From Forbes:
We all know Mrs. Bezos didn’t raise a shy son named Jeff, but as Amazon has come to dominate the world of e-commerce—edging ever closer to a 50% market share of all online sales in the country—its tactics are increasingly coming under attack for being overly aggressive, potentially unfair to its suppliers and maybe even borderline unethical.
All of which raises the key question: If Amazon gets too greedy—or appears to be too greedy to its customers—does it start to bite the golden buy button and turn off shoppers who will look elsewhere for their purchases? Just as importantly, does it get too big for its customers?
The latest charge comes from the Washington Post, which conducted test searches on the e-tailers’s site and found that very often Amazon offered its private-label product as an alternative right at the stage when online shoppers would add an item to their carts. As such, it tempts viewers with a lower-priced alternative at a critical stage of the purchasing process.
. . . .
“It’s an ad at exactly the moment the customer is ready to buy,” the Post quotes James Thomson, a former senior manager in business development at Amazon and now partner at brand consultancy Buy Box Experts. “I don’t see how that’s not unfair.”
Amazon says there’s nothing wrong with all of this. “Like any retailer we promote our own brands in our stores, which provide high-quality products and great value to customers,” the newspaper quotes Amazon spokeswoman Nell Rona as saying. “We also extensively promote products from our selling partners.”
. . . .
But Amazon seems to be crossing a line in the level of criticism directed at it by consumers and competitors alike. Suppliers to the site, while at the mercy of what is often now their biggest customer, can’t afford to stop doing business with Amazon. But in similar situations in the past, vendors have used subtle techniques to punish retail customers they didn’t appreciate. Maybe it’s not bringing them their best products first, maybe it’s restricting distribution on some items, maybe it’s slowing down deliveries: all can passively aggressively drive shoppers elsewhere.
Link to the rest at Forbes
BTW, all these gripes about Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc, are useful background data for worldbuilding. It helps to see how the world runs, even if it presents mass media as hopelessly clueless about the technological world.
The day Amazon put the used books beside the new ones was the day it showed its true concern. Its bottom line. That was a lot of years ago, and what the article points out is the very same thing. Once again, the WP proves its journalistic abilities in finding a news story.
Who wants used books as a purchase option?
Customers.
Who does not?
Publishers.
Who does Amazon care for the most?
Customers, by far.
“They only care about their bottom line” is someone else whining about theirs. Amazon cares about mine.
Simple question: what does Amazon exist for?
Making money, right?
They’re not a public utility of publisher-owned cooperative.
They’re a “money grubbing multinational”.
Their first duty is preserving the company.
Their second duty is making monet for the owners, via reportable profits or stock appreciation.
Their third duty and first *chosen* one, is serving customer interests. It’s actually an option tbey have chosen to emphasize. But it’s not a right. A fair amount of online gripes, like from serial returners, are from people who think Amazon exists for them to cheat and exploit.
Their fourth, and second optional, duty is to support their suppliers, as *they* see fit. They carry a wide variety of products and suppliers in many categories and not every supplier is supported equally.
They serve many clients (not masters) and who they choose to support and how is their decision, usually based on who makes them and their customer happiest.he
None of this is news.
They do their thing.
If it helps a given segment, they smile.
If it doesn’t, they shrug.
Nobody can please everybody.
The key thing to understand about books and other media (which Amazon does) is that most consumers buying books/etc are buying the *content*, not the packaging. And the more packaging options they can offer for the content, the more happy customers likely to return. That is why they sell ebooks, why they bought Audible, why they do POD, and why they sell pbooks as new, remaindered, and (yes) used. They list all the formats under the same heading for customer convenience. Asking them to list different formats separately is one of the main gripes of the Manhattan Mafia, whk prefer Indies be listed separately, in a “ghetto”, much like Overdrive does.
It’s not about Amazon or publishers. It’s about making happy customers. Because happy customers is how they choose to make their money instead of making publishers happy, as B&N did when tbey were downlisting Indies and hybrids. And we’ve all seen how well that worked out, right?
