Comment by j-c-hewitt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j-c-hewitt | Hacker News Reader

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They do stuff like this all the time. Large sellers are treated like subhumans that do not deserve attention from an intelligent person at Amazon. You get bots and contractors making very expensive decisions.

>Why would Amazon, in the middle of a pandemic squeeze a business such as ours so hard that we cannot get ANY of our funds for goods sold or to pay our people. I understand risk mitigation, but this is over the top. Please mods, help us!

Amazon considers sellers to be a renewable resource that can be disposed of haphazardly at the whim of an automated system or a low level employee. Note that they also pay for an account rep, covering a significant portion of that rep's fully loaded salary, yet they are still unable to get timely information. You have to understand that even if you are on the larger side, in the top 10% of sellers, that Amazon still considers you expendable.

Paid reps are very helpful but the cost is sort of absurd for what they wind up doing in high pressure suspension situations for nebulous or stupid/incomprehensible reasons.

Unfortunately, they are trying to write to "Amazon legal" which does not exist to field seller problems. Writing to "Amazon legal" is indeed a black hole. The way to force a response is to file for arbitration.

I'm a 20+ years customer of Amazon, bought stuff for tens of thousands of euros.

Tried to sell my book, was twice denied after a lengthy process without any explanation and a "this is settled, we will no longer answer your emails, good bye". No way to appeal, no way to get an explanation. No way to properly sell the book because of the Amazon book discovery monopoly.

You can't be surprised though right?

Their whole business model is built around automation and removing human decision making. Yes, it's going to result in false positives that cost them 20+ year customers (and even $100k in spend over that time period is a blip of a blip of a blip to them) but it's clearly something they've thought about and can live with.

>> You have to understand that even if you are on the larger side, in the top 10% of sellers, that Amazon still considers you expendable.

No. Amazon considers them a threat. Amazon itself is the largest of large sellers. Any profits made by an upstart large seller are profits that Amazon would rather be making itself.

Even more cynical: Amazon considers them a valuable source of business intelligence and/or ML model training data.

Sellers are more profitable and less risky overall because Amazon does not need to buy the inventory and they make a profit off of every interaction with the seller from transaction fees to storage fees to PPC ads and more. Amazon's vendor business sucks and is overall shrinking proportion of marketplace revenue.

I think you are more likely to be correct than the poster on principles. A marketplace model makes more and easier margin than being a seller.

However as any gigantic organization, Amazon is not a single minded entity. It's likely these activites are handled by totally separate entities with different employees and targets. So it's entirely possible that Amazon is pushing simultaneously for more marketplace and for more own selling actively sabotaging both aspects.

>Sellers are more profitable and less risky overall

Amazon has all the data anyone would ever need to determine which products the above is true or false for. They would be negligent if they weren't putting that information to use.

Amazon could just start drop shipping like these sellers do.

Ok, but holding their money until they go out of business smells strongly of anti-trust litigation being necessary.

They're not just a renewable resource, the most successful ones represent opportunity. If this guy is selling over $1 mil per month, Amazon has every incentive and resource to assume those sales themselves. One way is to make it as hard as possible on those sellers, without taking the PR hit from the transparency of shutting them down and selling the same products.

If you don't think Amazon thinks that way, ask yourself why it takes so many clicks to unsubscribe from Prime, but only one click to buy whatever you want. Amazon is waging a war of attrition against its top sellers, and Amazon is winning.

> Amazon considers sellers to be a renewable resource that can be disposed of haphazardly

It's almost like... Amazon doesn't have to... compete to draw sellers to their platform

Amazon won, and they know it.

So did Standard Oil.

Standard Oil was a monopoly.

There was no Target Oil, or Wall Oil. There also was never any ginormous hypothetical foreign oil company. Like, if a middle eastern company existed back then that called itself Ali Baba's 40 Oils. It wouldn't have been a monopoly.

That's the problem today. People want politicians to act against Amazon based on laws that are over a hundred years old. We never conceived of a situation where a company could have enormously powerful competitors, like Target, Walmart, and Alibaba, while simultaneously controlling an enormous market. Our laws never conceived that as a possibility.

Or maybe our laws don't really see that situation as a problem?

But whatever the case, if we want change, we're really going to need to rethink some of the laws on the books. They're going to need to change.

The laws on the books are fine. The problem is that the USDoJ and Fed courts have been captured, and don't enforce the laws as written. Judges and prosecutors invented their own modifications to the laws.

By the law as written, anybody seen exercising monopoly power is, and has chosen to be, a monopoly, and is governed by public utility rules, not regular market rules. The way the DoJ has chosen to re-interpret the law, it doesn't kick in until "consumers" see high prices. Charging below-cost prices and driving everyone out of business first, so there is after no one to compare prices to, gets no attention.

Standard Oil peak at 91% of US market for refined Oil products after 40 years, so there were competitors. Obviously there were far more competitors internationally and their international market share was far lower.

Target and Walmart are not platforms. Amazon isn't the only company selling consumer goods in general (for now), but they are the only online-seller platform in their category. Shopify exists, and Ebay exists, etc., but people wouldn't put up with stuff like in the OP if those platforms served their needs.

Isn't Walmart a platform? They have similar "Sold and shipped by XXX" as does Amazon.

Random example: https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=bicycle%20tires

Or like they are a large trust ... that ... needs breaking ...

Trust means something fairly specific legally. A group of businesses that team up to, in theory, monopolize a market is a trust. A cartel would be when those businesses are all the manufacturers or suppliers, leaving, for instance, retailers with no other recourse but to pay the higher prices that the cartel sets.

I think what you're thinking of with Amazon is more of a monopoly. I'm not sure they really need to team up with other businesses.

EDIT: Yes. I know that Amazon does not fit the legal definition of "monopoly". I was only saying that if we bend the legal definition of "monopoly" a bit in just the right manner, Amazon would fit. Whereas Amazon would never fit the legal definition of "cartel", or "trust".

They are certainly trying to vertically integrate all of their businesses. Prime video is hosted by AWS. Amazon is getting into the delivery business. Won't be surprised if Amazon buys a few cheap factories overseas after real estate crashes, or a container vessel.

They are a vertically integrated non-monopoly. Consumers and manufacturers both have plenty of other places to do business.

> Amazon considers sellers to be a renewable resource

In all honesty, isn't it? Isn't that the fundamental thesis of Amazon?

Amazon is an American business, and American capitalism has always favored the (near) monopolists. Nowhere else in the West do we find such a lack of diversity in options as in the US for consumers. Americans perhaps like succes more than others, for instance I feel the French are much more prone to sympathizing with the underdog, which builds a natural counterforce to monopolism.

Sometimes I think Americans do not realize their large internal market is both a benefit and a downside:success can snowball like nowhere else, into bigger snowballs like nowhere else. No other western market has a natural market of similar size, therefore foreign competition is always an underdog, or must succesfully learn to expand internationally before they can match for size.

We let Amazon get away with it, because we are letting them get away with it. In other circumstances, we'd not identify one company with its market so easily or totally, and Amazon's competition would keep them sharp.

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