granzymes

The intuition here is that the rules that block when CVC/ZIP doesn’t match necessarily happen after the bank already decided the transaction was okay, because that’s when Stripe learns whether CVC/ZIP match what the bank had on file.

So if you block on a mismatch, you’re throwing away an approved charge every single time since the bank already decided that other signals say the transaction is okay. The bank can block it themselves if they think it’s suspicious (which from my understanding wouldn’t increment this metric).

>Based on this data alone, I'd expect people with some practice would be able to get a reasonably close estimate of what Stripe processed this year.

Stripe recently started publishing their yearly processing volume in user letters (see, e.g. 2022: https://stripe.com/annual-updates/2022). I assume they will publish the 2023 numbers as well.

There are multiple reported injury rates that measure different things, just as there are multiple reported unemployment rates.

This particular metric would indeed include a paper cut. A better metric is the number of injuries that required time off from work or reassignment of duties. That’s something that Tesla reports, but the article doesn’t include it.

Bragging rights, party invitations, and one hell of a story.

I suspect that whatever transaction Klarna did not offer its services to you during was an outlier.

Klarna is paid by the merchant when you select them as a payment method. They definitely want people with excellent credit, because people with excellent credit are low-risk.

Maybe that’s your preference, but it certainly isn’t against the law to offer advertising.

I think you just proved the parent post’s point.

The REI legal entity is indeed still a member owned cooperative. But there are so many members today that there isn’t any practical control that any individual can exercise. That said, if you are a member then you have a vote for the board members.

You can read about the election process here: https://www.rei.com/about-rei/board-election-process

Whether they removed the article or not, I think it’s ridiculous that WIRED didn’t explain why the article was retracted.

They should have mentioned 1) what the article got wrong and 2) that the article was written by a former Duck Duck Go executive who should know better.

The relevant material was almost certainly the slide that the article was mischaracterizing: https://twitter.com/adamkovac/status/1710041764910846061

I wish WIRED had included this context in their retraction statement…

For context, here is the slide from the trial that the article was referencing: https://twitter.com/adamkovac/status/1710041764910846061

The author appears to have gotten the slide exactly backwards. She said the slide showed a query of “children’s clothing” that Google rewrites to be a “Nikolia kidswear” query so that it can sell more ads. But in reality, the slide is describing a fuzzy keyword matching system that takes a query of “Nikolia kidswear” and allows it to match ads with “children's clothing” keywords.

I’m surprised WIRED allowed such an obviously incorrect article to be published in the first place, particularly when it was by a known partisan (the article discloses that the author is a former Duck Duck Go executive with an obvious bias).

Interesting that Google isn’t particularly concerned about this antitrust trial. “They basically don’t feel the doj has a real case”:

>The DOJ filed its complaint against Google in this case on October 20, 2020. A couple days later, another Samsung employee suggested to Chang that the lawsuit might cause Google to loosen its interpretations of its contracts with Samsung.

>Chang responded: “Actually the COMPLETE opposite. Google just did a f*ck you to Samsung. After the doj filings, they submitted a new redline that went backwards om all negotiations with Samsung and was even more aggressive in being restrictive….They basically don’t feel the doj has a real case.”

The "buy box" is a product-level feature, not a seller-level feature. On any given product page, there may be multiple sellers with offers (one for $9, two for $9.50). The $9 offer would be prominently displayed in the buy box and the other two would be in the "other offers" section.

If another site starts selling the same product for $8.50 (regardless of who the seller is), Amazon may hide the buy box and put all the offers in the "other offers" section to avoid advertising an offer that isn't the best price available online.

Consumers price compare across sites, and Amazon wants to maintain its reputation for low prices (and in truly egregious cases prevent sellers on Amazon from price gouging).

>The fact that the product exists $1 cheaper on another site does not make it not the best recommendation for the customer’s need. If I search “tablet” are you saying I should be recommended a cheap off brand tablet promoted to me because Amazon has the cheapest price or an iPad even though I can buy an iPad on apple.com for $10 cheaper?

I think you are misunderstanding the issue. Amazon is selectively determining to show the "buy box" on a specific product page based on whether the prices for that SKU on Amazon are competitive with prices for the same SKU on other websites.

In your example, Amazon might not have a buy box for a given iPad model if the same model was available on apple.com for less. The presence of cheaper non-iPad tablets would not impact the iPad buy box.

You're right, shipping speed likely also factors into it in addition to cost (that's why I also mentioned the shipping speed). If Amazon can't deliver within its 2-day Prime guarantee it is less likely to promote the offer.

Of course, without access to Amazon's systems I can't say for sure why any individual listing is or is not promoted. I'm just making an educated guess based on what the FTC put in its complaint.

Actually, in this case I am cheating because I already know that this SKU is offered for a lower price with faster shipping from Walmart. I suspect that listing is what triggered the loss of the buy box.

Because you run into the issue of "unscrambling the eggs". If Amazon is not organized by retail product category (and I would assume it is largely not), then it will be very difficult to split the company in that way. Courts really aren't in the business of restructuring companies and the last thing you want is for the new baby companies to fail because the restructuring went poorly.

Which employees go where, who gets what IP, what happens to all the underlying website/physical infrastructure? A "3rd party marketplace" unit is already likely smaller than is feasible for a court to oversee. By comparison, it would be a lot easier to split Amazon into "AWS" and "not-AWS" because the company is already organized that way.

>It will be hard for the court to argue that amazon should start recommending more expensive items to consumers, just to push consumers into looking for a cheaper platform.

