[Retric]

Hardly, the vast majority of physical stores don’t manufacture anything they simply aggregate merchandise from wholesalers and operate a physical location. There is no way to transition that model to Amazon marketplace because they don’t have any way way to differentiate themselves. Attempting that transition would have simply lost them a great deal of money.

There are a mix of ways to profitability operate with Amazon both legitimately or via various kinds of fraud. However, suggesting that transition is often as reasonable as telling a barber to open a veterinary clinic, it’s just a completely different kind of business.

[mtnGoat]

But that’s changing the measurement to fit your argument, most sellers on Amazon aren’t directly manufacturing their goods either, yet still have margin. We are talking about retailers switching how they offer their goods. Rely less on the store front and just ship more stuff, isn’t a major change to business model. Adding a shipping center isn’t hard.

But either way business is dog eat dog and you have evolve to survive. Don’t blame the competition for building a better mousetrap. This is free markets and capitalism operating as intended.

[Retric]

You’re the one suggesting these companies could have made the switch.

I have no problem with capitalism crushing companies, as long as it’s head to head in a free market rather than based on fraud or avoiding regulations. I am simply pointing out Amazon has been a huge net loss for small businesses, which it objectively has.

[mtnGoat]

But that is no fault of Amazon is my point, it’s the business owners failure for failing to adapt to changing market conditions.

And my gripe is that they project their failure at Amazon rather than owning their own poor decisions.

[Retric]

Amazon is at fault for the amount of fraud on their platform and the amount of damage it’s caused both businesses and customers.

It isn’t at fault for people preferring to buy stuff online or Amazon’s highly efficient supply chain etc.

[mtnGoat]

Ok then it sounds like we agree on all points then. They could certainly do better at cleaning up the fraud.

[hnbad]

The fraud is integral to their business model at this point, though.

They deliberately chose a way of storing products that makes them vulnerable to fraud. Fixing that would require storing them differently (which would be more expensive to them).

Likewise, cutting down on unsafe or white label products would increase the quality of the products they sell but adding a vetting process and stricter moderation would significantly increase labor costs per product and if companies at scale want to avoid one thing, it's dynamic labor costs.

They literally can't do better at cleaning up the fraud because there is no market incentive for them to do so and doing so would reduce profits and thus shareholder value. To borrow your line: it's just free markets and capitalism working as intended.

[robertlagrant]

I don't think it's that simple. I've heard stories of Amazon doing data analysis on its own marketplace, coming out with competing products for ones it think it can make a profit on, and putting them above the 3rd parties in search results.

[mtnGoat]

That wasn’t invented by Amazon, Many retailers do this. Grocery stores white label. REI is another great example, they run data analysis on what sold the most, what features were searched for most and built their own products.

[robertlagrant]

I'm not saying it was invented by Amazon.