If Amazon weren’t selling used books online, somebody else would. And in fact, they were: ABEBooks was founded in 1995 and were selling used books online for 13 years before Amazon bought them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbeBooks
If all you pay attention to is the publishing establishment media, you’d think Amazon exists solely to serve them and their chosen books.
If all you pay attention to the activists constantly griping about Amazon, you’d think they’re a public utility or government agency, existing solely to “promote the common good”.
Neither is true.
They exist to make money selling to willing consumers. At their discretion. In the process they’ve gone from 5 employees to 650,000 plus, and from zero value to near a trillion in 25 years.
The customer focus thing seems to work for them.
Publisher focus? Well, B&N has a new master. His specialty? Customer focus. Publishers are gushing over him.
Let’s see how long that lasts…
RE: the publishers and the activists, the sad part is that Amazon has done more for both books and the common good than the publishers and the activists ever have.
Fortuitous accident. 🙂
It’s not their job and they didn’t set out to do it.
Still, 650,000 jobs isn’t half bad.
It would take a lot of taxpayer money for government to match.
The day Amazon put the used books beside the new ones was the day it showed its true concern. Its bottom line.
Before that day, what did you think was their true concern?
More, what should it be if not their bottom line?
Mind you, there’s lots of companies that pretend otherwise, but it’s just pretense. Like Google’s famous “Do no evil” promise.
Spouted just as they were helping the Chinese government suppress their citizens and helping the PLA build up their power. Pure hypocrisy.
Last I looked, Amazon made no bones about their priorities. Their promise is growth and money.
There’s a lot to be said about clarity.
I agree with Felix Torres. And may I add that while there are many legitimate complaints to be made about Amazon, it was almost literally a lifesaver during a recent bout of caring for a relative post-surgery.
When it is inadvisable to leave a patient alone, and various medical supplies are needed within a day or so, it is a blessing to be able to order items and have them arrive on one’s doorsteps. Plus, often the local stores don’t carry the needed items.
Yes, we have wonderful relatives who pitched in, but it was important to maximize their time and energy. Multiple trips to the pharmacy would have been an imposition.
There are other sites that deliver and are fine, also. But when things happen suddenly and/or become overwhelming, it is great to have an established account & relationship to avoid yet another learning curve/need to set passwords & list credit cards, etc.
For all its flaws, Amazon is a wonder, especially to those of us old enough to remember the age before the Internet.
No, Jacqueline, they are out to kill us all!!!
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/amazon-next-day-delivery-deaths
That picture is a joy.
Also, $160 a day is, what? $20 an hour? $40,000 a year?
Is the story an indictment or a recruiting ad? 😉
For comparison:
https://www.browncafe.com/community/threads/deaths-at-ups.192551/
Apparently package delivery requires hazard pay.
(Though some of the examples sound like Darwin Award contenders.)
Even more ADS, weekend edition.
https://www.richmond.com/opinion/our-opinion/editorial-a-world-we-created/article_b536c4ec-53f4-54f5-bb24-bfcc10849a04.html
It’s not too bad, until the last sentence.
They need a course in industrial engineering and concepts like diminishing returns.
Plus they have no feel for scale.
It’s like the handwringers urging Congress spend (somebody else’s) money because “it’s a *crisis* killing hundreds of people a year!”.
In a country of 330 million.
Yes, some things in life you live with because nothing ever is 100.00% perfect. Proactively policing everything to even 99.99% would eat all profits, force higher prices, and still not be enough.
So yes, it *is* better, economically speaking, to do as well as possible and let ADS and handwringers police the rest, on *their* dime, and then fix it if it makes sense.
None of this will kill Amazon but it will make them stronger. Not exactly what they want but it’s how the game is played.
Try this:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/how-amazons-shipping-empire-is-challenging-ups-and-fedex/ar-AAGv4Rd?ocid=spartanntp
Amazon haters will be happy to know they are phasing out the USPS, cutting its use dramatically.