Yes, 100% this. That's why I said that this lawsuit has a major remedy problem. Even if the court agrees this is anticompetitive, how do you fix it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37767994

I was offering the comparison because those two pens should be priced within a few cents of eachother (the difference is the tip width and ironically "extra fine" is more expensive). If the products were the same then there would only be one product page and the $9.99 offer would be the highlighted deal.

The fact that one product has the buy box at $9.99 and 1-day shipping and the other product does not have the buy box at $14.28 and 8-day shipping lets us infer that $14.28 is not a competitive price for these pens and there may be a cheaper price elsewhere (likely closer to $9.99).

You are touching on a point that Benedict Evans has made quite eloquently in the past:

>There was a joke a few years ago that rent is the new [Customer Acquisition Cost], and that now applies to everything. The [Total Addressable Market] for search ads is not ‘advertising’ (let alone online advertising) but everything that is spent to reach and serve a customer, starting with retail rents. This applies to Amazon, but even more to Google - you can ask whether Google’s ads are ‘advertising’ or ‘marketing’, but also ask whether the TAM for buying placement in Google search results is ‘advertising’, ‘marketing’ or just its customers’ operating margins. How do you reach a consumer? Do you spend your budget on TV ads or search ads, or on retail rents, or on giving retailers a margin versus selling direct, or giving the retailer a better price for better placement, or free shipping, or a better returns policy? Everything below P&G’s COGS line is up for grabs.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/3/6/ways-to-thi...

There will be no site that does not offer advertising, because advertising allows the site to determine which sellers can afford to pay more while still being profitable. It's a scaled version of the same way a landlord will raise rents on a profitable storefront.

But how? The smallest unit of a possible breakup would be a standalone 3rd-party marketplace company, and yet that unit would still have the same market power for 3rd party sellers as Amazon as a whole does today.

That's one possibility! But Amazon also hides the buy box when the only offers are not what Amazon considers "competitive" because it hurts their brand if consumers see shitty deals.

In this example, the pens with the buy box are 50% cheaper and have much faster shipping.

Here's one of the examples that the FTC cites in its complaint (at page 27):

https://www.amazon.com/Pilot-Retractable-Rollerball-Extra-Re...

Compare it to this listing for a very similar product:

https://www.amazon.com/Pilot-Retractable-Rollerball-Ultra-0-...

You'll see that in the FTC's example, you need to click to see more buying details and that at the time of this comment the lowest price is $14.28 with free shipping (on October 12th for my location).

In the other example, the "buy box" highlights the best offer of $9.99 with free shipping (on October 5th for my location).

I think a physical retail analogy would be to imagine that every store charges a variable "restocking fee" based on how much it costs to get a replacement for the item that you are purchasing. You don't know what that fee will be until the clerk is ringing you up. Then one day a store decides to bake the restocking fees into the price, and no longer surprises the consumer with a variable fee at the checkout counter.

This is clearly a win for consumers, who can now shop the aisles knowing exactly what they will pay for the item upfront before they put it in the cart and go to check out.

According to the FTC's lawsuit, Amazon no longer binds its sellers with a Most Favored Nation clause. Instead, Amazon now will refuse to promote an offer in its "buy box" space if it detects a lower price for that good on another website.

The FTC alleges that this simply reconstitutes the MFA since most sales on Amazon take place from the buy box. Amazon responds that it is within its rights to not promote uncompetitive offers that make its site look bad for not having the lowest available price.

>If this suit is resolved in the government’s favor, the remedy could be anything from ending anti-discounting measures to breaking up the firm.

There's a bit of an odd remedy issue with this lawsuit. The harm being asserted by the FTC is that Amazon charges more fees than competitors but requires that sellers not charge more on Amazon than on competing sites. Originally Amazon allegedly accomplished this with a Most Favored Nation clause, and today Amazon will kick you out of the "buy box" promotional space if they detect you offering lower prices elsewhere.

First, a breakup doesn't cure this harm. You could go all the way to the extreme of splitting Amazon's third-party marketplace into its own company and yet that company could still charge higher fees than competitors and condition the buy box space on sellers not offering lower prices elsewhere.

Second, no injunction makes sense either. Is a court going to force Amazon to advertise a price in the buy box that Amazon knows is not the lowest price available on the market? That's an absurdly anti-consumer thing for a court to order (and so a court would likely not order it).

So what cures the alleged harm?

>The consumer protection body got involved as well as a lot of negative media attention.

>They had to raise their prices so they don't become a monopoly.

You seemed to be suggesting that what was happening with milk was anticompetitive and the consumer protection body got involved to stop it. I pointed out that what actually happened is that the body determined that there wasn't anything anticompetitive going on and that the companies ceased the "milk wars" on their own because they were losing money (which is exactly what I was alluding would happen with soap if one company tried to drive competitors out of the market).

Seems like a big difference to me.

The FTC doesn't get to determine the relevant antitrust market. Part of Amazon's defense will be pointing out that consumers buy soap on Amazon and in physical stores alike. It will be up to a judge to decide.

Really? Because the reporting I found says that the competition authority cleared the market participants of any wrongdoing in the "milk wars".

>[Chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] Samuel said the major impact of discounted milk prices appears to have been a reduction in the supermarkets’ profit margins on house brand milk, rather than a gain.

https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/advice/startups...

And in Australia today is Woolworths a monopoly, or are there still other companies in the market selling milk?

I think I can guess.