Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

theverge.com

312 pointspabo272 comments

"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he can't guarantee employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers to develop the company's own products"

There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? The best Amazon can do is have policies, logs and access controls and punish employees if they break those policies. And Bezos committed to doing that.

>There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative?

don't make third party sales data available to Amazon at all? Can't exploit data you don't keep. The same way Signal prevents data problems: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=2...

The method is so good, it would even save Amazon storage space!

How is this possible? At the very least you need to store each customer's order history. From there you can work backwards to get sales numbers for a particular product or seller. Access controls don't work either, because at the end of the day it's stored on a server somewhere and someone must have access.

encrypt the data by default and let the third party sellers and customers have exclusive access? Why does Amazon need access to anyone's history?

Disclaimer work at AWS.

Customer disputes? Returns? Presumably you'll need some sort of history. At the very least saying Person X bought Y product

Two options. Don't offer those services for third party vendors that don't want to hand their data to Amazon and tell the customers it's between them and the vendor, which seems like a reasonable trade-off.

Alternatively a proper secrecy management system that allows customers/vendors to expose particular data to Amazon for those purposes without handing everything and the kitchen sink over, with fine-grained controls.

Disclaimer: I also work at AWS.

As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy? It’s already to the point where I filter on Amazon Prime eligible and if possible sold and shipped by Amazon.

>As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy?

On some purchases I would, I mean this is basically like an ebay purchase with no return policy.

Point being, is there a technical argument against giving the vendor/consumer control over this, as long as the nature of the sale is transparent? I don't think so.

And even if you're saying that's too free-wheeling there's point two. Keeping only a track record of the data for the return period and only making it accessible if a customer demands a refund is technically possible.

The anti-competitive /privacy breaching data-processing that is the topic of the thread can be completely avoided.

>> As a consumer, would you really trust a merchant that opted out of Amazon’s return policy?

> On some purchases I would, I mean this is basically like an ebay purchase with no return policy.

Not at all. eBay’s money back guarantee overrides any seller policies. You can definitely return eBay items that are sold as “no returns”, if they are defective, counterfeit, etc.

Option 1 simply won't work for customers. If a customer is buying something from the Amazon.com website they should expect to be able to get answers about it from Amazon. If a customer was defrauded or didn't get their product etc., Amazon should not be allowed to throw up their hands and say "I don't know what you're talking about."

I don’t think this is legally possible, since Amazon is the merchant of record. That implies all sorts of reporting and retention requirements (for taxes, anti-money laundering, etc.).

How is this relevant?

Why do you need aggregated sales data for these use cases? Presumably bad internal actors aren't going through order history records one at a time and pasting into Excel! This problem could only exist if you could query large amounts of sales records. Cynically I suspect Amazon has tooling specifically to identify lucrative products.

And what are you going to do when the customer wants to see their purchase history? Tell them "unfortunately, we can't show your purchase history for third party sellers"? What if they want to do a refund?

Even if you didn't keep purchase history for customers, Amazon would need to keep purchasing records for accounting purposes. In a multinational corporation you simply can't have money going into a black hole with no audit trail.

Store it encrypted and log access.

For accounting purposes you can still have line items with less specific category labels.

To be honest you probably don't even need to do much other than gate the data between teams (CSR vs product) and use permissions that prevent bulk aggregation across records for anyone not on a specific non-product team. Lots of businesses have internal policies like this (banks for example).

The reason they don't isn't due to the implementation challenges but because they don't have to (yet).

Should Bezos / Amazon be fined or penalized? Absolutely not. His statements just prove what should already be obvious. Businesses won't police themselves.

This applies to all marketplace platforms where an incentive exists to abuse your access to third party sales data (like app stores).

All that sounds good, but it still doesn't all you to prove no access has occurred. Sure, the data is "encrypted" (although even that's problematic) and access is logged, but the application servers must have access to the keys, and someone must have production credentials. What's preventing that person from attaching a debugger and grabbing the keys? Better yet, what's preventing someone from stealing the sellers' session, and making it look as if the seller's accessing the data? All the access might be logged, but how do you know whether the logging server has been tampered with? Maybe you do your evil deeds when the server is down for "unplanned maintenance".

It makes it far more effort and appears at least to be discouraged. That alone will eliminate most employees considering it. It also leaves a trail when Bob has a great new product idea... if there's ever an independent investigator of course.

You do all this. Then someone asks you whether you can promise that Amazon employees don't access the data. You are unable to promise it. The newspaper headline reads: "Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data".

Yes it's a pretty bullshit article title. I am concerned over the access to aggregated sales data though by people who will be involved in product development. It's similar to insider trading, and requires real enforcement of "policy" with 3rd party review IMO.

Well, taxes and accounting for starters.

I feel like these panels always try to make you answer 'gotcha' type of questions without providing a full answer or context.

This feels like hyperbole, though I hope Congress gets to the bottom of it if it’s really true.

On one hand, I can see an employee who maybe has performance metrics that incentivize this behavior. Without sufficient oversight, any policy against using this data would become pointless.

I can also see that Bezos wouldn’t want to make a strong claim guaranteeing it doesn’t happen. He would perjure himself if it’s occurred even once.

I’m more interested to learn if it’s systemic or if it’s just outliers. One is a company incompetently benefiting from not enforcing its own policies whereas another is more egregious.

This exactly. The line of questioning is very combative, and they will ‘claim back their time’ if your response doesn’t go along with their narrative. These hearings are more like televised platforms for them to create sound-bites they can use in their campaigns.

This is a game for two. Politicians try to score soundbites. Businessmen try to obscure misdeeds.

Amazon admitted to using aggregated seller data for competitive purposes. That's not illegal, but it should be, and congress should fix the gaps in the laws. Since Bezos doesn't want this, he dragged the conversation into the weeds (the aggregated/non-aggregated distinction and the proving-a-negative discussion).

That's fine. Everyone acted in their self-interest, as expected. What confuses me is how ridiculously effective the diversions were. This thread is full of people chasing the chaff. People who ought to know better.

> This is a game for two

It's a game where the politicians are in charge, subpoenaing the businessmen to come answer their questions, under their rules, at penalty of perjury.

Of course the businessmen do their best to present their side, but let's not pretend it's an even playing field.

I see an advantage to the businessmen as the net outcome. It's still business as usual and they continue reaping handsome profits for questionable practices while addressing the accusations from their 'critics'.

>It's a game where the politicians are in charge, subpoenaing the businessmen to come answer their questions, under their rules, at penalty of perjury.

>Of course the businessmen do their best to present their side, but let's not pretend it's an even playing field.

Your response is odd. The fact perjury is a possible outcome if a knowingly misleading answer is given doesn't change the equation of the fundamental social interaction.

Congresspeople are not fishing for soundbites. They have a legitimate interest in knowing what are the current practices being engaged in by major economic players. They need information pertinent to building consensus amongst their numbers to fulfill legislative mandate.

The capacity to give a concise number, or the propensity to avoid answering the question speaks volumes more to the necessity of regulation than any candid response would.

> Congresspeople are not fishing for soundbites.

I mean, if you watch the questioning, it's very clear that they are.

Look at e.g. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' questioning of Mark Zuckerberg.

Just because some of the elected officials act like children, doesnt mean they all do.

I've watched previous testimonies of Zuckerberg, the Libra one was infuriating as someone who has worked in the financial industry. Suffice it to say if he spent half as much time giving candid answers instead of evading the question or burning the clock to get to the next Congressperson's question, I might have some more sympathy.

As I recall AOC had particular difficulty getting a straight answer out of him back then too, as did several other Congresspeople, including a few who were far more reasonable, accommodating, and less incentivized to go down the route of theatrics than AOC, and asked fairly standard, straightforward questions. Those questions were met with answers which were evasive and vacuous on average; downright equivocations and deceptions at worst.

Are you sure that impression doesn't come from the fact things that aren't soundbites don't end up in front of you?

As I only spend 1 minute a day on political news, there's a lot of scope for politicians to do non-soundbite things and me not to hear about it.

> Are you sure that impression doesn't come from the fact things that aren't soundbites don't end up in front of you?

Yes. This has been discussed before. (See e.g. the 3 comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16807245 )

In particular:

> By the time you hear a pointed question in the committee hearing room or a speech in a floor "debate" from a Senator, they've been over it with staff, decided on a position, and calculated the optimal move to present to the cameras. That you enjoy or agree with the thrust of this particular show has no bearing on the theatricality of committee hearings as a tactic. They wouldn't do it if no one enjoyed it.

> It's not that politicians don't debate things in good faith. It's that they do it with and through staff (who are more like the people you find in high school debate than televised election debate), behind closed doors, and not on the floor.

The official questioning time is entirely staged. If a Congressman wants to know something, there are many ways for them to learn, but none of those ways involve televised oral questioning under tight time limits. That just isn't the purpose the formal questioning serves.

> Congresspeople are not fishing for soundbites. They have a legitimate interest in knowing what are the current practices being engaged in by major economic players. They need information pertinent to building consensus amongst their numbers to fulfill legislative mandate.

I don't completely disagree; political subcommittees do tend to be more practical than politics at large. But the committee a hostile environment for the people bought before it; if the politicians just wanted information they'd do it in writing or chat to Zuckerberg at a party or something. The committee process is a legitimate one for that sort of thing, but there are much easier ways to to figure out what is going on. If they actually care about matters of fact politicians tend ask domain experts to write a report - that is a much more comprehensive and nuanced approach.

Literally everything in a committee is about building a narrative to underpin political action. And the people appearing in front of the committee will generally not be the people who were advocating for that action.

>But the committee a hostile environment for the people bought before it; if the politicians just wanted information they'd do it in writing or chat to Zuckerberg at a party or something.