Reality check time:
The vast majority of people want a specific kind of product to address a need, at a reasonable price, delivered in a reasonable time, with the minimum fuss dealing with the source.
Amazon isn’t perfect in any of those categories.
They aren’t necessarily the best in all of of them in every or even any case.
What they are is “good enough” and “better than the competition” in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Are they angels?
No.
Are they devils?
No.
They are just a means to an end, a tool.
Most critically, the vast majority of people simply don’t care about what goes on to answer their need.
They don’t care if suppliers are squeezed.
They don’t care if the warehouses are full of robots or entry level workers.
They don’t care about the cost of running the business or even if it turns a profit.
They don’t care if the product moves by air, land, or sea.
They don’t care if the factory making the product is clean and automated or a dingy sweat shop.
They really don’t care.
They are too busy dealing with their own problems to give it a thought.
Should they? Maybe. If they had the time between making a living, raising a couple of kids, treating their conditions, staying out of jail, whatever…
They’re living life and that’s problem enough.
The vast majority of these *unquantified* complaints come from people who make a living finding things to complain about and spreading complaints. Or people with an axe to grind against the target.
And the vast majority of people still won’t care, no matter the tsk-tsking, pearl clutching, or handwringing of the professional worriers/agitators.
Most people understand that life isn’t perfect.
That no organization is.
(And in most cases it is cheaper and most effective to live with a defect than to try to be 100.00% defect free.)
They deal with their problems and cares and let others worry about theirs.
Don’t expect perfection and you won’t be disappointed.
Entropy always wins.
ADS, pure and simple.
Amazon has data, lots of it, and uses it – and the other retailers are so far behind the only thing they can do is carp.
Amazon is not perfect – but it is continually trying to improve. Other retailers won’t or can’t.
I don’t always buy from Amazon – especially if I’m worried about a counterfeit product and it’s important to have the name brand. Then I go to a company website and painfully go through their buying and shipping ‘experience.’
And, as an author, I’m not so thrilled about the process of finding readers for indie mainstream – but I can’t fault their method of selling volume based on data. I suspect my potential readers don’t do searches, but come with their choice already made.
But as a customer, I’m almost always satisfied – and there’s no beating their attention to getting my products to me fast. Whether they’re around forever or not, right now they are my go-to-first place.
When I read the consumers/competitors sentence, absent some serious consumer research, I doubt that “consumers” if that term means hundreds of thousands or millions of people who buy things online or offline care about what Amazon as an organization may or may not be doing to stir up people unlike themselves.
Most people don’t read Forbes or The New York Times or The Washington Post or watch MSNBC, in part because they may harbor a belief that the people that write/spseak on those fora are crazy. Or more likely, such ordinary people may have been exposed to the punditry and decided that group wasn’t talking to people like them.
I think the large majority of Amazon’s customers are seeking a product of the expected quality at a reasonable price that arrives at their home/office when expected.
Whatever Amazon does to present them with the opportunity to acquire that product is fine with 99.9% of Amazon shoppers.
For decades, critics of a similar bent criticized Walmart for many and varying purported sins and misdeeds. Didn’t have any perceptible impact on Walmart’s rate of growth and expansion.
It required Amazon using the same tactics to beat Walmart that Walmart had used to beat JC Penney, etc., before Walmart’s growth diminished.
“But Amazon seems to be crossing a line in the level of criticism directed at it by consumers and competitors alike.”
Oh yeah, as a consumer I hate it when a retailer offers me a similar product at a lower price just before I am ready to check out. How dare they?
/s
The only way that a company can kill itself by being “too greedy” is by having a lower value / cost ratio than its competitors.
Vendors had better be very sure that products they do not sell on Amazon have a significantly higher value / cost ratio for consumers.
“Slow walking” product is a chancy proposition – will the consumer blame Amazon, or will they blame the vendor? The latter results in depressed sales for all products, and damage to the “good will” entry in the balance sheet.