Comment by paulhauggis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulhauggis | Hacker News Reader

I will never do business with Amazon again.

As a book seller:

1) Customers aren't mine. I'm not allowed to send any of the people that buy from me a link to my website or collect any of their data. This means that this income channel can be taken away at the whim of Amazon.

2) Amazon regularly uses your sell data to undercut you and put you out of business. I regularly would sell rare books with no other listings. As soon as I had any sales, Amazon would popup with their own listing at half price. My sales would go down when this happened.

3) Strange things would go on with their listings. I was in business for 5 years. I saw patterns and know when my sales would be up and down.

None of these rules applied on Amazon. I would be going strong for weeks at a time. One day, I would have no sales and this might last for a month. From 100 sales/day to 0 just seems to be a bit funny to me.

Customer support would of course deny everything. However, after running my own tests, I could see that from certain IP addresses and on some Amazon servers, I would get random errors on checkout of my own listings.

Amazon eventually banned me. I had near 100% feedback and 1 complaint from a user that I sold them the wrong book. Before the user complained, I even paid to have it shipped back to me. This wasn't good enough. The customer wanted to keep the >$200 book and not send it back. I nearly went broke because I couldn't access my money for 3 months.

It took me a year to get my business back to where it was, but I am now in a better place (with many sales channels).

Amazon is an evil company and anyone that does business with them is risking everything for short-term gains. It's the destroyer of small businesses.

As a customer I see it as a feature that Amazon don't allow people to to collect my data, I bought the book at Amazon, nobody else should know the details.

That does not change that Amazon is scummy but that they don't allow you data is actually a customer protection feature.

> As a customer I see it as a feature that Amazon don't allow people to to collect my data, I bought the book at Amazon, nobody else should know the details.

I'm not sure the situation is that simple. You bought the book through Amazon, but (in this case), you bought the book from the other poster. Putting them closer to, say, a shopping mall. As a shopper, who's has a stronger relationship to you—the store you bought something from, or the mall you bought it in?

And for the seller, it means that your only "customer" is Amazon. Who doesn't really care about you at all. If I were a seller, I'd rather have my customers be the people who are actually interested in the product I'm selling.

When commerce goes well, the buyer and seller create a relationship that benefits both of them. With Amazon being a strict gatekeeper, there's no way for that relationship to form, and the seller ends up being an interchangeable name on a screen.

With a business-guy-hat on, selling "lead-gen services" and keeping the leads locked-yp and propreitary ...is a great business model. So this is a no-brainer from the supply side. The question for the "buyers" of this kind of quasi-lead generation svc...however are what else is outhere as a substitute? Demand aggregation, lead-gen, and overall simplificatation, and modular-expandability are all good selling points but hard to create/compete with from scratch.

Suggest engaging directly with your potential buyers, ask them "what are you using for Lead Gen now? What do you like/dislike about the quality?" Those conversations will yield insights.

I'm not sure the situation is that simple. You bought the book through Amazon, but (in this case), you bought the book from the other poster. Putting them closer to, say, a shopping mall. As a shopper, who's has a stronger relationship to you—the store you bought something from, or the mall you bought it in?

I cannot see how a mall is analogous. In the mall, you choose the stores you go to and then look for the product there. You are explicitly entering different stores, and you have the obvious ability to return to that store. That builds affinity with the store.

With Amazon, the typical entry point is to search for the product you want. You don't particularly care who is selling it so long as the price, delivery, and trustworthiness are there. Maybe if all other things are equal, I'll choose a vendor that I bought from before. But, to be honest, for most purchases, I've only ever thought of it as being fulfilled by Amazon or someone else.

Anecdotally, I literally can't recall the names of any vendors I've bought from in Amazon. But I do know the places I like in the mall.

> You don't particularly care who is selling it so long as the price, delivery, and trustworthiness are there.

> Anecdotally, I literally can't recall the names of any vendors I've bought from in Amazon. But I do know the places I like in the mall.

That's exactly my point. There are stores that you're buying from-many of them with physical locations as well. But because of the way Amazon sets things up, their identity fades into the background. They could be stores you like, just like the places you like in the mall. But Amazon makes it hard for you to know about them, and build a relationship with them.

But many people prefer to buy from Amazon precisely because it shields them from the less pleasant business practices of other businesses.

The issue here is not who has the right to the data, it is customer satisfaction.

> The issue here is not who has the right to the data, it is customer satisfaction.

