Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales

>but as much of a monopoly/monopsony as Walmart is, it's far less than what Amazon is

I don't believe this to be the case. How is Amazon a monopoly, given the large number of online retailers that continue to be successful?

> as much of a monopoly/monopsony as Walmart is, it's far less than what Amazon is.

Walmart retail sales are significantly larger than Amazon's retail sales.

For 2019 (chosen to avoid the disparate impact of pandemic), Walmart sold $514B while Amazon retail sold only $135B first-party and $200B third-party. Given the growth rates, Amazon will pass Walmart, but I don't think Walmart has "far less" power in retail than Amazon.

> Moreso in non US advanced countries that actually enforce the anti trust regulations in their laws.

I think it's pretty disingenuous to say that the U.S. isn't enforcing its antitrust laws, the DOJ certainly opens investigations against these conglomerates, they just don't take them to court. We don't know the full story for any of these cases and thus can't become sole arbitrators of whether or not something is an antitrust violation.

The problem is probably that the DOJ doesn't like to bring cases against people in they they don't have hard evidence and a high likelihood to succeed in their prosecution - they have an average 92% success rate in the cases they bring against defendants[0]. I'm not one to say how to run the DOJ but chances are they could find more damning documents via court discovery (if they think they have enough of a case to get to discovery, at least).

0: https://www.justice.gov/doj/page/file/1249306/download#page=... (page 16)

In what market is Amazon a monopoly?

This.

They are also so good at building malls that they own the construction company and the supply chain of raw goods for the construction efforts (AWS). They use their scale to cut costs for construction globally so it doesn't make economic sense for others to build without them. Even some of their competitors use their construction company to build their vision of what a mall looks like. All the while Amazon is gaining valuable insights they can steal to use on their own malls.

They don’t kick out competitors though, merely open up their own stores. To me (the consumer), that seems fine.

> But Amazon is also a marketplace

Meanwhile, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24174276

"Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court"

It seems both regulators and Amazon want whether or not it's a marketplace to go both ways whenever it's convenient.

This explanation makes the most sense to me, but there is something that you are leaving out. Not only is Amazon a marketplace, but it is THE marketplace. Amazon has an effective monopoly on small-seller logistics and marketplace services in the United States (and many other places), soup-to-nuts.

If you are anything other than a massive corporation, any manufacturer that chooses not to sell through Amazon and utilize all or most of its services (marketplace listing, payments, warehousing, delivery) will be at a massive cost disadvantage and will not be able to compete with other sellers that do choose to participate with Amazon.

And more significantly, perhaps, if you don't sell through Amazon's marketplace, you are often unable to compete with Amazon itself.

I'm still not understanding the distinction here. Costco and Amazon both sell company-brand products, alongside non-company products. Costco and Amazon collect and analyze sales data from the sale of both company and non-company products.

> But Amazon is also a marketplace. In that role it acts as a "rentable retail space".

Most brick and mortar retailers also sell space to manufacturers. Product positioning in the store and even on the shelves isnt solely due to UX

> I'm not intimately familiar with either side, but I see it as: - Costco buys x amount of product at y price from seller and then sells it in its store. - Amazon provides a platform for sellers to sell with a cut going back to Amazon.

This isn't really how it works. Retailers very often have arrangements to defer payments until after the product is sold.

In fact, in France, retail margins are so thin that supermarket chains reportedly make most of their profit by selling the inventory, investing the money in short-term funds, then paying the suppliers one month later and keeping the interest.

This is generally not how grocery operates today.

Most large grocers:

  - Sell shelf location slots to the highest bidder.
  - Include a consignment clause in their vendor agreements requiring vendors to take back spoiled, customer-damaged, and unsold inventory at X point or on-demand.
  - Require merchandisers to keep inventory in-stock for as many products as they can get vendors to manage (e.g. the coke delivery person is in-store several days a week.)

The modern grocery store is effectively managed like a flea market and is allowed to do so because the chains have so much leverage.

So while we can take issue with Amazon’s practices, we have to remember that most of large-scale retail operates in ways that if written about to the level of Amazon, we’d also be griping about.

Difference in quantity has a quality all of its own.

There are kinds of behavours that are acceptable for an individual or a single groceries store, but if a large company adopts it across the country and puts it in the policy, then they are beaking the law.

Grocery stores select which products they want to sell and have limited capacity.

Amazon provides a platform through which "everyone" can sell "anything" with no tightly constrained space/slots.

As far as I know Amazon is legally closer to a market place where everyone is up their own stand (but they are required to look mostly the same) and which happens to also require you to use their payment system.

I.e. Amazon is just a proxy while the grocery store legally buys and resells the products.

I am not from the US but I think Amazon has much more market dominance than Costco. If Amazon had 20% market share nobody would mind, but they don't have real competition that comes close.

“Money talks and BS walks”

Consumers may not be fed up with Amazon, but if this is SOP then the sellers WILL leave and a competitor with better SOP will come in.

Getting f’ed in the arse as a consumer is one thing. Getting f’ed in the arse by Jeffy B as a business is another.

It is trust which makes this world go ‘round.

That’s why they used the words “this sort of thing” and not “this thing”.

AWS could easily collect metadata like how your traffic looks over time, where it's coming from etc., and use that to inform Amazon business decisions. That would go a bit further than what's in this article, but it isn't a huge stretch.

> This report has 0 to do with AWS

Same company, leadership and culture. If you compete with Amazon, or could compete, it would be pretty stupid to put your jewels on AWS.

To me the only difference is that AWS biggest client base has the money and expertise to go after Amazon in protracted legal battles while simultaneously scrubbing AWS from their companies.

Most retailers, even big ones, don’t have the money or expertise to do this like that. Of the few who do (Apple for instance) Amazon is keen in making sure that those companies are heard and has direct relationships with them, but that’s few and far between.

That’s my take on this

Given everything mentioned in your comment, I don't see how it implies that amazon can't cast a dragnet at some level you're not aware of.

It doesn't have 0 to do with AWS. AWS funds the amazon beast they compete against. As a retailer you would have to be absolutely insane to feed money to the Amazon mothership via AWS so they can continue to fund undercutting you in the retail space.

All of that is ignoring the fact that any customer of size WILL be sharing details about their go-to-market with their AWS account team. Just because a random guy in support can't login to their systems doesn't mean their assigned architect doesn't know what their process workflow looks like and didn't help them design it...

Amazon is a direct competitor so it makes sense for Walmart to not give them more money via AWS.

That is true, I picked a bad example, although Walmart Marketplace is a very high touch service which is expressly targeting sellers that they don't want to cover themselves.

Amazon has structured their reviews to enable unethical behavior by sellers.

Any review which comments on the seller or seller's behavior is removed because the product page is supposed to be a page of seller-agnostic reviews of the product. There is a separate page of reviews for each seller, but it is buried to the point that no-one looks at it.

It makes it leaving reviews about sellers doing unethical things like paying for reviews fruitless: either you put it on the product and it is removed quickly, or you put it on the seller and no one sees it.

Yeah, as another perhaps anecdotal example, I've recently been forced to buy a book from Amazon because I literally couldn't find it anywhere else.

Despite the book being listed as "New", I received a book that was not only pretty old, but also had clearly been stolen from a library, with stamp marks and everything.

I'm not going to leave this alone, contacting the library and exposing this fraud is going to go pretty high on my pile of "to do" things...

Human nature

It's basically Murphy's law

That they are telling us about.