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Comment by kneebonian | Hacker News Reader

To be honest maybe I am just old but it seems like every argument and quibble people have been having over Amazon is the exact same arguments I saw back in the early 2000's the only difference is the company was Wal-Mart instead of Amazon.

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There is one single really key difference. Walmart takes responsibility for the products they put in their store. That they are genuine and represented as they are. They squeezed sellers, encouraged moves to china and all of that, but they aren't a marketplace - they are a store. Amazon has abrogated all responsibility in that area and pretended they are the equivalent of the open field on which a flea market is set up.

Yep. For the curious, go search Amazon for "1 TB USB" for a good laugh.

Sadly walmart.com is the same kind of trash. I searched 1TB USB and the top non-sponsored result was this:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Jonephe-USB-Flash-Drive-1TB-Metal...

Which has some obviously fake reviews along with probably a real comment stating:

"Only problem is the transfer speed sucks and it causes errors in half the files I transfer to it."

Truly emblematic of how these scam USB drives work. And its the top organic result on walmart.com!

Ya, and if you report or comment on the scams, Amazon acts to protect the scams. They have to know what is going on and simply don’t care.

they have done a bad enough job that fakespot has a viable business model vetting their products.

> Walmart takes responsibility for the products they put in their store.

Amazon also did this for it's physical stores. Walmart does not do this for it's web presence - it has a third party marketplace you need to actively avoid.

I have both Prime and Walmart+ due to credit card benefits, and honestly don't see a huge difference in either experiences. Amazon is more spammy but faster shipping, Walmart less selection and slower but more reliable shipping. Walmart is more curated, but you still need to ignore the third party crap.

Walmart third-party is a dumpster fire. Every single thing I ordered through it here in Canada arrived late or not at all, replacement orders sometimes arrived eventually, products were often damaged (a jug of glasses cleaner was leaking right through a soaked outer shipping box), vendors take zero responsibility, and it took multiple calls/emails/delays to get refunds from Walmart.

I avoid it like the plague. I don't even use their website because it's hard to consistently filter that crap out. And their site wasn't great to start off with in any case. Good riddens.

Doesn't setting the retailer to Walmart filter the third part stuff out? Or am I missing something?

I think I have to repeat that after each search (at least back when I last used the site). And it usually took many searches to find the product I sought.

Another really key difference is that Walmart operates retail locations that compete with (more realistically, undercut) smaller local businesses and gut small town America. Let's not paint a rosier picture just because it happened a while ago.

Amazon has killed plenty of small businesses that survived Walmart. Walmart didn’t go after the hobby shop style niche business the way Amazon’s million product warehouse could.

People worked out you can compete with Walmart by having a deeper selection as long as the population density supports it, but it’s not clear what small retail can do to survive Amazon.

On the flip side Amazon created hundreds of thousands of small business, it allowed them access to a global market. The ones that died could have done the same and remained competitive, they were asleep at the wheel instead. I see Walmart as more of a monopolist by going into small towns and selling at a loss. Whereas Amazon was an equalizer allowing anyone to compete in a global marketplace, those that opted not to, got their lunch stolen.

Hardly, the vast majority of physical stores don’t manufacture anything they simply aggregate merchandise from wholesalers and operate a physical location. There is no way to transition that model to Amazon marketplace because they don’t have any way way to differentiate themselves. Attempting that transition would have simply lost them a great deal of money.

There are a mix of ways to profitability operate with Amazon both legitimately or via various kinds of fraud. However, suggesting that transition is often as reasonable as telling a barber to open a veterinary clinic, it’s just a completely different kind of business.

But that’s changing the measurement to fit your argument, most sellers on Amazon aren’t directly manufacturing their goods either, yet still have margin. We are talking about retailers switching how they offer their goods. Rely less on the store front and just ship more stuff, isn’t a major change to business model. Adding a shipping center isn’t hard.

But either way business is dog eat dog and you have evolve to survive. Don’t blame the competition for building a better mousetrap. This is free markets and capitalism operating as intended.

You’re the one suggesting these companies could have made the switch.

I have no problem with capitalism crushing companies, as long as it’s head to head in a free market rather than based on fraud or avoiding regulations. I am simply pointing out Amazon has been a huge net loss for small businesses, which it objectively has.

But that is no fault of Amazon is my point, it’s the business owners failure for failing to adapt to changing market conditions.

And my gripe is that they project their failure at Amazon rather than owning their own poor decisions.

Amazon is at fault for the amount of fraud on their platform and the amount of damage it’s caused both businesses and customers.

It isn’t at fault for people preferring to buy stuff online or Amazon’s highly efficient supply chain etc.

Ok then it sounds like we agree on all points then. They could certainly do better at cleaning up the fraud.

The fraud is integral to their business model at this point, though.

They deliberately chose a way of storing products that makes them vulnerable to fraud. Fixing that would require storing them differently (which would be more expensive to them).

Likewise, cutting down on unsafe or white label products would increase the quality of the products they sell but adding a vetting process and stricter moderation would significantly increase labor costs per product and if companies at scale want to avoid one thing, it's dynamic labor costs.

They literally can't do better at cleaning up the fraud because there is no market incentive for them to do so and doing so would reduce profits and thus shareholder value. To borrow your line: it's just free markets and capitalism working as intended.

