> and then de-listed the original thing from their store
While they don't delist items, their algo favors products they sell directly to the extent that Amazon will get the buy box over a third party seller even when that seller is reputable and cheaper. Add that the 3rd party seller has to pay a sales fee to Amazon, often making it impossible to compete with them without approaching zero margin.
It's not delisting but it's the next best thing. If Amazon starts selling something you sell, your sales are gone, you were just free market research for them.
> there is no way Amazon (or EBay or anyone else) can possibly look at every item being sold on their massive platform
Amazon and Ebay are not comparable. What you say is true for Ebay, but not for Amazon. Amazon could vet its offerings just like every other retailer throughout history has done (that is, in fact, a big reason why retailers exist in the first place). The reason they don't is not because they can't but because it's too expensive. Their strategy is very deliberately to remove this piece of value that retailers normally add and hope nobody notices.
>Shopping on Amazon has gotten to the point where I actively try to avoid any 3rd party sellers now.
You can't really avoid it. Amazon comingles its inventory with that of 3rd party sellers who sell as FBA. So even if you choose Amazon as the seller, the actual product you receive could be the one a 3rd party seller shipped to Amazon's warehouses.
> Physical stores should do this too. Gets rid of the liability for what you sell.
That is the only way to compete with Amazon. It is a race-to-the-bottom of quality and safety for the consumers.
Amazon takes what are common rules with their customers and their retailers and has broken all of them. Amazon competes directly with its retailers using the information that got from them. Amazon brands 3rd party retailers products as if server-by-Amazon but it takes no responsibility on delivery or quality.
Or Amazon is forced into compliance or we are going to go back to the middle-ages experience where everything is a flea market and weights and measures are never correct.
> In contrast, Amazon does not buy the inventory from the suppliers, instead it charges them money to store their inventory in Amazon's warehouses.
That part seems entirely reasonable. Would you rather Amazon pay sellers for unsold stock? That seems like a sure way to get Amazon to reduce the number of 3rd party sellers they stock.
> They have done an amazing job of putting the customer first when everyone else was trying to figure out new ways to screw people over and tell them it was their fault.
They used to do an amazing job at putting customers first.
Then once they got traction, they pivoted to putting themselves first by commingling inventory with random resellers who can insert counterfeit or bad product into their inventory. They even went so far as to remove the option to filter for products only shipped and sold by Amazon.com.
They did this because retail margins suck and they would rather collect 15% for being a platform rather than a few percent accept and they get to shed all the inventory risk as a retailer. So now they’re just a more expensive Aliexpress, as far as I can tell.
> What Amazon is doing sounds more like stopping to be an open marketplace, depending on how hard it is to get approved. That's a solution, but at that point they are just another Target or Wal-Mart.
Good. If I buy from Amazon I want to buy from Amazon and Amazon alone. I'd never have considered buying Apple products via Amazon until Amazon recently became the exclusive seller of Apple products on their platform.
Don't get me wrong - I'm happy to buy from other reliable non-Amazon shops. However a seller that relies on Amazon or eBay but doesn't own/offer a trustworthy first-party store under their own domain, often feels cheap and like a someone willing to cut corners.
> Amazon makes it harder and harder to do this, de-emphasising the seller in listings.
You make me suspect I might be using Amazon wrong. Amazon's search is notoriously bad, but if you know what you want them you can go there and buy it. Just don't do stupid things like buying a 20 dollar item whose cost is 1 dollar price with a 19 dollar shipping fee, or buying weird things from shady sellers who just dropped by out of nowhere.
But that's just me. Perhaps I'm using it wrong. Who knows.
> This was totally unsolicited and it blew my mind.
That is small time customer service. Even Costco and Nordstrom’s and Trader Joe’s do it.
But the big time stuff, like Amazon providing retail products via a trusted supply chain, are where they screw you. It’s a low margin business, and Amazon wants as little to do with it as possible. So they removed the filter for showing only items shipped and sold by Amazon.com years ago, and they commingle inventory, so you have no idea of the supply chain of your product. Could be coming from some random product by some third party seller. Who knows?
Obviously, Amazon wants that 15% top line revenue from being a platform rather than the 2% to 5% they get from sourcing and selling retail products. That doesn’t align with my interests as a consumer.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was complaining about. The "shipped and sold by amazon.com" experience is super luxury. For consumer goods, and a whole lot of industrial parts? I have next-day access to a giant warehouse of stuff. I'd pay a lot extra for that. They cheapen that by adding in the shitty aggregator capabilities. (though, like I said, the biggest problem is mixing reviews, and making it hard to limit your search to just 'shipped and sold by amazon' - when looking at a listing, an experienced user can easily see if it's amazon or a shady third party)
A lot of my friends have big storage units full of stuff for projects, books they found that they want to read at some point, etc, etc... things we have bought before we needed them because we didn't know that those things would be available when we needed them.
As amazon gets better, there are more and more classes of things I don't need to own until the day before I need them. For those of us who live in areas where storage or living space costs way more than "stuff" - this is huge.
