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Comment by prawn | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. I assume that there's either an internal push to become more like Amazon, or consultants pitch this approach to them and it's hard to resist.

I wonder what the numbers are for supermarkets and the way they prioritise shelf placements? A friend had a big contract recently going around and hi-res photographing shelf-positioning in a massive supermarket chain. Every aisle. And then eye-scanning tests and analysis on legibility meant it was all used to upsell brands fighting for premium positioning.

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They did the same thing for Walmart+ and honestly it's pretty terrible. Every business is going to try to be amazon now and while it's probably going to make money in the short term it'll eventually poison their brand. I want to know the hot sauce I'm going to buy isn't sold by some random dude who will send me expired items. I want to know the hard drives I'm going to buy are actually new. Same thing with newegg.

'I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website...'

This is certainly a trend led, I am guessing, by troves of internal search data that suggests people are searching for things they don't have the capacity to stock themselves.

In a way, it feels like lying to the customer.

"Do you stock purple widgets?" "No, we're Red Widget Emporium" is not an inappropriate answer. If anything, it improves the trust angle-- you're the experts on Red Widgets rather than a mile-wide-six-inches-deep generalist. I generally don't want to buy sheet lumber and breakfast cereal at the same store.

"We'll pretend we stock it but actually hand you to a second tier vendor who you'd never go to directly" is less compelling somehow.

I agree, but I think it also helps retailers swell their cashflow (since they don't have to tie up capital on stock) so, for them, it's just too compelling an advantage to pass up?

In a way, it does help a specialist differentiate him/herself in the market though. I am tending to buy more from small, specialist retailers for this very reason.

> I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website.

Best Buy and Walmart do this too (allowing third-parties to list products on their website).

Vendors have used advertising dollars to pay for shelf placements in physical stores for at least 40 years.

I assumed that this is a legal requirement for all big online stores - is that not the case?

No, it's a blatant cash-grab by all big online stores.

And for awhile you can continue to search "shipped and sold by Company" but eventually that goes away, because the marketplace shit is pure profit for them.

It sells out the brand and turns them all into eBay/Alibaba clones and it's a major danger sign.

More and more I have to restrict Walmart to "stocked in store" to avoid useless crap.

Funny you should mention that because it's how I'd started searching the aforementioned Bunnings site. Filter by what's available and in stock at the local store.

The other development is having to check online reviews before purchasing just about anything. Previously, if I bought shelf brackets or similar, I could usually rely on the fact that they were stocked at at a reliable store to mean they were decent enough quality. They'd passed some sort of review. If they were terrible, they'd be pulled from shelves. But that's no longer the case. More and more cheap, unfit-for-purpose goods are being sold by formerly solid stores. They'll accept returns but keep stocking 1-star items and hoping most people forget to return. I've checked reviews and been saved by 1-2 star averages suggesting the manifold splits first use or the shelf supports a tenth of the rated weight.

That latter development is really, really annoying. I've started to order certain things from commercial suppliers like Uline (the advantage of having one local) simply because there's some things I don't want to deal with the thought process necessary to work out what is crap.

At this point it might be faster to list off the major retailers who do not do this.

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