It is. But for me, part of customer satisfaction is buying from a seller that I know and trust. So I like buying things that Amazon is the seller, since I know and trust them. But Amazon doesn't make it easy to build up trust with the other sellers in their marketplace.

I feel exactly the same way about the app business. I don't want an arbitrary and disinterested third party in between me and my customers because I believe very strongly that in the long run a strong and direct relationship with my customers is the key to a sustainable business. The iOS app store is particularly egregious in this respect because I can't even contact users that report problems. The Google Play store is slightly better in this respect but I'm still not comfortable with the idea that my entire online presence can be switched off at will by some overzealous algorithm.

Yeah but what's left for you?write a web app for firefox os maybe.

Apple created Ios,Google Android.While Android is more open(you dont have to sell your app through Play),both vendors own their respective plateform,even Microsoft wants to adopt that model.Things will not get more open in the future,definetly less and less open.It always works like that.

> I will never do business with Amazon again.

Every other day it's someone saying they'll never use Facebook again, they'll never use Amazon again, they've quit Dropbox, they'll never use Google again. People in HN are quitting startups, quitting established companies, forswearing this and that, and getting angry at all kinds of shit day in and day out, and to be honest, I'm not sure it's ever made any bit of difference ever.

Even GoDaddy is still alive and strong and not one of these other companies has a founder go and shoot elephants and post about it on their official blog with pictures, after supporting SOPA and demeaning women on national television. Boycotting does nothing, and crying about it even less.

Yeah just like that whole Dropbox x Condoleezza Rice thing went.

I closed my Dropbox account in response to the Condoleezza Rice thing, but it was an easy action to take since I hardly ever used it anymore anyway (because Google Drive works much better for me).

What about Paypal? I've heard complaints against them time and time again, and alternatives have popped up in competition because they sucked too much. Stripe, Square?

I use PayPal every day nearly. I like Stripe, Square not so much. I don't know, the people that seem to complain about PayPal are people who take donations but aren't registered non-profits and even if PayPal was evil, I doubt any of these boycotts have made a difference.

Stripe exists because they have a really awesome API and they make refunds super easy without penalties.

Square exists because Jack Dorsey is able to drum up a lot of VC money and engineering talent from followers of his personality cult. Not a lot of profitable business though, apparently.

Many regular people are comfortable with Paypal, specifically using it instead of giving out their credit cards (almost half, in my experience). Can't say I blame the motivation, given that I've had to report fraud 4 times on my 3 credit cards in the last 6 months. Knock on wood, Paypal has gotten better, anecdotally.

Trivializing someone's experiences by dismissing them as crying might not be the way to go. It doesn't seem like you're arguing against anything at all. Comments like the one you responded to are some of the most important, because (a) they're from direct experience, (b) people rarely talk about the topic, (c) they're thorough and substantive and present their opinion well.

The last thing the world needs is to mock people for speaking up.

I'm not mocking the person and I appreciate his post, I am simply fed up with having to keep track of all the things I am supposed to be boycotting right now though. I do apologize if what I said came across as mocking. I'm just saying boycotting does nothing. Voting with your purse is about as effective at getting what you want as voting at the polls.

Their comment might have more teeth than it appears. It's a datapoint to potential Amazon competitors about how they might coax away some of Amazon's clientele. While an Amazon competitor is unlikely to pop up, it's not completely impossible, either. The recipe is for Amazon to make mistakes and for those mistakes to be scrutinized by the public. In the internet age, people's low tolerance for injustice and inconvenience equals a business opportunity.

Well he didn't say it would make a difference, he just said he isn't dealing with Amazon.

"Boycotting does nothing"

Actually for-real boycotting and similar types of actions like calls for coordinated divestiture do often cause changes, sometimes very big ones; but a few people posting on some internet forums is by no means a real boycott.

Personally I also have a number of issues with Amazon but none of them are serious enough to overcome the fact that they do retail sales on the Internet about a billion times better than anyone else (only Newegg comes close, and only in the narrow band of computers/electronics).

Other times it's about boycotting, but this comment isn't. It's about "doing business", and it is a very relevant warning to other entrepreneurs who need to choose if they should bet on Amazon as a distribution platform.

"Customers aren't mine. I'm not allowed to send any of the people that buy from me a link to my website or collect any of their data"

I'm curious: which bookseller does let you do this? Barnes & Noble? Your neighborhood bookstore?

This is a just a possible outcome (or maybe inevitable if you look at history) when you build a business on someone else's platform. Whenever humanly possible, try to have a more direct path to your customers. Of course, I realize that's easier said than done.

Thanks, thats why I stopped buying on Amazon.

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