Generally speaking, committee's don't happen if there is no reason to believe that any of the alternate means you brought up as examples would be sufficient to resolve the problem. In fact, many of those may have already been addressed or attempted to unsatisfactory result. The legislature has organized and tasked the committee with this investigation as an expression of the "Will of the People" to get to the bottom of business of redressing the grievances of the Constituency, and building policy on the basis of the facts collected. In Facebook's case, largely prompted by not adhering to a previously unnecessary to enumerate social norm, which many people have begun to become concerned with Facebook's primary business model being reliant, and the consequent leveraging of advantaged position via network effect exploitation to prevent competition.

As a corporate citizen of the United States, there is no adversity here. You're in this country, granted legitimacy by the authority of our institutions. If the political apparatus taps you on the shoulder and deems it necessary to look into the facts of what you're doing, nothing at all should change about what you're doing or the answers you give. That behavior of manipulating the response you give in response to interrogation by Congress is analogous to anti-debugger code; obfuscation being an act of perjury. This is fact finding and policy building by duly elected representatives. There should be no adversity. No legitimacy or illusion of legitimate competition acknowledged.

This is humanscale debugging by an authority mechanism implemented by a distributed decision making and consensus engine in the form of a Congress of elected representatives. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't accept the right of a Corporation or an Executive to evade or deceive official legislative apparata. The called already has going in their favor that a great deal of the population are highly resistant to meaningless change, and that there needs to be a non-trivial consensus for change.

Now I fully acknowledge we may have gotten away from the ideal of how things should work, and that when you're dealing with human beings, the level of nuance and communications overloading associated with a state bearing comment skyrockets; but that still does not to me justify lying by omission or outright to your legislature or it's representatives, or intentionally wasting their time for your gain or to intentionally frustrate policy making. If you can't be honest to the collective proxy of $the_rest_of_the_nation, you've got your priorities all sorts of misaligned, and if you're feeling that threatened by the experience, maybe, just maybe, it's finally coming back in unequivocal terms that something needs to fundamentally change about your operational model. I also acknowledge that making the determination of what is "frustrating policy making" and what is just best effort is left fuzzy, and in that fuzziness creates a dangerous policy tool to be abused. I make no claims or suggestion to what should or shouldn't be done in the event thereof, or what the determination that obstruction of policy making has occurred looks like. I'm only pointing out that if you accept as legitimate "defensive legislative perception management" you've undermined the status of the legislature from "wielders of the power of the collective social apparatus, and the authority and access to privileged information that comes with it" to "For sale: invest in a full time employee to haunt enough representatives, and you too can have a law."

There is no illegitimacy in any question being asked. Axiomatically, this is basically people with as close to societal root access as you can get trying to build a realistic representation of the socio-governmental system in order to plot a reasonable course to satisfy $rest_of_the_country.

TL;DR: So long as everything is being done by the book; there should be no self-preservation or overt attempts at manipulation being acceptable. Only as accurate of a rendering of facts as possible, and where a subjective question is asked, a candid answer provided.

For it to be any other way reeks to me of dysfunction, and an overt admission of a lack of integrity, and standing in opposition to the very thing that grants you the legitimacy and capability to live in the manner you desire.

From a social and civic point of view, it isn't and shouldn't be a contest. Just a mechanism at work.

> That behavior of manipulating the response you give in response to interrogation by Congress is analogous to anti-debugger code; obfuscation being an act of perjury.

The parallel between debugging and political committee hearings is pretty weak. Code tends to be repeatable and fairly easy to build consensus on (eg, a group of developers will have a fairly clear and reasonable band of opinions on whether networking code is succeeding or failing). In politics, even basic questions like what the question is are subject to uncertainty and there is no consensus on even basic points.

> I don't accept the right of a Corporation or an Executive to evade or deceive official legislative apparata

So if the official legislative apparata asked you to "explain, in detail, how your activity has broken the law?" how would you answer that if you don't believe you've broken the law? That sort of question is a little uncommon but entirely plausible in a committee hearing. It is impossible to answer directly; the person in the hot seat has to push back on the premise and answer a different question.

What you are saying there is implicitly supporting the idea that the people in front of the committee should agree with the agenda of the committee. That isn't reasonable.

Having been in this world, though on a smaller scale (state level), while the electeds may take every opportunity on the dais to create good soundbites, behind the scenes committee staff work to identify the right questions, get the answers, etc. The public may never see all the information gathered, or know that it has been gathered, staffers are smart.

I mean he could mention what controls they do have to prevent this, that’d be a decent start.

That would expose confidential trade secrets and competitive intelligence. It'd also jeopardize their internal security posture to release that information publicly.

I don't buy it, but I imagine that'd be the excuse.

The key is "access controls." The best Amazon can do is ensure brand managers don't have access to this data.

Rep. Jayapal was pressing on this, and Bezos mentioned policy but never access control.

> The best Amazon can do is ensure brand managers don't have access to this data

This is easier said than done. Data exists in multiple places. It transforms in the form of reports and presentations. Policing this is expensive, which is why it almost only happens under regulatory pressure.

Hence why we are here.

There's a reason basically every SDE is subject to the trading window: its impossible to give them the permissions necessary to do their jobs without also giving them access to highly sensitive information.

I mean, can we get the politicians to say the government and it's employees aren't accessing data that they're not allowed to access/have?

> Policing this is expensive, which is why it almost only happens under regulatory pressure.

I completely agree. Before GDPR, many companies did not knew who was accessing the data, what was the reason to store it and if there was any value to that data. Now, I have seen an increase in understanding of which data the companies have.

I have worked adapting services to the GDPR. The reality is that it is very cheap to design systems with 100% data accountability. The main problem is to adapt old systems full of technical debt where nobody knows if the data is used or not, or even how up to date it is.

If your mother caught you sneaking a cookie from the cookie jar with chocolate and crumbs stuck to your face and a quarter cookie cupped in your palm, would you expect to get away by saying "well I can't prove that I didn't sneak a cookie..."?

Given the mountains of anecdata on this subject all pointing to Amazon openly and intentionally mining third party sales data, it seems overwhelmingly more likely that Bezos dodged the question because the answer would make Amazon look bad, not because Amazon is mostly innocent and just can't prove it 100%.

That's way too simplistic since Amazon is not one person and not every person has the same morals or ethics in the company. I see this a lot -- personifying a company that is. It's not a good mental abstraction for making arguments about companies.

Letting companies get away with incentivizing bad behavior and diffusing blame doesn't make for good policy.

Just as companies earn the monetary rewards of their actions, they should also earn responsibility for their actions.

I didn't say it did, I said you used a bad analogy to make your point. Don't put words in my mouth to make up for your poor analogy.

> I see this a lot -- personifying a company that is.

Corporations are people, my friend - Mitt Romney.

Yeah so the law is a lot more nuanced then that and just because of certain legal affordances are made, certainly doesn't mean that the company is made of singular focused human beings all acting in the same way with the same goals.

Quite the opposite, the complexity is enormous there's even an entire area of study for it "Organizational Theory".

> certainly doesn't mean that the company is made of singular focused human beings all acting in the same way with the same goals.

Have you looked at ELon Musk, Steve Jobs and many others?

There are hundreds to thousands of other people below them working on hundreds of different things. If anything those 3 are great examples of what I'm talking about. Even Jobs wasn't the singular person making all the decisions, you should look into Jony Ives, Cook etc

Those hundreds to thousands of other people dont matter when the guy at the top sets the direction.

>Given the mountains of anecdata on this subject ...

Isn't there a saying for this? "the plural of anecdote is not data"?

This reminds me of the meme that facebook/google is listening in on you without you knowing it, the evidence for which is mountains of anecdotes of people claiming that [product] showed up on their ads shortly after them talking about [product], despite them never expressing an interest in [product] to facebook/google. Despite the mountains of evidence, no one was able to provide a shred of solid evidence of the fact (eg. decompiled binary, network capture, runtime analysis).

Let's get some data! Perform discovery!

A self-serving non-answer is even less reliable than a pile of anecdotes. It would be utterly ridiculous to elevate this one to the dignity of "data."

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding, though, on what constitutes abuse (and thus an anecdote for your assertion). Amazon openly mines third party sales data to bolster its in house brands, just as Costco does with Kirkland, Walmart with Parent's Choice, Trader Joe's does with their house brand, etc..

Amazon has a policy, as described in this article, of not allowing individual seller's data to be used in non-aggregated form by internal parties. This is purportedly to make third parties feel less directly competed with, and is a guarantee not provided by my above examples (Trader Joe's, etc.).

There is not a mountain of evidence that they look at unaggregated data, and it is absolutely difficult to prove a negative on. For example, let's say there's a single brand breaking through in a new electronics category. Let's say some enterprising internal brand manager is looking for up and comers to pull into Amazon Basics. Why not just search the site for that type of electronic? Or look at short term best seller lists?

I'm on the fence about what should or shouldn't be legal in this situation. But if Amazon can't do it, it seems clear that Trader Joe's, Costo, etc. shouldn't be able to do it, and that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms.

Amazon has the policy, and the journalists have found sources saying they break them, so at the very least an internal investigation is warranted, or some non-criminal external investigation for transparency's sake. But as far as I understand (I am so ready to be corrected), Amazon does not even need to have such a data aggregation policy, much less have an iron-tight way of policing it. What this really looks like to me is Amazon shifting from being a third party seller platform to a more highly curated internal/external hybrid platform, just as maker supermarkets did in the 90's. Believe me there was a lot of handwringing then about the practice at supermarkets, but now it is commonplace and one can argue that it is ultimately a benefit to the ecosystem.

Aggregating the data doesn't make it one lick less anticompetitive. Carving a distinction based on aggregation is every bit as much of a dodge as hand-wringing over proving a negative.

> that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms.

No kidding.

> an internal investigation is warranted

We agree.

There is a fundamental difference in the volume of data collected by Trader Joe, Costco et al and Amazon.

Costco at best knows what I bought at their store, Amazon knows a lot more than that. Just from the data they collect on the store they will know how many people compared what products with what else, what are they searching for, what is in who's shopping list, they will likely know demographics and lot more information about the buyers as well.

