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Can't you open a normal online store that doesn't rely on Amazon? You could try shopify, or etsy, or sell on eBay? Or make your own?

Otherwise I feel it's a chicken and egg. It's like saying we need Amazon or a similar big known marketplace so that customers can find you and buy from you, but at the same time, we don't like the concentration of power it brings.

So if nobody tries to open an online store on their own anymore, what then?

You can, but the fact that other large companies (like MonoPrice, and even newegg) sell alot of things on Amazon as well shows just much market Amazon controls.

One should likely have both, their own store, and an amazon store

I never go to Amazon to buy monoprice items. I go to monoprice and get guaranteed quality control over the items I will receive. If your products are compelling and your customer support is good I would prefer your own site vs going to Amazon.

While you dont, and I dont either we are not the only customers of Monoprice, and it seems monoprice gets enough sales from Amazon to justify having a store on that

The fact that we do not shop at Amzn for those items do not really change the reality of ecommerce in 2020

I agree 100%, and often use NewEgg and Monoprice for specific needs, but there's a huge swath of stuff where I check Amazon first just because they're always competitively priced and ubiquitous. Recently, there was an appliance accessory I needed that was only available from Amazon. Their position as the first place to buy online is crazy.

I've had to go to amazon several times to buy monoprice products since their website was just broken on multiple different occasions in the last year.

Platform traffic and discoverability. ECom volume lives or dies by traffic and Amazon has the bulk of it in Western markets. This is only going up as people take their product search directly to eCom vs. generic search (this BTW is also why Baidu began losing market power vs. Ali in China and Ali has also been a lot more innovative than Amazon in terms of attracting content creators on site)

Amazon's ads are 10x cheaper than Google/FB etc ads, that's why many brands remain amazon-only - they can't afford to advertise outside of it with their narrow margins.

Sounds awful, my recommendation is to find a connection who can put you in touch with someone at Amazon.

My experience with these huge companies is you can either get stuck in Algo Hell where you either get automated responses or are redirected to people who can't help you.

Or try to get your story to the top of HN, that seems to work with Google

> find a connection who can put you in touch with someone at Amazon.

I was at Audible for many years, and at least within that section of Amazon this would have been very sound advice.

If any complex legal procedures, economic regulations, or necessary international standards must be followed to sell your product, there is a strong chance that Amazon's policies are being handled by a single GM/PM type who can directly handle the internal tooling necessary to remedy the ongoing issue.

If you're in the US, could you contact your representative about your experience? The government is starting the wake up to abuses like this and you might find a receptive audience.

At the very least, Amazon might suddenly talk to you or reverse their decision to ban you with a Congress person breathing down their neck.

I’ve been saying for a while that a serious class action lawsuit, government intervention, or both, is needed in order to curtail these practices.

Amazon, Google and Facebook have laid a path of destruction far and wide through this practice of lifetime bans.

Today these bans mean being excluded from the online business world (achieving scale is almost impossible without them).

Isn't this how its always worked?

If you're a farmer selling to a grocery chain, they have all the power in how your product is sold and marketed. If they feel your product is subpar, whether rightly or wrongly, and drop you, you have essentially zero recourse.

The problem is no given retailer has the sort of market power Amazon does. There are at least a dozen grocery reatailers in my smallish city, and dozens nationwide. In fact, merging grocery store chains are frequently forced to divest of stores in order to ensure communities have multiple options.

There are some who came close, though Amazon is in a league of its own. Sears Roebuck, in its day, aalong with Montgomery Wards (which long had a bad reputation with both sellers and customers), K-Mart, Walmart, and before them the railroads and AT&T.

There are a few grocery chains with national reach (and they've been further consolidating), but none controls major markets (rural regions are often another story).

Amazon is World - China.

Amazon, like Uber and all the other companies criticized here gives me exactly what I want: a trouble free shopping experience without getting ripped off. No one else wants to enter the arena. No one wants to even come close. If there were viable alternatives, I would use them.

I live in NYC where Walmart is banned so we're left with the Mom-and-Pop stores + the permitted national retailers like Walgreens and CVS both of which charge multiples over products available on Amazon. We're talking like 300% more for items like toothpaste and other toiletries. And in-store experiences that flat-out suck. Everyone knows this and that's why practically no one cares about Amazon's bad PR or their questionable HR practices behind the scenes. In one ear and out the other.

Execution and customer service is everything and right now and Amazon's execution for customers has been amazing for a long time now. This isn't like a 37Signals space where you can one-down the competition. You one-up or go bust. I can't sympathize with your situation without more details being shared. Whatever your response was to that case must not have been up to Amazon's standards. It seems unlikely they would randomly pick on revenue generating sellers without cause.

Can't you create an LLC and obfuscate your name that way?

> I've been banned for life.

Why would you even consider associating with them again? Ban them for life as well and do your business somewhere else.

Ummm can’t help but feel like your comment started off a little tone deaf? Yikes.

I only post this because you seem to have a history of low-effort comments like these. Please take this kind of clap-back nonsense to reddit, as it's not appropriate here on HN.

The ethos of the GP was obvious, not to mention that many plantations were not slave plantations, but rather sharecropper plantations (which is most likely what GP means). So even looking at the metaphor from a historical context, there's no "yikes" to be had. Maybe instead of polluting one of the few remaining decent communities on the internet, your time would be better spent reading a history book or two.

I'm only posting this because I've seen this type of response to responses many times. While it's good to encourage higher standards of communication and thoughtful response, there's no need to slam a different community and think people on HN are somehow better.

dvt made no claims about the people on HN being better than those on reddit. Simply that Reddit's community standards lead to it being a lower quality place for holding discussions compared to here. I find that point to be so obviously true I don't know what else there is to say.

Reddit is home to both trashy discussions and also excellently broad and deep discussions, both due the large audience it intentionally cultivates. But anyway, it's not relevant. Here is here and justifying rules by comparing to Reddit is unhelpful.

Reddit hasn't been a home to deep discussion for 2+ years now. Every community is an echochamber, any dissenting views are downvoted to death simply for disagreeing with the hivemind. If someone compared HN to Tiktok, you'd laugh. But reddit is closer to tiktok than it is to HN in terms of signal to noise ratio.

HN is one of the last communities where I can see someone post a contrarian opinion and have an actual discussion about that opinion instead of it vanishing from downvotes. I don't ever want HN to become like reddit, and in that context calling out reddit specifically makes sense.

The sad thing is HN is slowly trending towards being like reddit as the community grows. I see more and more instances of people using downvote as an 'I disagree' button or posting low-effort comments. To that end, yeah, I think the community should do what it can to call those behaviours out.

I have seem quite a bit of echo chamber on HN as well, it's not limited to reddit. For instance your post is getting more gray because people here don't like an opinion like yours that is strong but not necessarily in line with "community standards" aka "echo chamber resonance". almost all online platforms have become echo chambers on anything that is just pure technology or science articles.