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by sandworm101 2244 days ago
>> You have to understand that even if you are on the larger side, in the top 10% of sellers, that Amazon still considers you expendable.

No. Amazon considers them a threat. Amazon itself is the largest of large sellers. Any profits made by an upstart large seller are profits that Amazon would rather be making itself.

3 comments

Even more cynical: Amazon considers them a valuable source of business intelligence and/or ML model training data.
Sellers are more profitable and less risky overall because Amazon does not need to buy the inventory and they make a profit off of every interaction with the seller from transaction fees to storage fees to PPC ads and more. Amazon's vendor business sucks and is overall shrinking proportion of marketplace revenue.
I think you are more likely to be correct than the poster on principles. A marketplace model makes more and easier margin than being a seller.

However as any gigantic organization, Amazon is not a single minded entity. It's likely these activites are handled by totally separate entities with different employees and targets. So it's entirely possible that Amazon is pushing simultaneously for more marketplace and for more own selling actively sabotaging both aspects.

>Sellers are more profitable and less risky overall

Amazon has all the data anyone would ever need to determine which products the above is true or false for. They would be negligent if they weren't putting that information to use.

Amazon could just start drop shipping like these sellers do.
Ok, but holding their money until they go out of business smells strongly of anti-trust litigation being necessary.