It is not remotely the same problem between online and offline.

And how do you legislate for this? After a certain threshold of data collected you fall into a category that needs to be broken up?

It's not a binary offline / online business. Retailers are a mix of both, with some, like Walmart, quickly expanding their online presence as well.

Same way we legislate privacy ? Our shopping data should be just as anonymous as browsing and PII perhaps more so . This is not much different from GDPR type regulation ?.

How do we make companies follow it is different issue altogether . First step is the make liability exposure high for violating (like COPA ?) and provide consumes right to access what they have on you.

There is no technical way privacy of this or any other kind can be guaranteed, companies internal controls are always going to be opaque and data collection looking from the interfaces we can audit may not visible .

We can only make it higher risk legally and give consumers frameworks to make it easier to expose violations

Individual shopping data from the consumer to the retailer. That should be PII and treated like any other sensitive data.

Aggregate data on what consumers bought from the retailer. This is the retailer's data.

Individual sales data from sellers of the retailer's platform. This should be PII and treated like any other sensitive data.

Aggregate data on what consumers bought from all sellers on the retailer's platform. This is the retailer's data.

Individual data on consumer actions on the retailer's platform prior to purchasing an item. This can / should be PII. This includes search history, shopping cart, listings visited, etc.

Aggregate data on consumer actions on the retailer's platform prior to purchasing an item. This is the retailer's data.

---

My position is it's unreasonable to ask retailers to limit their use of aggregated, anonymized data. And unless you limit that use, it doesn't materially change the current situation. The major difference between Walmart, Costco and Amazon is Amazon has a lot more aggregate data.

If retailer is just a retailer , aggregate sales data is theirs to do as pleased . If they are also sellers it is problem, if we cannot stop them collecting or using , then all sellers must have access to the same information.

Actually retailers are far more sophisticated than you think. Plenty of data brokers work with them to help piece together a larger puzzle. Plenty of startups willing to help them get to the sophistication of Amazon as well. Still early days for knowing consumer shopping behaviour in store but they pretty much know who you are if you signed up for loyalty cards or paid by card.

While it is more sophisticated than most people think, target famously knowing about a pregnancy, even before a close family member does happen , online will always have lot more data, and it is just not data on the website only .

The issue is that Amazon can leverage that data, and no one else can. That is anti-competitive.

A grocer can get away with whitelabeling, because the manufacturer of the product is bought from as a supplier. Therefore every brand/product in the store, regardless of the manufacturer or "brand" is essentially the grocer's product. In that sense what grocer's are doing is more inventory management. None of their suppliers are "harmed" by that in house data processing.

Amazon, on the other hand, is fundamentally harming the members of it's marketplace because they never make a purchase to prop up other members of the marketplace. Instead, they use those marketplace actors in order to target high return corners of the market in which to compete without taking any of the risk; and crucially, without also making aggregate data available to all sellers.

In effect, every Amazon seller is a risk sink. Everyone else suffers the downsides of poor market fit, but if there's a sector with good profitability, you can bet that Amazon is on it as soon as possible with a brand new Amazon Basics offering. Essentially leveraging their scale to extract as much retail volume out of the market for themselves at everyone else's expense.

Dismissing this looking at seller data due to it being aggregated is like marketing one's tobacco as toasted. You're drawing attention to something irrelevant in the hopes that no one keeps going down the path that leads them to realize you're abusing your advantaged position to the detriment of everyone else involved.

Companies regularly use this trick to get away with crimes. They might explicitly forbid something illegal, not setup the actual guard rails that would prevent it, and then give employees every single possible incentive to break the rules. The moment they're caught they can act shocked, shocked, to discover that gambling was going on in this establishment, and then throw the line level workers under the bus.

This is exactly what Wells Fargo to get away with opening fraudulent accounts in their customers names.

I know of many ex amazon employee anecdotes where people were “taken in the night” (didn’t have a job in the morning), and had their credentials and their teams credentials rotated due to a customer or seller data access overstep.

As with most conspiracies the facts don’t add up super well in this case for Amazon - their whole company is based on trust. The cost of losing it would be huge, so they’d be super driven to stamp it out.

well, they already lost everyone's trust for allowing the sale of low quality knock offs so who's to say we won't find out about some major privacy violations in the coming years?

Really? Search online for "trust amazon poll" and look at the results. People appear to have an overwhelmingly favorable opinion of Amazon.

For example, look at The Verge Tech Survey 2020. 91% of those surveyed had a favorable opinion of the company, and 70% felt they had a positive impact on society. Most of the other polls have similar results.

Trust is too general a term to be very useful. I trust that amazon will get me my order swiftly, and that if it gets lost in transit or stolen from my front door, I will be made whole without any fuss. That is huge for them as a retailer. At the same time there are entire categories of products that I simply wont ever buy from them because I do not trust that the product is legit.

I trust Amazon to send me a branded SD card or Apple charing cable on time.

I don’t trust Amazon to ship genuine to specification SD cards or original Apple power cables due to the commingling stock issue.

That’s consumer trust, which is certainly high. I’d be interested in how much companies trust amazon, that number might be very different. Both groups can have wildly different experiences with the same company, and there are a lot more consumers than there are companies ready to sell on amazon.

The original question here was not “does amazon provide a bad service to consumers”, but rather “does amazon abuse their data to compete unfairly”. Only companies would know that, end consumers won’t know why the amazon basics product exits, only if it arrives on time.

Company trust doesn't mean all that much given conflict of interest. Technically you can translate any antitrust claim regardless of merit as "Competitors say 'main rival's success unfair, should be punished'".

Realpolitik of sorts often matters far more than any trust at the company level - does going on your own or letting someone else take a cut pay off better? Would they get massively punished if they failed to carry through and burned your company?

It certainly feels that way if your opinion was mostly from the comments section of HN. In the real world? Not so much.

People forgive them for that because it's so easy to return, and they are so quick to give a refund/make things right.

Also, I don't think as a percentage of purchases that they are as common as people think - the stories get lots of attention, but the regular shopping is ignored.

> they already lost everyone's trust

Love the completely unfounded assertion. Based on what? "Top voted comments on HN say they've lost trust in Amazon, so everyone in the world must be the same"?

Let's look at actual data shall we? Turns out surveys indicate that "Amazon is the second most trusted institution in the United States, behind the military" (https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/10/25/18022956/amazon-tru...). Many other surveys indicate something similar.

If you have data that indicates otherwise, please do share.

Co-mingling inventory does not inspire trust

What's important to know is that the seller chooses if they want their inventory comingled or not. And that comingling allows for faster delivery.

That said, I would really like it if it could be a choice given to the buyer as well. Or at least make it clear when you're buying and getting something comingled.

When I worked at Amazon, I personally knew someone who put in their two-weeks notice, and the next day they found out they were fired when their badge didn't work. From anecdotes I've heard, this happens if Amazon suspects a person is leaving to join a competitor. Amazon is very serious about protecting their data.

This is not atypical though, and it happens in non high tech industries. Why is this an issue?

Sorry. I didn't mean to imply a moral judgement on the issue. I was just trying to provide an example that furthers the parent's point on Amazon being very protective of their data.

I personally know someone who gave a two week notice at Amazon and had his manager ask him to stay out the quarter. It's all about relationships and reputation. People with a proven track record of quality work and strong ethics are valued there.

What leads you to believe the difference is in the quality of the employee and not the quality of the manager?

Nothing. Relationships are by definition bidirectional. Being able to have a good relationship with a manager implies that that manager is at least not awful, and most likely also good. The person I refer to would never have delayed starting his new job as long as he did if he didn't have professional respect for his manager.

Fired as in not paid for the two weeks? That’s very unusual but being shown the door when you give notice and having your desk effects delivered to you is not at all uncommon.

In the UK they would have to put the person on “gardening leave”.

Firing in this way when someone’s done nothing wrong would be constructive dismissal and prohibited by law.

The fact that Amazon treats their resigning employees in this way doesn’t increase my trust in them.

It actually just makes them look viscous and petty.

What's the difference between this and gardening leave? Does Amazon not pay for those two weeks or what?

Apart from whether Amazon are paying the two weeks notice that they morally owe, one obvious difference would be if your next employer asks have you ever been terminated from a previous position.

Who would want to be placed in the position of saying yes I was fired because I was suspected of being a security risk?

You can just say that you were terminated because your manager at Amazon was insecure and didn’t trust you to not fuck things up?

Well you can of course but interviewers often discount candidates that slag off their old employers on the grounds that they’ll be difficult to manage.

Does anyone ever answer this question truthfully? I generally assume not. The only way to verify this is through a back channel (AIUI corps generally won't disclose the reason due to libel liability), unless the employee really screwed up and didn't sign a separation agreement, which (again AIUI) you'd only decline if you plan on pursuing legal action against your employer.

And if you're already on a back channel, then you don't care about playing fair.

Many companies do the same thing. The employee isn’t fired they are just asked not to return for the 2 weeks. I’ve never heard of the employer not paying out the 2 weeks.

In France the standard notice for engineers is three months, and goes both way. It's not unheard of for a corporation to pay the three months notice when firing someone, without the employee actually coming in anymore, precisely to avoid theft, or the moral hazard towards other employees.

But what's the rational the other way around? When an employee resigns, they obviously know that they are resigning before actually handling in their resignation. If they wanted to leave with something, surely they would have already stolen it? Or it's just an expectation of lazyness, in case nothing has been stolen yet?

It is basically CYA.

If the employee should later indeed be found to have taken IP or other assets during their last weeks at work, it would reflect poorly on whomever decided they should work during the resignation period.

Hence, you let them go immediately, so you can shrug and say 'well, we did what we could' in case of problems down the road.

They don’t think someone would have taken the data before handing in their notice?

Feels a bit silly to me.

Must depend on the org and how you do it. My personal experience is that if you are open and up-front with going to a competitor, they'll cut your access and pay you for the remaining time left on your resignation letter/month.

