Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First

propublica.org

7 points·kristianc··3 comments

It’s interesting to observe the different expectations here -bricks and mortar supermarkets give their own brand’s preferential treatment within a supermarket all the time, and no one seems to complain that much.

Inherently it seems like there is something different about doing the same thing as an online retailer - even though it doesn’t feel like there should be.

People seem to forget, Amazon is NOT the only online retailer!

I've recently switched a lot of my e-commerce to ebay / searching for a product on amazon and then buying from the manufacturer's website if possible

That is likely worth doing, but it does come with costs.

Amazon has great distribution and a good checkout flow (even ignoring that I already have an account there).

Many smaller shows will take easily twice as long to get what I want and/or the checkout flow is obnoxious. One I did recently took 2-3 extra days because my shipping address doesn't match my billing address and they somehow had to email me to get the phone number to call my credit card company. Pretty extreme example, but still, there's some funky ecommerce out there once you venture away from the big few.

Totally not to say you shouldn't do it, but there are legitimate reasons to want to fix Amazon instead.

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