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Comment by hirako2000 | Hacker News Reader

hirako2000

I can't be happier to see amazon struggle to keep their marketplace clean. It's the beginning of the downfall. They thought they could just be a logistic company while eating up all the margin, profiting from defenceless sellers. I guess they got totally outsmarted.

Can't keep a marketplace at the same level of standard as a direct seller. Selling millions of products doesn't seem to scale well. Worked for books, but even there, opening the door to seller accounts flooded the lists with copies, a ruin for publishers who touched the devil rather than staying away from it.

I like amazon for many things they do well, but the truth is that they were never profitable with their previous business model. Now they've been turning directions to make a profit, it's the snowball to their death.

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This is what happens when regulators don't promote a fair marketplace. With no competition, companies like Amazon stop caring and start to optimize to get the last few pennies out of each sale... which results in a drop in quality of the overall service and eventually either a long, slow death or a corporate sale.

Because Amazon has out priced or out delivered many local stores, we don't have those choices any more.

There's a place for companies like this, but they have so many advantages due to size that they have to be watched to ensure they don't step on smaller players just because they can.

Could actually be a major factor yes. Surely contributing. I'm still unsure Amazon was ever profitable without the new practices, being a private company makes it even more difficult to figure that out.

Amazon is a public company.

Amazon has been profitable since the 90s, which is also when they went public (1997). This would be useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Amazon

The key thing to remember is that they expanded aggressively. People who didn’t do their homework - like most pundits and media stock analyst/entertainers - would dismiss them as another unprofitable .com without recognizing that they were becoming profitable in each new market a few years after entry and could halt expansion if they had a cash squeeze. The other point was being comfortable with low margins: that disappointed people who wanted a rapidly climbing stock price but that wasn’t the company they were trying to build and they’ve left quite a few once-hot companies in the rubble.

you just described how the market is correcting. Regulators would just get in the way of the correction.

Regulators would ensure there would be nothing to correct

ummm. I'll disagree with you on that point. Regulators don't have the clairvoyance to know the market needs. They do have their own self interests and politics of their organizations to inhibit reaching market needs...

It corrects itself to next abusing monopoly since everyone is priced out from the market.

Your complaint that every bad monopoly is replaced by a better monopoly with lower prices?

Not better, just lower prices.

Temporarily lower, usually subsidized by VC.

> With no competition, companies like Amazon

amazon has only got ~5% of the US retail market. this ongoing meme that they've got no competition is surreal.

Name another online retailer that's bigger/better known.

You can't compare them to the entire retail market. If anything, their competition is Wal-Mart's online service, or Ebay.

> You can't compare them to the entire retail market.

sure i can. i do every time i buy something at my grocery store, or local retailers, that i could've gotten from amazon.

> Name another online retailer that's bigger/better known.

You literally named two. My father knows how to do only two things on his computer - check his email, and buy stuff on eBay. There is a "Walmart.com" desk and in-store signage in 5,000+ physical stores.

> You literally named two.

Neither of those are bigger, in fact they're dramatically smaller, Amazon has 49.1% of the online retail market to eBay's 6.6% and Walmart's 3.7%, according to: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-...

All retail includes B+M stores no? Not necessarily a fair comparison. Same article says they control 49% of US E-commerce.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-...

What does delivery method matter?

What I care about is obtaining a product. Segment by non-substitutible category (book vs electronics, etc) but not delivery method.

Yet 49% of the US ONLINE market share...so you just are moving goal posts so that you can feel that everyone else is confused about "not a problem"?

> This is what happens when regulators don't promote a fair marketplace.

> Because Amazon has out priced or out delivered many local stores, we don't have those choices any more.

Original post referred to the marketplace in general, and even posited that Amazon has "out priced" local stores, so the goalposts were set to reference the market in general. You're the one moving them.

>Original post referred to the marketplace in general

I was obviously talking about the major marketplace associated with Amazon, IE online ordering as opposed to the entire retail market.

That’s like saying “Boeing only has 10% of the transportation industry”. I believe you’re reciting the Benedict Evans pseudo-contrarian standpoint that Amazon has plenty competition, when in reality we all know it doesn’t in the online space.

> when in reality we all know it doesn’t in the online space

yeah, Sears, keep telling yourself that online is a different market.

Is there any evidence that any of this is affecting Amazon adversely? Or are we just wishfully thinking that it is because it should?

Well, this isn't the first article on the subject in the last couple of months. look at the other comments. take a guess at how this kind of PR will do to amazon's sales/revenue and brand. I'm not saying they are suffering from it yet in term of financial, I could imagine their profit to be higher than ever on the market side of their biz today, but one can see a downturn in their future ability to grow and remain the dominant ecommerce in the west. (they've already totally lost the battles in the far east, even though they try there and there)

> take a guess at how this kind of PR will do to amazon's sales/revenue and brand

My guess, sadly, is that it will round to nothing. Most likely the sheer volume of the bottom end of the mass market is worth a lot more to Amazon than elite users who post comments like these on forums like this. We may have been critical as early adopters but now have outlived our usefulness.

I hope that's not true, but that's why I asked the question: what evidence is there? Maybe it's too early to see anything more than assorted anecdotes, but it's hard to know what those objectively amount to in an operation of Amazon's scale.

