retailer has this data.

Even those who have loyalty programs that end up being a tracking card, people can still buy without using cards.

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> In that regard no retailer has this data. Not true, this is tracked by loyalty cards and to a lesser extent, by the credit cards that are used

> Not true, this is tracked by loyalty cards and to a lesser extent, by the credit cards that are used

Like I said, you're not obliged to be in a loyalty program, and you can buy in cash, debit card - at least in Europe that's pretty common.

Plus I didn't want to go through the whole type of sellers on amazon. You have:

Products sold by Amazon: these are all amazon brands + products from other brands (maybe this is the closest to the retailers)

Products Fulfilled by Amazon: Where amazon only deals with fulfilling and customer service (to some extent), and Shops pay referral fees and fulfillment fees;

And you have Fulfilled by Merchant: where people set shops and pay only referral fees (this is maybe the closest to set a quiosque in a mall);

So it's quite tricky, yet Amazon gathers data on everything.

And you don't think a purchase history is associated with your debit card?

In the US (not sure about EU countries), there is price discrimination based on loyalty program membership. Some retailers (Costco) require membership to even walk in the door.

Under GDPR I find it hard that they are using any debit/credit data without your consent to be used for any sort of profiling.

For loyalty programs you give explicit consent to be in a marketing program. They can't simply use your banking data to profile someone, neither your tax number which you give (in some countries) in order to get a valid receipt.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't pretend to know what GDPR does and does not allow but this kind of data collection and analysis can be done entirely internally to the company so I'd be surprised if it was prohibited. This is just normal operation of a retail business.

I'm also not familiar with what you sign away with a credit or debit card but I would not be surprised if it included this tracking since that's a core part of the credit card business model.

I do admit to almost complete ignorance on this topic however so you could be right.

> (that's worth what's worth with all of the fake reviews)

Wondering now if Amazon knows which reviews are fake, and leaves them up to obfuscate truly useful reviews to keep their dataset “public” but hard for competitors to utilize?

Hmm I don't think that might be case, because they end up diluting the value of reviews to get volume (and to obfuscate).

Reviews are mainly a selling factor, and second a way to gather insights imo.

Honestly I think they don't know how to deal with fake reviews, oddly enough because some are so obvious - namely from chinese sellers.

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