[aahhahahaaa]

>Before the Journal’s report came out, Amazon had told Congress that it doesn’t access sales data to help guide the launch of its own products.

This is insanely hard to believe. Amazon just started selling batteries and other random goods under their Basics brand based on ZERO inside sales knowledge? I'd love to see how they enforce that.

[tuna-piano]

Look closely. Amazon claimed they don't access individual seller data, but they do access aggregated product data.

However, in at least one case the aggregated data was only between two sellers: Amazon Warehouse (which only sold a few returned items) and the original seller.

"Amazon draws a distinction between the data of an individual third-party seller and what it calls aggregated data, which it defines as the data of products with two or more sellers."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...

[mountainb]

They do, though. I have been on calls with Amazon reps to discuss how our ad campaigns have been performing, what can be done, and what additional sources of data from Amazon we can access through beta programs and the like. Individual Amazon agents of varying levels constantly check and reference the private data of individual sellers for all kinds of reasons (again, most of them justified and useful). In most such cases I have been very impressed on the search ad side of things. On the outside Amazon ad placement side of things (Amazon Media Group) they were basically crooks, but that is normal in display ad world, which is a crooked world full of frauds.

They can absolutely access individual seller data and do so all the time for all kinds of (mostly mundane) reasons. The aggregated data is also actually more valuable than the individualized data in most situations.

Amazon unlike Google has tended to open up more accurate sources of data to larger groups of sellers, in contrast with Google or FB which have tended to start off giving people lots and lots of free data and then paywalling more and more of it through the progressive crippling of the keyword tool and so on.

Frankly Amazon is so bad at selling its own private label products that it should not concern anyone. They suck at it compared to any other major retailer that you can think of. I have seen Amazon private labels be discontinued and fail and have competed with Amazon products successfully in many different categories on Amazon. They are usually pretty lazy and un-inventive. When they succeed it is usually at the level of "acceptable competence, good price to performance ratio" as in many of the Amazon Basics computer hardware accessories.

It is a major distraction from other serious issues like the endemic crime on the platform (counterfeiting etc.) which actually poses a serious danger to customers, to Amazon, to sellers, and to brands as well.

[imtringued]

AmazonBasics won't sell if there is no counterfeiting to force you to buy it.

[aahhahahaaa]

Ah there it is. That makes a lot more sense... honestly at their scale I don't think they should be able to do this, aggregate or not.

They're about 50% of all online sales in the US, where compared to brick-and-mortar, Walmart gets a lot of flak as a small-business killer despite only accounting for 15% of all physical retail sales.

[AndrewUnmuted]

eCommerce, though, only accounted for 16% of all 2019's US retail sales. [0]

So, Walmart ought to get rid of all these private brands [1] I take it?

[0] https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/e-commerce-sales-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walmart_brands

[aahhahahaaa]

Right not a bad point, but I was making the comparison to demonstrate Amazon's scale within ecommerce... not to compare the volume of sales across all commerce.

I personally think the distinction matters, but maybe I'm wrong.

[AndrewUnmuted]

The other issue with your distinction is that all these brick-and-motor retailers also have online eCommerce services where shopping carts, logging data, and third party vendors are involved in improving the experience - and let me tell you, those guys are using the data. Probably not nearly as well as Amazon uses theirs, but they're still trying as best they can.

[actuator]

Playing the devil's advocate here.

You can get this data easily from market research reports and sales data of the respective companies also.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

I dunno. I mean I'll stipulate that they did access insider data. But batteries seems like something they could have just you know figured out on their own. Doesn't seem like a sinister undercutting of the market. It's not like there is a shortage of battery brands on Amazon or elsewhere.