It’s also not in their best interest to let things get out of control. Free markets ebb and flow.

I don’t know of any other platform that has a markedly better vetting process, Walmart, eBay, AliExpress, Wish, etc all have much the same or worse issues with this. But they all seam to be very pro consumer when it comes to returns, none seem to ask any questions.

Maybe it’s not a conspiracy but rather an industry wide problem of playing wack-a-mole with scammers, that every platform is continually dealing with.

I don't think it's that simple. I've heard stories of Amazon doing data analysis on its own marketplace, coming out with competing products for ones it think it can make a profit on, and putting them above the 3rd parties in search results.

That wasn’t invented by Amazon, Many retailers do this. Grocery stores white label. REI is another great example, they run data analysis on what sold the most, what features were searched for most and built their own products.

I'm not saying it was invented by Amazon.

> Amazon created hundreds of thousands of small business

Based on my experience most of those small businesses are reselling uncertified whitelabel shovelware (especially electronics) from Ali Express. That's a bit like praising cancer for rejuvenating the body by reducing the mean age of all cells.

Of course you could also say it created a lot of businesses via "self-employed" last mile delivery drivers but I think we're all adult enough to acknowledge that the gig economy is a scam to skirt labor laws, not an actual net positive for those working within it.

Pretending small businesses could have kept up with Amazon by "doing the same" is absurd. Small businesses lack the infrastructure to offer one day (or even same day) deliveries and free returns with full refunds. We've reached a point where buyers take these things for granted to the point of balking at shipping costs for goods privately sold on eBay classifieds because they have no idea what delivery companies like UPS or DHL charge.

Even as a marketplace, Amazon cannibalizes its sellers via its "Amazon basics" brand which copies products if they get popular enough and often undercuts their pricing while also benefiting from the Amazon branding.

> Whereas Amazon was an equalizer allowing anyone to compete in a global marketplace, those that opted not to, got their lunch stolen.

Saying "allowed anyone" makes it sound like it was optional, yet that "those that opted not to" died off demonstrates that it wasn't. It's nearly impossible to start a small local retail shop but it's also nearly impossible to be a small retail seller on Amazon. There's a reason white label shovelware dropshipping is so ubiquituous: by creating your own brand to resell white label products you make it harder to compare you to your competitors selling the same garbage and you no longer have to directly compete on price. This is effectively the only kind of business on Amazon marketplace that doesn't directly suffer the race to the bottom.

> This is free markets and capitalism operating as intended.

Yes, that's the problem. Free markets accelerate monopolization by forcing local small businesses to compete globally with international megacorps on those megacorps' terms.

The benefits of small local businesses are externalities to capitalism so they get sanded off eventually. Free global markets just rapidly speed up that process.

Exactly, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, nor fair, more pointing out that attacking them for using the levers and dials available To them to return value to shareholders, is short sighted. literally every other company is doing the same, just not as efficiently.

Walmart now operates a marketplace (https://marketplace.walmart.com/). However, I am unsure if they take those same validation steps as they do in their physical stores or not.

Came here to make that point. I know that newegg and bestbuy have done the same. And, much like amazon and ebay, I expect pretty much zero verification and Sisyphean dispute processes.

I do agree with your point on Walmart, what is on the shelves at a physical location. However, Walmart's online store is just as bad, if not worst, than Amazon.

There are a few complaints that are unique to Amazon, but really it just speaks to how little has been done to fix the problems Walmart brought to our attention decades ago. Not dealing with those issues back then just opened the door for Amazon to come in and screw people over in similar ways. I hope people realize that their problems they have now aren't just about Amazon either and that unless things change it'll be some other company 10-20 years in the future doing the same things to the next generation.

So how do you propose those “problems” be “fixed” and not cause harm to customers who are getting cheaper goods?

I refuse to believe that customers getting "cheaper goods" is dependent on employees having to piss in bottles to keep their jobs, or employees suffering twice the number of severe injuries as other warehouse workers. Surely, selling counterfeit/fraudulent products and allowing scammers to have free run of their platform isn't a requirement for consumers getting inexpensive goods either. Amazon pockets billions every year. They can more than afford to treat their employees and their customers better without raising prices a single penny and still remain profitable. Less profitable perhaps, but profitable.

Amazon should be held accountable for their failures and for the harms they are causing to both customers and employees so that the next company to rise up knows that abusing workers and turning a blind eye to fraud won't be tolerated and that the laws and protections enacted to rein in amazon's exploitative practices will effect them as well.

I’m not referring to Amazon’s practices or counterfeit goods. I’m referring to passing laws that “prevent the harm done” by Walmart crushing mom and pop stores.

Walmart has never to the best of my knowledge been accused of the rampant selling of counterfeit goods in their physical stores nor do the people who deliver to stores have to “pee in bottles”.

Crushing mom and pop stores isn't the only issue Walmart and Amazon share. Both have mistreated employees and stole product designs to push their own versions of popular items undercutting the original. Walmart employees weren't peeing in bottles, but unsafe working conditions and union busting have been problems for both companies. Walmart.com is known for selling counterfeit goods, while the physical stores routinely sell dangerous items. It seems that filling your store shelves with the cheapest goods from the third world isn't always safe for your customers.

I do think that fixing a lot of the "quibbles" people have concerning Walmart and Amazon would help make things more competitive and help give smaller stores a better chance though.

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