If you go to a competitor and aren't open about it? You might find yourself terminated with no additional pay.

And it makes sense. At Amazon, most people have varying levels of customer data and/or confidential company data. Amazon has to protect itself from data exfiltration/data theft.

If someone was going to steal company info for a competitor, they’d do it before they gave notice that they were leaving. And they wouldn’t tell their current employer where they were going.

This might catch extraordinarily stupid people from conducting industrial espionage, but really I see it as the company encouraging people to not give any notice at all (which, remember, is just a courtesy) when they quit. It’s shortsighted on the company’s part.

“ their whole company is based on trust. The cost of losing it would be huge, so they’d be super driven to stamp it out.”

This was the exact argument put forth by defenders of Goldman Sachs when it was alleged they were screwing over their own customers in the financial crisis.

On the other hand, now people don't trust them and their stock is below where it was in 2007, compared to the market index which is at more than double that.

All bank stocks are down right now. When comparing Goldman, it would be better to use a bank index ETF fund like XLF rather than the overall market.

You could argue that it's because Goldman destroyed the public trust in the entire industry. How many people who used to just blindly give their money to investment banks are now paying enough attention to their performance relative to index ETFs to find them lacking?

This is a poor argument. Just because they get punished sometimes, doesn't mean it's the norm. Even if Jeff Bezos was a perfectly decent, well-meaning guy, intention is not enough.

If a person keeps stealing from other people, do we just slap them with a fine each time they get caught and let them continue operating in society? No! They go to jail! We make sure they can't continue the crime! Because otherwise, the crime can become highly profitable; allowing any entity to profit from crime is simply incompatible with being a participant in a civilized society - If you let one entity get away with it repeatedly, soon enough, it becomes a viable business model and everyone will be doing it and society will implode.

If he and his shareholders are unwilling or unable to personally take responsibility for every single transgression committed by Amazon, then this company is unfit to exist within our society.

I think that corporate personhood is the biggest problem of our time and is a misnomer because not only do corporations have all the rights that people have, they actually have more rights! I don't have the right to influence politicians in Washington! I don't have the right to consistently get away with crimes with only a fine! I don't have the right to evade taxes by claiming that I live in a different country than where I actually live!

I mean, if you know many amazon employees who overstepped seller data access, then amazon really should do something to prevent seller data access.

Any large organization (that includes government organizations) is going to have some level of crime in it. "Guaranteeing" there isn't any hanky-panky going on somewhere in it is an absurd requirement.

But you can categorically state that it's against the aims and culture of the company, and there are formal processes in place to deal with transgressions, and that you'll be happy to go through those processes in detail, with examples of why and how they were followed.

That's a rather different category of response to "Well I just can't guarantee this doesn't happen."

Of course, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that some organizations explicitly create the incentive for criminal or unethical behavior, fail to setup the safeguards to prevent it, and then use the line level workers as scapegoats if they get caught.

This is significantly different than a good faith organization having some members engage in criminal behavior.

The problem with safeguards is none of them are impermeable, and so how far is it worth going with them? Safeguards aren't free.

That's not what Wells Fargo did given that it was a massively net unprofitable venture. A tiny minority of the new accounts opened were fee paying ones, the vast majority were fraudulent, free accounts opened so employees could collect bonuses.

It's amazing to me that a fraud perpetrated upon Wells Fargo by its own employees is spun as an act of malice by WF itself.

> How can you prove a negative?

I think in science you cannot "prove a negative" because you cannot observe all the events in the system (the universe).

But if you can observe all events in a system (Amazons data access logs) I think you can "prove a negative" by proving that the data was not accessed.

So employee A who should access data sees it and than tells employee B who shouldn’t.

Breached and now you lied to Congress. You can’t control everything that happens in your company.

Agreed, once data passes via human-human communication its not possible to observe 100%.

I think it's a logical fallacy to assume you can "observe all events" in any non-trivial system, particularly where there are humans on the edges.

It's like asking to prove that you haven't been hacked. You can't. The questioner should have been asking about access control, how many people allowed to access, rules about accessing, auditing, how audits are screened for violations, how many people have been caught for violations (if it's zero then you know you have a problem), how they were punished, etc.

Of course hard to see how a Congressperson would know about any of this. Congress should be bringing in domain experts to ask these kinds of questions.

Or perhaps they do know, but they're deliberately being obtuse to score some easy political points.

I don’t think he needs to “prove a negative”. Just show us that you care about upholding the trust your sellers place in you to act ethically.

What if he said “we care about our sellers. To prevent abuse by our Amazon basics team we have isolated independent customer data from our amazon basics team and firewalled the teams with access to the data from the rest of the companies. Independent audits and training are used to minimize the risk of inappropriate access to this sensitive data. “

If Bezos said that wouldn’t you feel better?

Is it abuse for Amazon to compete with their sellers? I don't think so, it's just like Best Buy selling their own brand of TV mounts & HDMI cables and prioritizing them over other brands they carry.

There should be rules in place to stop them from effectively defrauding sellers (e.g. terminating accounts / promotions / offers without contract-backed cause, canceling wholesale orders outside of contract).

Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day).

> Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day).

this is not the problem that people are grappling with, though! the problem is that amazon can see that your product is doing well by looking at "their own" platform data and then competing with you based on your own sales data. I would hope that anyone entering in to a market that Amazon, or any big player, is in would already be aware of their competition.

Amazon can choose at any time to peek at the data and simply flood a market that they know they can dominate on their own marketplace -- does that not seem unfair to people? It seems to me that as long as Amazon is able and willing to profit off of sellers' and services' data on their platforms, they will incentive their employees to take advantage of that in the name of ~Consumer Value~, all else be damned.

>I would hope that anyone entering in to a market that Amazon, or any big player, is in would already be aware of their competition.

Who isn't aware of it though? Every major retailer has their own store brand, and it's been like that since before any of us were born.

At least Amazon clearly marks their brand, unlike some companies create brands like "Open Nature" which is clearly meant to disguise their origin.

I don’t really have a problem with this (as you mention, stores have had their own brands forever), but you may be interested to know that not all Amazon brands are clearly marked and there are a lot of them: https://qz.com/1039381/amazon-owns-a-whole-collection-of-sec...

Wow, I didn't know that. Thanks for the info.

Oh wow, that is just evil.

Same reason regular companies cannot be banks in many countries , you would be able to give loans unfairly to your other business even if they are not credit worthy. It is wrong whether it is Best Buy or Amazon to be both marketplace and seller.

Even if the controls were somewhat weak in practice, his inability to commit to that even on paper is damning.

I mean it’s like an impossible thing to commit to even if he wanted to, no?

Why is it impossible to commit? Restricting access to select people and firewall groups from these data , putting that in your contract with sellers are reasonable things he can do . It will not be perfect , people can still talk etc

Just because your safeguards will not be perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any. It is akin to saying as there are many zero days out there so I won’t secure my infrastructure at all .

Congress held this hearing as part of their looking at what changes to make to the law / changes to force the companies to make, so maybe they'll look at legislation that would change the situation (for example, some way of forcing Amazon to split "platform provider" and "product creator" into separate companies).

I've no idea if anything at all will come of it, or whether anything that does will be good or bad, but this hearing wasn't just about getting verbal commitments of being good from the CEOs (despite there being several questions did ask for verbal commitments in various areas).

I am seriously struggling to see why I need to feel better or worse about this situation in the first place.

How is this different than every other brick and mortar store that offers store brand items? This is a practice society has been completely happy with for decades.

Amazon's third party seller fees aren't trivial even for their FBM service. Amazon labels don't incur this cost just like B&M retailers don't have to pay slotting fees to to get their products on their own shelves. However other retailers charge this fee because shelf space is a scarce resource. Amazon doesn't lose this revenue when adding their items to the product listing.

Amazon also has 50% of e-commerce marketshare and nearly double Walmart's share of all retail sales.

Would the same principle apply to a tech company "privacy policy"?

"We can't guarantee that policy has never been violated."

Perhaps there is a way to make this guarantee: Do not collect the data to begin with.

Don't collect any sales data?

That would mean no reviews or Q/A section because engagement there is a good proxy for sales. Search would also be completely broken because Amazon wouldn't know what products were good.

Not to mention payment processing. How is Amazon going to pay sellers their money if Amazon has no data on what is bought and sold? Dealing with payments cannot be stateless for a number of technical and legal reasons (audits, chargebacks, accounting, etc).

Amazon collecting this data is completely legitimate. Are you concerned that Best Buy knows how many third party HDMI cables they sell while also selling their own?

Your assumption is that Amazon, the middleman, must exist.

If Best Buy, a brick and mortar, were anything like Amazon, they would be under investigation as well. Nonsense comparison.

> Your assumption is that Amazon, the middleman, must exist.

You don't think stores should exist? How do you justify that?

>If Best Buy, a brick and mortar, were anything like Amazon, they would be under investigation as well.

I don't see how they are so different. Both are stores that sell third and first party items. BB even does significant online business. Care to explain?

Many sellers on Amazon have their own stores, be they brick and mortar and/or website. Amazon in these cases is just a middleman processing sales that the third parties are already capable of making themselves. They simply lack the web traffic. This is not true of all the brands carried by Best Buy. Many do not do direct-to-consumer sales.

There are less obvious differences such as the contract terms agreed between brands and Best Buy versus the ones between sellers and Amazon. Those details often are only discovered through litigation.

To suggest Best Buy was already doing what Amazon is doing is nonsense.

> _Many_ sellers on Amazon.

> This is not true of _all_ the brands carried by Best Buy.

Now you're just playing word games. Both Amazon and Best Buy sell some amount of stuff that could be sold direct to consumer, and some amount of stuff that could not. Even if the proportions are different, I'm not seeing how they differ in principle.

> They simply lack the web traffic

How would they acquire it? Amazon is normally their answer to "I'm trying to sell, but don't have the web traffic". Seems like if they could get the traffic without Amazon, they'd leave the platform, like Nike did.

