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by TapWaterBandit
955 days ago
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> Nobody else besides Amazon can get a random product to my door in under 12 hours. If I buy the product direct from the manufacturer I often get charged shipping. That situation could be easily argued to be a monopoly. Why do Amazon have a monopoly on this? Is it because they are engaging in anti-competitive practices preventing competitors from offering the same thing or do they just have the best logistics expertise and setup in the industry? That's a genuine question btw because it matters a lot for whether or not regulation/the state should attempt to resolve it. |
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You have to have Amazon’s sales volume before owning a delivery and logistics empire makes any financial sense, and you can’t provide Amazon’s level of service and low costs without owning your own global logistics company.
Then you’ve got the fact that Amazon’s technology infrastructure is a profit center. In contrast, any e-commerce competitor has to pay retail rates for cloud computing or run a data center as a cost center. Amazon e-commerce lost money for decades while AWS propped it up.
The anticompetitive practices come from the ways in which they exploit this enviable position, like the issue the FTC is suing them over where they are charging their merchants money to fight over search ranking, and knowingly promoting inferior and/or less relevant products with the result of raising prices for consumers and merchants artificially. Merchants can’t refuse to play the game because if you don’t sell on Amazon you lose most of the addressable customer base.