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Comment by simplecomplex | Hacker News Reader

Of course. Good for them. It’s their fucking store!

> Amazon has adjusted its product-search system to more prominently feature listings that are more profitable for the company

Unthinkable. A store trying to make a profit selling things. How crazy.

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Is this only being down voted because of tone?

I am curious if there actually are any laws relevant to this situation. As far as I can tell, this is exactly like Walmart or BigBoxCo pushing their own brands. It's not illegal and, generally, it's not even a bad thing for the consumer (in the short term).

It really feels like most of the people taking issue with this are doing so because of their personal sentiments rather than legality.

I have lukewarm feelings on the issue, but the difference to me is that BigBoxCo isn't selling counterfeit products in their stores, which means their brands have to compete on price/quality with the rest of the store, even if they are "pushed". With Amazon, the presence of counterfeit items, especially due to shared inventory, etc. means that even if I wanted another brand, I can't guarantee that I will even get a genuine item. This gives Amazon brands a huge advantage they wouldn't have at a big box store.

I think it's downvotes because Amazon is not a store, it's a marketplace. And it's well different than BigBox because there is way less capital outlay for both property and goods.

Downvotes for bad information, not snark

“marketplace” is just a word, not a legal fiction/status like “corporation”.

AFAIK US antitrust law does not have any concept of “marketplaces.”

It's a similar problem to why we have antitrust laws.

If this was you or I, there wouldn't be a problem. If you are the only / pretty much the only store used then it (to me) would clearly be a problem for consumers. You'd be using your monopoly in one area (marketplace) to benefit you elsewhere (selling USB cables) rather than competing on a level playing field.

In between it becomes trickier. At what point are they too big? How dominant would they need to be?

I think there are differences to physical stores partly due to scale. If a shelf has 10 different variations of basically the same thing that's the equivalent of all products being on the front of the search results. If there are hundreds, then the ranking becomes vital.

Walmart has an interesting approach. They let whichever supplier has the best sales in a category design the shelving layouts for ALL suppliers in that category. If you abuse your rights you lose your category captain status. That means if Pepsi has the best sales they decide where Coke goes on the shelf. Pretty clever.

At one point when coffee wasn’t a big section, the category captain of coffee actually helped bring in competitors to increase the overall size of the shelf space and thus attract more passing customers.

You might want to add some supporting information why you feel that way instead of just sharing your opinion and dropping the mic

I think their point is simply that "it's their store" - and to be brutally honest, I agree.

Two not-entirely-random examples of similar behaviour:

Supermarkets place their own brand merchandise where they feel it'll sell best. Undeniably good business, and certainly no reason for concern.

Perhaps more questionably, but bare with me - Google place AMP content, which is to say content they have made their product by merit of some ToS/caching slight of hand, front and center. Is it exactly the same as what Amazon are doing? Well, no. Is it placing content they want consumed above other content irrespective of merit or consumer benefit? Probably.

Similarly Amazon are doing what businesses do and promoting their most profitable products, straddling both the above examples. Whether it's best for the customers is open to debate, but it doesn't change that it's entirety their prerogative.

Note the European Commission has fined Google billions for giving Google Shopping preferential placement in search results.

Yeah, the search vs shop tension is the big question.

The difference being that Google are ostensibly a search engine, who are looking to monetize and leverage their ubiquity - Amazon are a book store grown to titanic proportions looking to maximize profits.

The same, but different.

I fully support Amazon's divergent empire being broken up into sperate companies, but for the moment Amazon.com - the online marketplace - is still an internet shopfront.

> I think their point is simply that "it's their store" - and to be brutally honest, I agree.

Amazon claims they are a marketplace, not a store. Amazon itself is only one player on that marketplace, according to Amazon.

It depends if it operates as a store or as a market place, laws are different.

Which law would that be?

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