Beyond that, even when you order directly from the manufacturer's website, that doesn't mean they, personally, are handling the sale. All the logistics that go with fulfilling orders and customer service around that I'm sure is outsourced frequently (to Amazon or someone else)

True, however those payment processors are not in competition with the sellers in terms of the goods/services being sold.

The facts are that Amazon does not sell only payment processing, order fulfillment or customer services.

As to the question, I would guess the answer is "Not easily." Otherwise, we would not be having these problems with overgrown websites acting as middlemen for large swaths of the web. The rest of your statements are all true, but that does not change the truth of "They simply lack the web traffic". Amazon has an amount of traffic that gives them leverage as a middleman.

The GP made no such assumption

"How is Amazon going to pay sellers their money if Amazon has no data on what is bought and sold?"

I might agree with you if this sentence used a generic term instead of "Amazon". However it specifically refers to Amazon.

I think people forget that Amazon did not operate as a middleman when they first appeared in the early 1990's.

Amazon was originally a bookseller, not a middleman for other sellers.

Not only does the sentence above from GP assume the existence of Amazon, it assumes that Amazon must act as a middleman for other sellers.

Amazon only needs third party sales data if it is acting as a middleman for third party sellers. There is no requirement that Amazon act as a middleman. The company was founded as an online bookstore.

"And Bezos committed to doing that.?"

Why on earth would we believe him?

It could be a widespread practice he's happy to overlook.

I don't believe anyone in AMZN retail is looking at S3 bucket data, but I do believe they are looking at sales data from the online store, no doubt.

It's not like Walmart or Walgreens isn't doing this.

Do you have access to encrypted data? How does any company can guarantee your password is secure?

He can certainly make that part of the contract with seller. , you would have legal recourse for breach of contract and standing to sue.

It is another matter that law should be strong enough to prevent this in the first place and AMZ or any other retailer shouldn't be needed to put in the contract explicitly.

> How can you prove a negative?

Answering “no” while under oath would be a good start.

You'd rather that CEOs perjure themselves?

I'd rather that them saying "no" didn't mean they were perjuring themselves

You think anyone of any company that employs more than a small handful of people can guarantee that a company policy has never been broken?

I don't see how you can guarantee this without also scrutinizing and monitoring employees to a level that would feel incredibly invasive.

invasive in the same way as employees looking at customer data is invasive?

Zuckerberg did what you are implying. He said what Congress wants to hear by saying Facebook's business model isn't based on Cookies. He is banking on Congress' poor track record of proving perjury and the law enforcement acting on it.

Other CEOs gave truthful answers, which is ... out of 10s of thousands of data points, I can't give you a blanket yes or no without commiting perjury.

That is what is meant by "guaranteeing". They way you interpret the term nothing ever and anywhere could be truly guaranteed and the term becomes useless.

There is a difference between guaranteeing that employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers, and guaranteeing that you have all the policies, access controls and punishments. It seems that Bezoz couldn't guarantee the former, while he probably can guarantee the later.

What? No. They were asking if there were basically access controls in place and he just said there are policies.

Bezos committed to doing [none of] those things only after Amazon was called out by the US Congress and the international press seems like an extremely important distinction.

Amazon hasn't been doing it (why not?), and isn't doing it (why not?), but Bezos has committed to "look into it very carefully". Great (sarcasm).

> There's no way he could make that guarantee.

But you can put various things in place. E.g. limited access, (external) audits, etc. Such things are entirely standard and expected for any big company.

Saying "cannot guarantee" is too much nitpicking. Such needs (limit the access, etc) happens all the time. Say you want to takeover another (competitor) company. During that process you'll need to figure out a lot of information. However, you're competitors and you aren't allowed to do that. The common solution is to "ring fence" that team. Such "ring fencing" is a normal occurrence.

Similarly, you can also educate what is allowed and what not on a regular basis.

The company I work for has annual repeating courses for various basis things. Meaning, GDPR, competition law, fraud, etc. They're highly annoying and enough people try to ignore the course and go straight to the questions. It'll be difficult to pass if you didn't do it. Not doing those course will get you an email

After doing all that you'll still have enough cases where people were found to have committed fraud, etc. But that's entirely different than 'cannot guarantee'.

I know you went into things I said above. However, immediately saying "cannot guarantee" is too much of a technical answer. Yeah, there might be cases. But your whole response is a lot of proactive things. You also need to check after the fact, plus do more than just a policy. There is more than enough possible. Further, the question that was asked is entirely normal.

Regardless. If he is not capable of guaranteeing this, then clearly Amazon is too big and complex to follow the law. If a person is incapable of following the law by controlling their own actions, we put them in a psychiatric asylum. If a corporation is incapable of following the law by controlling their own actions, what should be done with them? Clearly it would be unjust to let them continue. It's already bad enough that corporations have the same rights as people, they shouldn't be exempt from having to face the consequences of their transgressions because that would put their rights above people.

There are very strong ethical and economic grounds for breaking up these corporations. It merely comes down to the law. It really doesn't make sense that corporations are allowed to keep breaking the law and only get fined whereas if people keep breaking the law, they go to jail.

If people were treated the same as corporations and we abolished prisons, people would form mafias and go on rampages, hunt down billionaires, seize all their assets, then use the assets that they stole to pay the fines... Clearly that doesn't make any sense, it would be total anarchy; and yet this is exactly what we allow corporations to do.

Under that definition the US is an open air insane aslyum because nobody knows all of the vast body of laws they are incapable of following them. Meanwhile abolishing all laws would make Hinkley perfectly sane. To be perfectly frank using laws as a basis for sanity isn't a sane concept in the first place.

Besides while they are pissy about accessing the data it isn't /against the law/ per se. A mom and pop scale website doing the same thing wouldn't even be cared about as anti-competive. It isn't like price fixing where it is a crime in itself.

Shouldn't there also be access control security measures in place that prevent this kind of thing.

E.G., not just anyone can look at seller data, have to have a ticket with some IT group to get limited access to a specific seller's data with a specific reason stated for the access etc.

So what if you made up a reason and completed the process as required?

My point being - regardless of access control the people that are allowed to actually have the data could still leak it in the end.

First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco?

You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it to gain success in some aspects of online retail.

But to the proponents of the "market power has helped Amazon strangle so many industries", you have to answer - how did market power help:

-Amazon grow Whole Foods?

-AWS become the most popular cloud service?

-Kindle become the most popular ereader?

It seems to me a much better explanation than "market power abuse" is that Amazon's culture and people have enabled it to dominate a variety of unconnected industries.

I think you're right that Amazon has come to dominate a lot of markets on merit. But it's still the case that having overly dominant players in a market is bad for... well everyone except the dominant player. It doesn't matter why or how it came to be.

This is not universally true. It's bad if the dominant player uses their dominance to deliver sub-par quality at high prices. But so far Amazon doesn't seem to be doing that, at least in my user experience of it.

It is bad that they might one day be able to parlay their dominance into harming consumers, but the dominance itself is not necessarily a bad thing, IMO.

I completely disagree, the quality of products on Amazon has gone downhill over the past 5 years. You may attribute this to influx of bad merchants but it really comes down to Amazon not having the same incentives to properly rank items and remove bad actors. Instead it created Amazon Basics brand and steers users towards it. The influx of misc brand names and items that look exactly like each other just helps confuse consumers and make them lean towards Amazon Basics.

Amazon has always been the more expensive online shop in my experience. You should expect to get overcharged by up to 20%.

Such as what? I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland branded item that doesn’t have a name brand right next to it. Toilet paper, water, dog food, clothing, spices, oil, nuts, etc.

I literally can’t think of a single Kirkland item that was used to run a name brand out of business. And they don’t do any “special placement” either.

Amazon on the other hand....

Not only that, but often times Costco's Kirkland branded item is made by the same supplier as the adjacent name brand.

> often times Costco's Kirkland branded item is made by the same supplier as the adjacent name brand.

That's true for basically all store brands including Amazon Basics.

Amazon basic is never quality just cheap and not complete crap that will break immediately, especially not within the return window. It's only viable because there are currently so many counterfeit goods and downright awful products on Amazon in any category where the item is less than 100 bucks and especially under fifty. If I buy an Amazon basic usb cord I know it will transfer at the rate it says, unlike dozens of other cords on their site, but I still expect it to fray or break in some other way I wouldn't expect from paying a couple dollars more for anker.

Kirkland usually is not a top of a brand category, except when they are putting out marketing to let you know how good their vodka is, but they are never competing at the bottom either.

Why would you think AmazonBasics are not the same thing?

The construction company my dad worked for was hired to redo the concrete flooring in the factory sockets were made. He told me how the sockets would come down the conveyor belt and then get pushed down different paths. At the end of the different paths, the sockets were stamped with Husky, Craftsman, etc. Different company names, same socket.

I hate doing this, but just want to point out the humor of people downvoting the comment without a SINGLE example to counter my point. Either you've never shopped at Costco or you're just pissed that Amazon is 100% NOT equivalent to Costco despite the really poor analogy.

And how could they be? Costco makes their money off membership fees - Amazon is attempting to make their money on driving their competitors out of business through what can only be described as monopolistic practices. Costco isn't an open bazaar that tracks goods sold and enters markets where they see "vendors" being successful. They sell a small number of items at a fair price - and don't intentionally screw their suppliers.

Because the point they are making is irrelevant. It doesn't matter to the discussion whether or not Kirkland brand items have other name brands next to them

It absolutely does, the claim was that Kirkland does what Amazon does and it's patently false. Kirkland doesn't stock name brand items, figure out what customers are buying the most of, then build a competitor while giving priority to their own brand which was the accusation.

On Costco, it’s not a marketplace for third party sellers to ship to customers. Sure it’s closer to us to make analogies with traditional brands, but Amazon’s position is nothing similar.

Then, the difference between business as usual and market power abuse is the extent to which you do something. The same way annoying someone and bullying is a matter of degree. Here being in a dominant position Is what makes it different.