I completely agree with you.

The “negative PR argument” has become an indicator to me that someone has an extremely immature world view. There are anecdotes that reflect PR events that are catastrophic (Theranos). But most companies completely recover from PR bumps because most consumers only change their behavior in response to costs.

Who knows, it also depends on how Amazon adapts in the coming years. I just observe the trend, years ago I could hardly find any reason to complain about amazon, I didn't come across stories like this. I have not made a purchse on amazon for a long time, and when I did, it just cost me time to return an overpriced product having a dishonest description.

Evaluate a provider for the quality of its service. Think how others from elite to mass consumers would perceive it in the long run, and you can guess the fate of that provider. Things move fast and many competitors are working at offering better user experience. We will see I guess.

I'm buying less from Amazon due to flood of garbage they allow.

In some cases, there are hundreds of junk items before finding something acceptable. This is complacently allowed Amazon, in several ways: 1. they don't calculate shipping costs in price sorting (allowing dishonest sellers to sell 0.01$ items, with high shipment prices), 2. they hide where the item comes from, 3. they don't police items which should be grouped together (I think I once saw an item replicated more than a thousand times).

This makes the buying experience really tedious, and I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this is a problem.

But of course, while this affects Amazon adversely, I think it's a stretch to qualify it as "the downfall".

Another anecdote, My target.com spend during the holiday season has been +$500 across multiple items since I don't trust amazon for various items now. Also, the customer service is going downhill and I have been pleasantly surprised how much nicer target support is now.

I have done far more buying though the web sites of B&M retailers this season that I have in past years. I no longer trust Amazon for name brand electronics or anything to be ingested. It seems I'm adding new categories of distrust every week.

Just today, I wanted a new flash drive but didn't need it urgently. I checked Amazon to get an idea of fair pricing then looked at Best Buy and found one that looked good on sale. I went to the manufacturer's site to verify the specs and found they had a price 33% lower than the next closest retailer. Win.

So lots of arbitragers were buying from Best Buy and then selling on amazon. I keep thinking about the front page article a few weeks back about the repackaging from other online sellers.

This same exact scenario has been playing out for me over and over again. I'm now using Amazon as a showroom - how quaint.

I remember once listing some item. I think it was an adapter for a USB-C dongle.

The seller listed the dongle as one dongle per model it covered.

Example:

DONGLE for iPad Pro

DONGLE for MacBook

DONGLE for MacBook Pro 13-Inch

DONGLE for MacBook Pro 15-Inch

DONGLE for MacBook Pro 16-Inch

DONGLE for Samsung Note 7

DONGLE for Samsung Note 7 (GTA Edition)

and so on...

The first four or five pages were flooded with THE SAME DAMN ITEM. It was not the one I wanted. It was one of those "$0.01" parts with a $7.99 S&H.

This makes the "Sort by Price" worthless; and that's what I used to use to get myself into the ballpark of where I wanted to be.

There are lots of duplicate products with slight naming style variations. No one seems to have solved grouping products together where the same UPC hasn’t been provided from each seller. Would require building a parser/ some AI that understands aspects of the title: brand, line, size etc

UPC wont do much. There's somewhat of a scam where sellers will reuse old discontinued products or buy upc codes from ebay in order to get around any filtering Amazon has.

Ideally Amazon should require the UPC to be fully registered and verified instead of just taking whatever a seller enters at face value.

eBay have been trying to enforce UPC/EAN for some years now but don't seem to be making a lot of progress either.

Amazon have also made the burden of proof for getting changes to a listing made so high that it isn't really worth the time to point out the issues to them unless it is a product that sells well, so the long tail is a mess.

I think this isn't a technical problem.

Ebay has the same challenge, and similar solution (Ebay uses dropdowns, while Amazon uses small clickable boxes), but I see the problem much less on Ebay, so I think Ebay is simply policing sales more than Amazon does.

Only speaking for myself, but I've become much more cautious about buying electronics from them, because much of it turns out to be poorly implemented junk.

Just last night I purchased a new MIDI controller from the local Guitar Center because the Amazon listing was not sold-by Amazon. I don't trust Amazon's 3rd party program. I also recently purchased a power adapter from eBay because Amazon's listings were hundreds of items of incomprehensible trash. It's getting to the point where I don't even look at Amazon at all for many items, because I know their listings will be useless.

I have the same problem with eBay - 99% of the results are stuffed with incomprehensible trash, non OEM "not genuine" knockoffs, copy paste paragraphs of every possible model, just to keyword stuff. Especially for things like laptop batteries, power adapters, etc.

Somewhat ironically books are the only area in which I have personally been dissatisfied with Amazon so far. (Since my first order from them, in 1998.)

A book I ordered recently arrived in a flimsy envelope instead of a box. Needless to say it was damaged. Nothing major but having paid $30 for a 150-page paperback, I thought it was reasonable to complain. No problem.

The replacement book came in the same envelope, with slightly different but still obvious damage.

To my shame, I kept the second book. But next time I want to buy a physical book, I'll certainly look elsewhere.

risk of counterfeit goods and really the cost of Prime have pushed me away from Amazon. I can get free overnight shipping from walmart if I just do batch orders of $35 or more. I don't care about their music, video or other misc services.

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