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by bradleyjg 1302 days ago
Amazon knows that the deodorant it’s selling is not discontinued or clearance. It knows Old Spice isn’t giving some mom and pop a better wholesale deal than the world’s largest retailer either. There’s no legit reason for there to be “other sellers” for that product, or really most any product it itself sells.
2 comments
kube-system 1301 days ago
Amazon barely knows who is listing products on their site, whether the products are even legal, and sometimes they can’t even tell what a “product” is.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/15/tech/cpsc-sues-amazon/index.h...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/amazon-mails-postcards-to-se...

https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/amazon-listings-wrong-r...

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nirimda 1301 days ago
But that's because they deliberately chose not to know it. A responsible business would have processes in place to identify all of that information.
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ilyt 1301 days ago
"responsible" doesn't earn them as much

The only pressure on them to do it would be money. And not in "someone decides to not use them to buy some stuff" but getting sued for hundreds of millions

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from 1301 days ago
This is just false. There are "grey markets" for basically any major product. Quality King Distributors is one company that dominates this space and has been sued many times (they win nearly every time on the basis of the first sale doctrine and are responsible for [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_King_Distributors_Inc.....) case) for undercutting manufacturers. Example: Dollar General sells some prepaid phones at prices substantially lower than on eBay/Amazon but in limited amounts per customer. Companies will hire a bunch of runners to go buy the max amount of these phones to resell (or unlock and export to other countries). Or: "Diversion"/products that are intended to be exported to another country actually being reimported, liquidations/bankruptcy auctions etc.

Lots of manufacturers and distributors who play by the rules don't like this because grey market distributors will undercut MSRP on places like Amazon so they will report the listings as fakes to get them removed.

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