> On Costco, it’s not a marketplace for third party sellers to ship to customers. Sure it’s closer to us to make analogies with traditional brands, but Amazon’s position is nothing similar.

Is it not? I mean, some of the details are different, but fundamentally Costco sells third party products. I don't really see how the distinction here is relevant to the issue at hand.

Amazon doesn’t buy the third party products to resell to the client, nor does it pass delivery and production contracts with volume orders and quality checks etc.

It’s a completely different business that has a different relationship with its sellers. In particular Amazon guarantees nothing and the seller is fully responsible for delivering the goods and satisfying the client. Going through Amazon’s warehouses is still a different case, but if I’m not mistaken it’s just a shipping agreement and nothing more.

In specific cases Amazon might actually buy the goods from the seller first, but it’s the exception more than the rule.

Kirkland products are actually white label versions of the products they copy, produced by the company they are copying - so it’s an entirely different situation - ie Costco is paying brands for their products (albeit at a lower price), not stealing.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23912991

Do you think Amazon is making its own sunblock? I'm sure many of their self-branded products are being manufactured by name brands as well.

Amazon doesn't manufacture their own Amazon Basics goods. They pay for it, albeit at a lower price.

This is common with many white label products and not at all unique to Costco. For example, I know which craft brewery white labels one of Trader Joe's brand beers (each type of beer might be made by a different brewery). Same production line, just different bottles.

The argument I’m familiar with goes as follows: Stores choose all their goods, bazaars provide stalls for merchants. People don’t like when one tries to masquerade as the other, or, be both.

Costco, being a store, can choose foods or goods that have been rebranded or independently sourced and no one really cares — they are still fully autonomous. They have always taken ownership of the product, so a change in supply seems to be completely within the store’s wheelhouse.

On the other hand, Amazon is a bazaar. Merchants line up, trying to get you to purchase from their stall using various tactics. Merchants get unhappy when they see that the bazaar’s guard uses their ledger to inform the head of the bazaar which merchants he could kick out. Not literally kick out, but be put in a worse position so that the bazaar’s own products are now the first ones people see.

This conflict of interest is in direct opposition of the merchants and may be in opposition of the consumers.

I personally really like Amazon Basics, as it tends to remove the brand cost. However, there’s a reason brands became popular in the first place — and the Amazon Basic brand is not one I associate with “quality”. I think the best part of the Amazon Basic brand is that it establishes a minimum bar of quality that Amazon generally needs. I know if so want the cheapest I go to them, otherwise I do my research or rely on brand reputation like I did before.

This is becoming more of the case with Whole Foods, which I’ve started to avoid. They were a quality store and that quality (seems to) have gone down. The issue with the Whole Foods purchase is that there are lower quality grocery stores already, so I’d be interested in how they’re doing with that market.

I think it is more a problem of reach\scale. If a store has a reach just like a bazaar, we need to worry about how the store operates behind the scene just like the bazaar.

Amazon seems to have only recently moved ahead of Walmart in revenue[0], so I find it hard to support the store inherently has a smaller reach than a bazaar. Am I misunderstanding your position or the nuances therein?

I think my initial post agrees with your conclusion, though, which is that trying to be both is an area that is not as defined and is part of what is causing issues.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2019/05/15/worlds-...

Amazon is fundamentally a store. Third party sellers on Amazon are the equivalent of Girl Scouts: the store lets them sell cookies on the premises but that’s not what the store is there for. IMO third-party sellers are close to a dark pattern since it’s so hard to distinguish them from actual sold-by-Amazon product listings.

Costco does similar things—both my ladder and my blender were things I purchased at Costco under the influence from third-party sellers demonstrating products there. Sure, the stocking and checkout were via Costco, but the same is true for Amazon.

Have you been on Amazon recently? Third party sellers dominate it.

Amazon is fundamentally a bazaar that does a good job of pretending to be a store, but the mask is starting to slip.

I’ve noticed this when shopping for certain things and I don’t like it. But honestly they were a store first and they still own the entire consumer experience. Whenever a third party seller from Amazon contacts me, I am usually surprised because in my mind, I’m buying from Amazon and not from them.

Third party sellers who use FBA in particular are more like suppliers to whom Amazon can outsource part of their job to. In that case I’d say Amazon is a store, with infinite shelf space, and a very permissive policy about letting suppliers stock some of that infinite shelf space themselves sometimes.

We’re in agreement about all the basic premises, I think the key points I’d push back with are:

(1) I can’t “easily” register as a seller with Costco, but I can with Amazon (Or so I believe)

(2) The ease with which non-company merchants can enter is a key property of the bazaar vs store dichotomy. Easier to enter, more bazaar-like

(3) Given (2) and (1), it seems like Amazon wants to be both a store and a bazaar, which my initial post articulated as a “problematic” state, at the least. Even if only problematic through novelty

This doesn’t make Amazon good or bad, I can just see where it leads to new discussion

Sure, but I think it’s somewhat dubious to be immediately suspicious of any successful business model that changes the basic assumptions. Once you start enshrining “this is how we’ve always done it” into law and policy you basically outlaw innovation and start operating in a prohibited-unless-explicitly-allowed rather than allowed-unless-explicitly-prohibited mode.

Interesting point.

The bazaar part of amazon is the worst part for me. It’s purely noise. I hate it and do whatever I can to filter it out. I just want the store part of amazon and like their basics brand stuff.

In certain parts of the world supermarkets are built to be two stories or more so that the ground floor may be rented out to small vendors. I don't see anybody object to that.

Most people prefer to pay a fixed fair price instead of potentially being ripped off because they don't personally know the seller. Haggling constantly is an awful waste of time

I think haggling is a big sign of an immature market. But I’m not sure that really touches on parent’s point that there can be both.

And I’m not sure parent really touches on my point that the bazaar part of amazon is just noise.

It’s worse than unreliable junk. A vendor is showing up and dropping their orange painted lemons onto amazon’s orange display.

That's by design. You can't know whether a product legitimately came from the original manufacturer or was sent to an amazon warehouse by a third party seller. Therefore AmazonBasics is the only "trust worthy" brand on Amazon and the only reason it is trust worthy is that there is targeted campaign (by letting fraud happen) against every other brand that isn't AmazonBasicsbrand.

This distinction is not hard and fast even in the physical world. Just go to original department stores in Paris. They have a mix of stalls for merchants and the general store.

Also many landlords (airports, arenas, etc...) charge a percentage of sales instead of a fixed rate (and even fixed rates can be adjusted based on perceived revenue).

Amazon is basically the Internet version of WalMart. WalMart used its power to force suppliers' margins to near nothing thus lowering prices for consumers and making the WalMart heirs some of the richest people in the world. Amazon uses its power to improve the consumer experience overall thus making Bezos the richest person in the world.

The complaints leveraged at Amazon have analogues to those leveraged at WalMart. Also, WalMart has copied Amazon's online strategy including being a store/bazaar hybrid.

This area would seem to be very hard to legislate. I suspect that most of the tech giants are now partly competing with each other and partly with the next big innovations. Amazon became WalMart's competition with the rise of the Internet.

> This distinction is not hard and fast even in the physical world. Just go to original department stores in Paris.

Or you can go to department stores, gas stations, or grocery stores in the US, where the “store within a store” model is also very common.

Stores also sell on consignment and force companies to take back unsold goods. It’s especially the case for media like magazines and back in the day CDs.

But target / walmart / your bookstore can often return product for full refund to the folks making it within a time period (usually within a year).

Honestly it’s a dumb hill to choose to die on for the simple reason it is so obviously pro consumer as to be politically and legally untenable as a status quo antitrust matter.

This is more like a landlord evicting a restaurant and then opening a copy of that restaurant in the same location

If the landlord can run the restaurant as profitably as a restaurant operator could, then either the landlord or the restaurant operator was in the wrong business before. Property management and restaurant management are very different businesses that require very different skills, and it's pretty rare to be able to do both very well, which is why landlords normally lease the space to professional restaurateurs.

"Amazon took my idea and did the same thing at lower cost" is basically another way of saying "I wasn't adding any value but was still capturing a bunch of money on all those sales". Maybe there's an argument there that Amazon is freeloading on market research, and we should have some kind of intellectual property protection for market research, but that seems like it'd be a policy disaster. And there are lots of businesses out there already that piggyback off their competitors' market research (for instance, Burger King supposedly just locates anywhere McDonald's can operate profitably).

> "Amazon took my idea and did the same thing at lower cost"

This isn't always the case, as many merchants have pointed it out. Sometimes (I'm sure not all the time), it's more "Amazon took my idea, and all the validation work I did in order to develop and prove it and build a market for it, and is selling it below cost in order to force everyone else out of the market"

I'm not passing judgement on whether that is okay or not; I'm pointing out that Amazon "winning marketshare" does not mean that they're doing it in a better way, or at a lower cost. Sometimes it just means that Amazon is able to spend/risk a whole lot more money than anyone else.

I'm not aware of any evidence that Amazon sells stuff below cost.

And really you're not going to get any direct evidence of this. Amazon is a private company that would have to willingly release this information related to their costs, and obviously won't.

However during congressional testimony last week Bezos was directly asked this in relation to Echo devices. His response was that "at list price" Echo devices "are not below cost", however stated "sometimes when it’s on promotion it may be below cost, yes."

Echo devices (for example) are "on promotion" a significant amount of the time.

Hell during Prime Day last year Amazon was selling Fire tablets for like $12 (although that was widely believed to be a pricing error that was still honored).

> Amazon is a private company

Amazon is a public company.

> however stated "sometimes when it’s on promotion it may be below cost, yes."

Using hardware as a loss leader isn't unusual -- you get a discount on the hardware but on average they make it back on products/services that are complements of the hardware. Keurig and every printer manufacturer do this, too.

Kindle definitely became the most popular ereader through a type of market power. The difference is that Amazon didn't win that market power, they were gifted it by publishers that insisted on DRM that would lock users into the Amazon ecosystem.

