[letsdothisagain]

The anti-competitive bit is they have all the sales information that would typically be a trade secret for a company.

Go ahead, call up your local 7-11 and ask them what their sales were for the quarter. They'll tell you to fuck off.

[abduhl]

But Amazon is the 7-11 (and more)! It is the customer facing part of the business that houses and delivers the beef jerky to the ultimate customer. 7-11 sees that jerky sells, that lots of brands can sell jerky, that consumers don’t seem to care about the brand of jerky as long as it says teriyaki, and so 7-11 now sells 7-11 basics teriyaki jerky.

The FBA middlemen are more like traveling salesmen - they take an order, send it in to HQ, and HQ ships it to the 7-11. They don’t do anything but take orders. They are Tom Smykowski - they take the plans to the engineers!

You’re complaining that the storefront that the goods are sold through has its own sales information. The amount of sales you have through Amazon may be a trade secret, but it is not a trade secret from Amazon.

[havnagiggle]

If we're coming up with brick and mortar analogies, it's got to be grocery stores and generic branded items. Kraft Mac vs Great Value.

It's hard for me to say Amazon shouldn't be able to do it while every grocery store can, but there seems to be a quantitative difference because of the ridiculous number of options online vs the finite shelf space of a brick and mortar.

All the same economic games are played. Items are placed on specific shelves to drive specific sales, etc. Sale numbers are known by the store and they get their cut.

The distinguisher is supposed to be in the quality. Premium vs generic. That doesn't seem to play out healthily in Amazon's marketplace.

Maybe one difference is the consumable nature of the grocery products vs what one typically buys online (Amazon batteries as opposed to an animal carrier). Or maybe we have given up too much with the consolidation of grocery chains the last few decades and that is equally problematic.

[LeonB]

I think that a lot of the same problems exist in generic brands at supermarkets. Supermarkets already have a lot of ways to pressure suppliers, and “own brand” products are weaponised extensively.

I’m all in favor of suppliers competing with each other, as that’s in the best interests of society overall. But when the platforms/marketplaces themselves participate in that competition they have tremendous advantages, which is anti-competitive, and it benefits no one but themselves.

[jtbayly]

But Amazon refuses to be the actual seller taking the risk in the first place. They aren’t buying jerky from anybody and then selling it. Until they decide to make their own based on the actual seller’s data.

[ipaddr]

But should barr them from selling a line of similar products.

[cowsandmilk]

Your local grocery store has store brands that compete with the name brands. Your local grocery store also charges for shelf placement.

Amazon is actually more open than other stores about this information, giving product rankings so that you could decide to knock off popular products too.

[BizarroLand]

Except that overlooks Amazons intentionally messed up search function. Amazon, unlike grocery stores, doesn't really put all of the items into the same location.

On amazon, if you want to browse "electric bike tires with motors" you will have to browse through dozens of full electric bikes, electric scooters, hoverboards, tires without motors, tricycles, and all sorts of close but not quite what you're looking for items to find 1 that you might be interested in.

Want to price shop them? Good luck finding others to compare with.

It would be like looking for a 5 lb bag of white sugar in the grocery store so you go to the sugar isle and finding 1 half pound bag of brown sugar amongst all of the flour and seasonings and honey and agave nectar and sweet n low in the first 100 feet.

Any grocery store organized like that would fail and be replaced by a company with decent organizational flow.

But amazon makes money by charging the vendors on its market for visibility, in addition to listing fees, storage fees, and whatever else.

Amazon has a perverse incentive to not show you, the customer, what you are looking for when there is anything else close enough to what you are looking for that they will make more money for selling to you.

There isn't a better word than evil for this, even if it is the benign sort of evil that only added to the chaos and misery of the world without directly harming anyone.

[hellojesus]

Also, in direct response to the Gp, grocery stores buy sales data that contains their sales + their direct competitors down to the product level. It is anonymoized but freely available.

Edit: Also companies like Google scan emails for information. Amazon stopped including prices in their emails because Google was getting a direction stream of sales data with full costing info.