Amazon takes 50% cut from small businesses | Hacker News Reader

Amazon takes 50% cut from small businesses

bloomberg.com

29 pointsonion2k7 comments

I used to run a small business through Amazon selling specialty spices & rubs. They took 40% of my sales. The margins were too tight, even without Amazon taking all the gravy. I figured it was worth it because it would let me build a list of new customers. I quickly found out that they had restrictions on that, too. I didn't sell on Amazon very long because at the end of the day I was left with very little room for profit. If I wanted to build a customer list, I would have had to get creative by pulling customers off amazon, onto my own properties, and the conversions on that tactic were shit. I don't know if it has changed (this was back in 2010) but not giving you rights to customer email addresses and list building tools in-store was a real kick in the ass.

The hard lesson here was that you build your business on other people's platform at great peril, and it is almost never worth it over a long enough timeline.

> The hard lesson here was that you build your business on other people's platform at great peril, and it is almost never worth it over a long enough timeline.

I don't disagree with this, but for customers, this is a bonus: I don't have to give random small business my e-mail or any information. I, as the customer, tend to trust Amazon more than Small Co. with any personal and billing information.

I hate that when I buy things using Shopify's payment platform, there's an auto checkbox that says "Allow store to contact me with deals and offers" that I have to opt out of.

Keep paying 50% more than registering with a genuine seller.Shopify is on the same level as Amazon, they are just storing the info on their platform.

> Keep paying 50% more than registering with a genuine seller.

This is a naive view of how the economics work here and the power these platforms hold. The point of the OP is that sellers eat this cost, for the most part. Some of this is passed to the customer, but not a significant amount. The prices on Amazon are as low or lower than anywhere else (this is part of the problem).

Amazon is probably the single worst experience I have witnessed from a selling perspective. Might as well sell overpriced counterfeit goods on it just to push people to your own legitimate site lol where you get actual margins.

"Amazon doubles the price consumers pay when buying from small businesses" would probably be more effective in getting people to complain?

It is almost as if monopolies are bad.

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