Think about a world where we don't have to go shopping. Especially where we don't have to go exploratory shopping, where you don't have to buy the things you will need ahead of time.
(actually, I mean, this is a very silicon valley perspective; I visit family members elsewhere in the USA, and it is so weird to me that one day shipping isn't available if I forgot to pack a thing I needed. At that point, it becomes a lot less luxury.)
> Secondly, that isn’t what sellers want. Many sellers use Amazon to fulfill their orders. Amazon is far more than just a “market stall”.
This.
Amazon is basically a huge logistics network. Their business is not selling you products, whether from their own generic brands, from high-end Veblen goods companies like Apple or from cheap chinese dropship artists. Their business is to process payment, and get that package delivered to your front door. To Amazon, their products is just a way to generate output through their logistics network.
>I feel like Amazon has gotten harder to browse, lately.
Amazon has a "problem" with private labels. It's so so so easy for Joe Blow in Kansas to create a private label product and get it shipped directly to Amazon's wearhouses. So Amazon is overrun by them, which makes it difficult to find anything in the mess. On top of that, since most listings are created by third party sellers, listings vary in quality and can be very inaccurate. All this makes it close to impossible to compare items. Top it off with Amazon's sorting feature being entirely broken, it can really be a mess to try to browse. eBay actually offers a better UI in that regard.
It was pretty short sighted on Amazon's part to let this happen, IMO.
Amazon actually CAN improve in this regard, all they have to do is require third party sellers to complete the listing and also have a human review the listing for quality and accuracy. Just that small step would improve the customer experience drastically.
With all that I don't really understand why people still use Amazon anymore other than out of habit.
There are not many resellers doing it, no where near as many as Amazon but many large online shops are embracing the Amazon Model, Newegg does it now, Walmart, and a few others.
Amazon is also getting more aggressive with their resellers, putting in more restrictions, heavily favoring the Fulfilled by program where Amazon gets a larger cut, increase the number of blackout catagories, and increasing the number of items sold by Amazon directly which puts huge pricing pressure on Resellers that can not get the pricing amazon can.
Several Niche and some larger brand have pulled out of Amazon completely in the last couple of years for these (and the counterfeiting problem) issues
>The level of discipline required to operate a multi-tenant, externally facing service like FBA yields tremendous benefit to the Amazon’s internal operation — this isn’t some hacked-together, homegrown tool that is hard-coded to Amazon’s own needs and thus nearly impossible to improve.
Did this guy just say FBA is impossible to improve? Is this a comedy piece? FBA is garbage, we (third party sellers, at least me) only sell on FBA because that's where the customers are. FBA is like an abusive boyfriend you can't get away from. Sure, Amazon will reimburse you when they lose your inventory (which they will do, very often) but you have to watch your inventory like a hawk because they won't tell you your inventory is lost. That's assuming your shipments even make it into your inventory in the first place after arriving at the wearhouse. Ive heard of big time FBA sellers having to hire someone to do nothing but resolve inventory discrepancies full time. Seller support barely speaks English (unless you can get a supervisor, which I was able to do once by making enough of a stink) and doesn't understand what your problem is. Of course they take 3 full days to not resolve your issue. No legitimate seller commingles inventory anymore because then Amazon will send out counterfeits to your customers. It absolutely WILL happen to you at some time if you are commingling for enough time, no exceptions. Then you have to hope Amazon doesn't kick you off their platform for their own incompetence.
The irony is that what attracted me to Amazon in the first place was that they could mostly supply the things I used to go to eBay for, but did it better -- because Amazon held the inventory and handled returns.
If Amazon no longer does that for the things I buy, then there's no advantage to using them. It sounds like eBay will be getting more of my business back.
> Surely Amazon has a history of who bought what from who
They don't necessarily. Amazon combines items from different sellers together in their warehouses, and doesn't sort them out when picking orders to ship. So if I send them a high quality doohickey to sell with FBA, a customer who orders my doohickey might actually receive Mr. Cheapo's knock-off doohickey because as far as Amazon is concerned they're the same thing and got placed in the same bin in the warehouse.
Sellers can opt out of this but then Amazon charges them more.
> Were you perhaps paying into the minimum number of seller features? Not FBA?
Full FBA
> Don't allow Amazon to be your sole selling platform.
Exactly.
I have friends who we know people who have had products suspended on Amazon for nonsense (or unknowable, due to the opacity you mentioned) reasons. They decided Amazon was more risk than they wanted to put on 100% of their income generation strategy. They started to work the direct channel. It took time and effort. Now about 30% of their income is direct and does not depend at all on Amazon. They want to eventually reach 75%, with 100% being the ultimate dream. They want to leave Amazon but they are stuck until they can replace their income through direct sales.
While they don't delist items, their algo favors products they sell directly to the extent that Amazon will get the buy box over a third party seller even when that seller is reputable and cheaper. Add that the 3rd party seller has to pay a sales fee to Amazon, often making it impossible to compete with them without approaching zero margin.
It's not delisting but it's the next best thing. If Amazon starts selling something you sell, your sales are gone, you were just free market research for them.
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