This was a waste of time.

A 1 year study produced concrete details that can be investigated. Then the most senior congress people get 2 minutes of sounds bites and no progress is made. It is a farce. There may well be real violations of public trust or illegal activity, but this is not the way to effectively examine those reports.

They don't even let the CEOs talk long enough to commit perjury. It is a dog and pony show for congress and the CEOs.

Obviously, in 5 minutes nothing can be done. I suppose in smaller setting, maybe sub-committees, but not here. Here the idea is that later DOJ starts looking around and let them talk for hours and days. Will it happen?

I agree with sub-committees and more focused time. It doesn't make sense for this sub-committee to tackle so many disparate businesses.

Imagine in 1982 Congress had hearings with AT&T, Exxon Mobile, Ford, Amoco, DuPont, Boeing, and Eastman Kodak. They probably wouldn't have had the focus to force the breakup of the Bell Systems.

It's politics. This wasn't for any actual investigation or enforcement (that's what the DOJ and FTC are doing), this was for the re-election campaigns.

So I used to work with someone from Amazon retail. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that Amazon mined their seller data to undercut them. We sold on Amazon and he constantly told us that we were fools to do so. He even mentioned that prior to accepting a position he had looked up our seller performance to make sure he was going to a good company.

Maybe policies have since changed. At the time I was also told the most popular "test" SKU used by Amazon engineers was a 50 gallon barrel of lube.

I can't comment on any of the meaty stuff, but I can comment on the silly.

> At the time I was also told the most popular "test" SKU used by Amazon engineers was a 50 gallon barrel of lube.

Not knowing when this was, but I can say around 2013-2015 that this wasn't a general thing[0]. Could there have been an engineer who used it a lot? Sure, but there's a lot of them.

Even if you disregard the crudity of it, it also just doesn't make for a good test ASIN outside of a small number of verticals. You'd much rather test with real ASINs where possible (which is almost 100% of the time), or with something idiomatic to the experience you're developing.

EDIT: though maybe people have become inspired by https://observer.com/2015/07/at-1k-55-gallon-bottle-of-lube-... ? Still, it stands to reason that you want to test with real products whenever you can.

50 gallon barrel of lube was a real SKU, I remember a friend sending me the link because he found it amusing.

Was a couple thousand dollars IIRC

It is, but it's a single particular ASIN. And given the majority of the time issues/changes arise due the particular characteristics of a particular item (is it pantry? is it prime? is it a garment? is it a toiletry? etc. etc.) using any one particular ASIN isn't going to be viable for most developers.

I can't really confirm/deny whether what he was saying was true, but I heard this from him around 2009.

Be wary of stories you hear. People like to embellish to make themselves sound interesting or as if they have some embargoed knowledge.

I worked at Amazon and heard stories from other people(who worked there, but didn't know I worked there since I just describe myself as a programmer if people ask and not an amazonian) about things I knew to be untrue

Are there indicators we can use to differentiate people who actually have embargoed knowledge from people engaging in puffery?

Really hard to say. There was a project veritas(which is a sad joke of an outfit) video with a Google employee where they got her to say all sorts of untrue things about the company because....she wanted to impress anew acquaintance? Puff herself up?

It happens all the time. Honestly I'd be inclined to disbelieve secret knowledge shared with me unless it was by a close associate who I knew well and trusted to be honest.

Bezos gave an incredibly forthright set of testimony. I like how he continued to answer in the affirmative when the interrogator continued to drop the aggregate quantity scope. Can they do it for 3 sellers, yes, for 2 yes. That's basic mathematics, the aggregation will take place over however many are in the pool be it 100, 50 or even 3. Seems like Bezos stuck to the facts and reality on that one.

His comment about trying to give helpful answers too when questioned about organized stolen goods. Bezos did a fine job, his replies were coherent, concise, and didn't bumble trying to coordinate and mobilize a bunch of caveats and statements with extensive justifying or clarifying context that could not be delivered in the compressed timescale he was afforded.

Yes, he easily had the most substantive and thoughtful responses of the 4 in my opinion.

>Before the Journal’s report came out, Amazon had told Congress that it doesn’t access sales data to help guide the launch of its own products.

This is insanely hard to believe. Amazon just started selling batteries and other random goods under their Basics brand based on ZERO inside sales knowledge? I'd love to see how they enforce that.

Playing the devil's advocate here.

You can get this data easily from market research reports and sales data of the respective companies also.

Look closely. Amazon claimed they don't access individual seller data, but they do access aggregated product data.

However, in at least one case the aggregated data was only between two sellers: Amazon Warehouse (which only sold a few returned items) and the original seller.

"Amazon draws a distinction between the data of an individual third-party seller and what it calls aggregated data, which it defines as the data of products with two or more sellers."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...

Ah there it is. That makes a lot more sense... honestly at their scale I don't think they should be able to do this, aggregate or not.

They're about 50% of all online sales in the US, where compared to brick-and-mortar, Walmart gets a lot of flak as a small-business killer despite only accounting for 15% of all physical retail sales.

eCommerce, though, only accounted for 16% of all 2019's US retail sales. [0]

So, Walmart ought to get rid of all these private brands [1] I take it?

[0] https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/e-commerce-sales-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walmart_brands

Right not a bad point, but I was making the comparison to demonstrate Amazon's scale within ecommerce... not to compare the volume of sales across all commerce.

I personally think the distinction matters, but maybe I'm wrong.

The other issue with your distinction is that all these brick-and-motor retailers also have online eCommerce services where shopping carts, logging data, and third party vendors are involved in improving the experience - and let me tell you, those guys are using the data. Probably not nearly as well as Amazon uses theirs, but they're still trying as best they can.

They do, though. I have been on calls with Amazon reps to discuss how our ad campaigns have been performing, what can be done, and what additional sources of data from Amazon we can access through beta programs and the like. Individual Amazon agents of varying levels constantly check and reference the private data of individual sellers for all kinds of reasons (again, most of them justified and useful). In most such cases I have been very impressed on the search ad side of things. On the outside Amazon ad placement side of things (Amazon Media Group) they were basically crooks, but that is normal in display ad world, which is a crooked world full of frauds.

They can absolutely access individual seller data and do so all the time for all kinds of (mostly mundane) reasons. The aggregated data is also actually more valuable than the individualized data in most situations.

Amazon unlike Google has tended to open up more accurate sources of data to larger groups of sellers, in contrast with Google or FB which have tended to start off giving people lots and lots of free data and then paywalling more and more of it through the progressive crippling of the keyword tool and so on.

Frankly Amazon is so bad at selling its own private label products that it should not concern anyone. They suck at it compared to any other major retailer that you can think of. I have seen Amazon private labels be discontinued and fail and have competed with Amazon products successfully in many different categories on Amazon. They are usually pretty lazy and un-inventive. When they succeed it is usually at the level of "acceptable competence, good price to performance ratio" as in many of the Amazon Basics computer hardware accessories.

It is a major distraction from other serious issues like the endemic crime on the platform (counterfeiting etc.) which actually poses a serious danger to customers, to Amazon, to sellers, and to brands as well.

AmazonBasics won't sell if there is no counterfeiting to force you to buy it.

I dunno. I mean I'll stipulate that they did access insider data. But batteries seems like something they could have just you know figured out on their own. Doesn't seem like a sinister undercutting of the market. It's not like there is a shortage of battery brands on Amazon or elsewhere.

Bezos cannot guarantee that employees may have access 3rdparty sales data. Can any big retail like Walmart, Costco, Safeway, etc. can guarantee that no employee ever looked at 3rdparty sales data ? If Walmart sees a cheap item flying off the shelves, and thinks that it can make a cheap copy of it, then Walmart would do it. Isn't how store brand work ? and they often use a white label producer anyway (i.e. same factory, different packaging/label). Walmart, Costco, etc. they know precisely what products you buy and how often. They can push you next time to buy their own version of it, by sending you a discount for for it, or simply rearrange the shelves in store. I understand that sellers with little to no competitive advantage, are very vulnerable to such practices. But this is hardly new with Amazon. They could avoid selling through those channels (that is why you find some products only through producer website, or direct sales). Amazon has 35% of the e-commerce market in US, or 6% of retail market in US (Walmart has 9% of retail market in US). Amazon does not do as well in the rest of the world. The 35% of the e-commerce market is in US. And even that 35% includes being an agent for 3rdparty sellers. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...

Given that they're third party companies, i think the question is if Walmart can data mine the sales data from other stores in the same mall?

Isn't this straight forward?

If the employees responsible for product development for Amazon brands have credentials to access 3rd party data, then assume they used it.

Doesn't matter if only one used it, or all of them - they had access to it, all the rest is semantics/claims/smoke&mirrors.

Gently reminder that Amazon uses to astroturf social sites. If this post sees a unfair amount of pro-Amazon statements is possible that is part of Amazon's PR strategy.

- "Amazon workers are being paid to defend the company on Twitter": https://mashable.com/article/amazon-warehouse-twitter-defens...

But do not call on people just for siding with Amazon most people are just expressing their own opinion freely and deserve respect. Just adjust how you read the threads to account for biased results on voting and side representation.

Question. What would a system capable of proving “this didn’t happen” look like?

Audit trail of data source access?

Though then, you would need to differentiate between legitimate access and using it for your own products.

Suppose the data is accessed by one employee who routinely accesses data of this sort for legitimate purposes — but the employee takes a copy of the data (even just a summary) and sneakernets it over to the in-house brands.

How can this attack vector be mitigated?

Yeah, this was what I was referring to. There is no way to control this and I am guessing this is why Jeff Bezos wasn't committing on this not being violated as well.

Bureaucracy. A company that size, these people probably wouldn't know each other and at the scale needed would require significant organization to accomplish this. You would need a team of people doing this full time which requires bureaucracy.

A hard regulatory barrier between the product side and the sales platform side.

