[tyrw]

That is what's happening today, offered by the only company with the scale to do it: Amazon (It's called FBA). Then when they see your products are selling particularly well, they stock them, undercut you, and put you out of business.

[concede_pluto]

Amazon can't undercut manufacturers (not without becoming a manufacturer). If they undercut middlemen who weren't adding any value, what do I care?

[hobofan]

The middlemen are adding value by making niche items available on the marketplace. If they are gone the diversity of products will shrink.

[robryan]

But either Amazon will have the product or it will still be valuable to another middle man.

Amazon have a lot but are a long way off having everything. Health and Beauty for example, they may have the top 50k sales ranks pretty well covered but at least the top 100k are probably worth a middle mans time.

[hobofan]

Not all products are really valuable to a middle man. From my insights regarding Amazon sellers, ~70% of the profit is made from ~5% of the products, and those are the products Amazon is taking away from them. If they then only have the low-profit items remaining, they aren't able to be profitably on Amazon anymore, unless they operate at significant scale - a scale that becomes very hard to grow to when Amazon is constantly taking away your means to do so.