This already exists in the financial sector. What you would call an "investment bank" is actually a holding company with a number of subsidiaries.

The investment bank subsidiary does capital raising and M&A advisory, while the broker-dealer does market transactions. These are separated by a "Chinese wall" or a "firewall". There are criminal penalties for circumventing the wall.

That's about the only way to do it, but it's still a relatively easy barrier to get over in my experience (I can't speak to finance).

I work in a heavily regulated industry as well with clear "firewalls" between different groups. You're basically relying on the company's own good faith and fear of being punishment to actually enforce it. And the chance of it being discovered is very low as long as it's not a formal process within the company.

"We have a policy against that" along with "I know of no such occurrences and if I did find out they'd get fired."

I don’t think that’s exactly enough for serious things, like Anti-Money-Laundering or Bribery in finance. The company also needs to make be able to prove they (1) actually implemented reasonable policies to prevent it (e.g. having access controls, educating employees on relevant legislation, etc.) and (2) make sure that they’re not just avoiding the problem (e.g. by telling employees not to do it but then not investigating, or by hiring another local company to do the bribing).

My thought was that people reacting to the article are disappointed they didn't get an empty promise.

Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon employees have accessed sales data from independent sellers on its marketplace to help the company develop competing products for its private-label. Amazon has a policy barring the practice, but lawmakers like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) focused in on the company’s enforcement of that policy.

“Let me ask you, Mr. Bezos, does Amazon ever access and use seller data when making business decisions?” Jayapal asked.

Bezos highlighted the company’s policy banning the practice, but said, “I can’t guarantee you that that policy has never been violated.” He continued, “We continue to look into that very carefully. I’m not yet satisfied that we’ve gotten to the bottom of it, and we’re going to keep looking at it. It’s not as easy to do as you would think because some of the sources in the article are anonymous.”

This seems reasonable. They have internal controls, but auditing of them is hard, and as he's under oath he can say they have the controls but ... proving a negative is hard. I understand why people predisposed to not trust Amazon, but in this case this is a reasonable answer being pulled out of context for a soundbite.

Spin off a separate/independant company thinking and producing the goods?

I'm surprised that people are surprised.

ex-AWS employee here. I worked in one of the managed services (can't say which one because it might reveal my identity). In Managed services, instances are created in AWS VPC so employees have access to underlying VM.

We have used that capability to get stats about the type of customer workloads, and devised feature products based on that.

whoa...

He should have said he can neither confirm nor deny.

Not sure I am against commodity goods being driven to razor thin profit margins.

>commodity goods being driven to razor thin profit margins.

that's not the only factor

Any mention if the same non-guarantee applies to third party intellectual property on AWS? There doesn't seem to be much to stop them from "borrowing" code from AWS customers without anyone being the wiser.

I don't think that is a concern, I think a concern is them looking at traffic patterns and network infrastructure setups within AWS so they could potentially one-up them on that front. They aren't going to steal someone's code from their own servers.

This is why you encrypt, it’s not impossible to bypass but it would make it a gargantuan task.

If it runs on aws, it must be decrypted at some point. If it's not, then you're using it as a storage only. There are studies on "decryptionless" data computation but nowhere near practical stage yet

IP theft is no joke and isn't some grey area of the law. By accessing and reusing code that belongs to someone else it would simply break the law and no-one would even try that considering how stupid it is.

Now anti-competitive behavior is much harder to control for and that's what would be at play here.

Jeff Bezos probably also can't promise they won't use startups AWS usage to find out as much as they can about their business in an M&A or just competitive analysis scenario.

> “I do not think that’s systematically what’s going on,” Bezos said. “Third-party sellers in aggregate are doing extremely well on Amazon.”

Cool so cheating is okay if you do it only a little, great take.

That's having your cake and eating it too.

I hope congress does something to curb this behavior where these platforms glean information from hard working businesses and use that data to inform the platforms' tactics.

I'm honestly intrigued as to how this is so morally unambiguous.

Walmart, any-given-supermarket, Costco, etc., have in-house brands (for example Kirkland with Costco). These became prominent in the 90's and there was similar discussion at the time about the ethics of a supermarket introducing competitors to the brands it stocks. Such controversy has died down and now it is commonplace. Looking at some updated articles, in-house brands at those retailers have in many (most?) cases outsold their branded competitors, so in-house brands like Kirkland are actually the largest brands in the country.

So my question is: what makes Amazon different, behaviorally, than Costco, Walmart, Vons, etc.? Both use an (arguably) unfair data asymmetry to introduce in-house branded products to compete with the external brands they also sell. You then have brands like Trader Joe's that go out of their way to have an in-house brand, and make few exceptions.

On open question is: who is this behavior actually hostile to? I think it's now conventional wisdom that if you're a brand selling in Vons or Trader Joe's that you need some special sauce to compete successfully with an inevitably-introduced in-house brand. So what is that special sauce? You have some brands that are exclusive because of their provenance or method of creation (say, a particular Scotch). But then you have many brands that are actually manufactured in the same locations and by the same people as the in-house brands, wherein the brand itself is a middleman who created a particular formulation or price/materials ratio that may or may not be the best one. These would seem to be the most vulnerable to Amazon building an in-house competitor, or Walmart, or Vons, etc.

I suppose, looking for the other side of the argument, that the question would be if Amazon has so much monopolistic market clout that the third party has no way to exist once the in house brand has taken over. E.g. as though Costco were the only supermarket period, or, more accurately, if Trader Joe's were the only supermarket period.

> So my question is: what makes Amazon different, behaviorally, than Costco, Walmart, Vons, etc.? Both use an (arguably) unfair data asymmetry to introduce in-house branded products to compete with the external brands they also sell. You then have brands like Trader Joe's that go out of their way to have an in-house brand, and make few exceptions.

The difference is that Costco very clearly discriminates about whose products it will stock on shelves, whereas Amazon is more like a flea market that charges people for renting bazaar stalls to sell from, and POS machines for processing payments.

I'm not sure that should result in legislative differences, but that is a pretty significant difference between the two.

It's interesting how perspectives differ and I'm not disagreeing with yours. If you'd asked me before this discussion whether or not I felt, given those criteria, that Amazon was a store or a flea market, I'd say I'd prefer Amazon to act like a store, and while it does have flea market aspects, I'd be happy for it to move away from them and in the store direction.

The times I've actively disliked Amazon was when I bought some cheap but well-reviewed product and got something that was below cheap quality. I realized at those times that my natural expectation of Amazon was that it had some quality threshold for what it sold. I realized my thinking about Amazon did need to become flea-market-like, e.g. look that gift horse in the mouth! Except that isn't viable online where you can't personally evaluate what you're buying, especially on the low end of the market.

I now like buying Amazon Basics at the low end price tier because it has a certain quality bar. I'd be more than happy, from a pure consumerist perspective, for Amazon to be mainly stocked with high quality third parties, its in-house brand filling in the cheaper side of the market, and then non-premium third parties who have somehow successfully competed with the in-house brand with some angle (say, sourcing a cheaper process that still gets results).

I wouldn’t be mad if they had their own products without using data mining to compete against their sellers. It’s that they use advanced data intelligence to compete.

If they competed naively (had a hard wall between their market place division and their consumer products division, I wouldn’t have an issue.

That sounds ideal to me too, but you have the same data asymmetry in the supermarket example. Supermarkets are pioneering data aggregators, having the ability to observe foot traffic and having the final seller aggregations. They can and do have a bird's eye view that they actively use to choose what to do with Kirkland, Parent's Choice, etc.

I'd be very interested in what comprehensive reform in that area might look like and unintended consequences that might impact the consumer. I'm a big Trader Joe's fan, and they aggressively push out or white label third party brands. Only brands that are seemingly irreplacable, like Roquefort cheese or single malt Scotch-es, are spared the white label (and even then Trader Joe's constantly puts up 'Trader Joes blue', or 'Trader Joe's scotch' in an endless attempt to replicate). Should it be legal for Trader Joe's to do exactly that, but illegal for them to use sales data to optimize? I'm not sure I'd find that a happy outcome.

If Trader Joe’s were the only supermarket chain or they had an 80% market share, yes I’d have a problem, unless they had always been no frills label only and then decades later decided, you know what, we’ll bring in some independent brands in.

My problem is their using independent brand/seller data to undermine/undersell that brand by leveraging that morally dubious data.

What AmazonBasics product isnt a commodity Made in China?

Curious as to what the response is like on internal email lists like @seattle-chatter.

How are employees responding to Bezos remarks today?

Does anyone believe Bezos?

Not believe as in he can guarantee they didn't?

Not believe as in “this is not a good faith answer”.

Exactly. Thanks for taking me literally. You definitely don’t deserve the downvotes but it appears the average ‘hacker’ here trusts Bezos more than us. Interesting, hey??

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23996125

No, I’m asking literally. “Does anyone believe Bezos?”

I sure don’t - a man with that much control and who is known for being that demanding doesn’t strike me as the type of person who could actually not know something like that (if he cared to find out). But, judging by the downvotes, the average person trusts him more than me. That’s very interesting...

Edit - I can’t fucking believe I have to use ‘literally’ to be taken literally.

Edit 2 - Fuck again. “I literally can’t fucking believe I have to use ‘literally’ to be taken literally. :)

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

– From the classic scene in Casablanca, 1942 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME)

I see no fault on Amazon's side about using the data that are accessible to them, and exploit whatever value from them.

Naturally, the competition is for a winner to emerge. Not to continuously drag on in a competition. What Amazon did is natural and reasonable in a competition.

Secondly, it's a reasonable thing for a platform to access aggregate sales data. Amazon is a retail platform. It's entirely unreasonable to forbid them from using such data for the benefits of the sellers and buyers, and for their platform to function better.

In the end, this is a value judgement: * Is it still a valuable thing to let the small retailers to operate independently, and be free from of systematic data-driven competition from platforms?

My feeling is that the small retailers are just an inefficient way of using society resources. And I support Amazon's strategy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com