[gwd]

> 1. Think of Amazon as a search engine for products. 2. Amazon wants its site to be the lowest-price destination for products. 3. If Amazon finds your product on another website for lower than its own website, it'll just hide your listing from the search -- this is meant to be pro-consumer (when you go to Amazon you'll get the lowest price).

Stockholm syndrome at its finest -- reinterpreting "punishing a seller if an item is cheaper anywhere else on the internet, even a site they don't directly control" as "pro-consumer".

If Amazon really were a search engine for their own products, they should just give an accurate answer for their own site. If they really wanted to be pro-consumer, they'd say "Available cheaper here: ..."

ETA: Showing competitor's prices could still be a strategic win for Amazon. It conditions users to always first check Amazon; and most of the time if it's cheaper, the ease of one-click ordering and/or batching deliveries should make it worth ordering from Amazon even if it's a few dollars cheaper elsewhere.

[ChoGGi]

> If they really wanted to be pro-consumer, they'd say "Available cheaper here: ..."

Which company does that?

[AlecSchueler]

One claiming to be a pro-consumer search engine for products?

But plenty of companies do things like "If you find a cheaper quote we'll match it."

[dirtmerchant]

Amazon does not claim to be “pro-consumer “

Instead they claim to be “customer-obsessed “

Obsession is rarely a net-positive for the target of the obsesser.

[terminalshort]

When has Amazon ever claimed that? And a price match policy makes no sense for a 3rd party platform like Amazon. That's up to the first party sellers.

[Tadpole9181]

Did you even bother to read the thread? The top-level comment, the Amazon employee defending the practice.

[BigGreenJorts]

Wise does (did?) that. I was doing large international money transfer a couple years ago and they advertized in app the rates of other companies in the space. At the amounts I was transferring it was cheaper for me to transfer with OFX so I did that. They are more expensive at small sums though, not to mention Wise card makes foreign payments much easier.

[noirscape]

Nobody, because no company is actually pro-customer. Which is fine, the customer and the company's goals don't align beyond "want product" and "supplies product".

The problem is that Amazon abuses it's market position as being the search engine for customer products to unfairly prevent anyone from competing with them. Being "better than Amazon" as a seller in the margins is completely impossible, because Amazon demands sellers price match them.

Let's say you're a seller who wants to make 7$ from each sale as revenue (your actual margins from making the product aren't relevant to this estimate). If you list this product on the Amazon store, Amazon is going to take your listed price and apply their own price cut on top of this (although it's usually framed the other way around, so you list the final sale price and Amazon then says how much they take). For simplicity's sake, we'll go with a 30% cut, so they list it for 10$. Now let's say there's a second storefront you want to sell to, we'll call it Bamazon. Bamazon has a lower cut than Amazon does, let's say it's 10%. So the final product would then be listed for 8$ (taking into account customer psychology on price listings), making Bamazon the better seller, right? The smart customer gets a better deal, Amazon is incentivized to improve their margins if they don't want to lose market share and everybody's happy.

Wrong. What happens instead is that Bamazon will now also list the product for 10$ (because if it's listed lower, Amazon screws the seller by delisting them from Amazon, which is unacceptable for the seller because Amazon is the one with the monopoly position, so the seller then can sell absolutely nothing), making the product equally expensive for the customer and making Bamazon's deal only an improvement for the seller, who now gets higher profits from their sales, screwing the customer. Meanwhile Bamazon is rendered unable to compete with Amazon on their better margins since Amazon is the assumed default. Any benefit of a different store having better margins is fully masked by this approach, only benefiting Amazon.

It's a Most Favored Nations clause and their use on online platforms is both ubiquitous, scummy and makes things more expensive for the customer while also entrenching Amazon's monopoly position. This crap is usually couched as pro-customer rethoric, but it really isn't. It mostly serves to entrench monopolies not on their quality, but through their existing market share. (Valve also famously does this by the way.)

[WarmWash]

Just a heads up, since no company is pro-consumer, and I assume you know what it is to be pro-consumer, if you started a truly pro-consumer business, you would put all the others out of business.

Just think about that.

Ironically, a large part of Amazon's rise was on the back of their very pro-consumer policies. Not many companies would tolerate large scale GPU return fraud (among other items) for those many years for example.

[Timon3]

That's a very simplistic take because it assumes full transparency for all consumers - all while advertising, one of the biggest industries in our society, explicitly allows companies to turn the money they make from consumer-hostile behavior into additional reach, and even worse: all while large companies and VCs keep buying up pro-consumer businesses and enshittifying them.

[WarmWash]

Trust me, the simplistic take is "All company's are bad, and have ill intent"

[fwipsy]

Their take is simplistic, but yours is worse.

Some companies have good intent. Public benefit corporations are a thing. They aren't really relevant, because unscrupulous companies outcompete them.

Your assertion that pro-consumer companies would outcompete unscrupulous ones depends on consumers and regulators holding them accountable. So why are you arguing against being suspicious of companies?

Obviously the best strategy for companies is to appear to be pro-consumer, but "cheat" (meaning price fixing but also things like advertising and buying up competitors) as much as possible. In that context, "all companies are anti-consumer" is a decent shorthand for "you should assume every company is anti-consumer because the regulatory environment favors it, even if there are exceptions."

[terminalshort]

And why would they want to be pro-consumer anyway? We want them to be pro-consumer because we are consumers. But they are Amazon. They are going to be pro-Amazon.

[delecti]

I mean, their very first Leadership Principle is "Customer Obsession", so they do at least ostensibly want to be pro-consumer. Though yes, obviously those "principles" are only in service to making money.

https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...

[terminalshort]

The interests of customers and the business are aligned the vast majority of the time, but in those cases the phrase "pro-consumer" is meaningless because no choice had to be made. In the more unusual cases where they do not align, then that's a different matter.

[thepryz]

The assumption everyone seems to have is that the customer is the average consumer purchasing items and services on Amazon’s website. That hasn’t been true in more than a decade.

The real customer are the third party sellers and those using Amazon platforms.

[libertine]

The elephant in the room is that Amazon keeps increasing their fees.

So if someone needs to adjust the price to accommodate Amazon fees, on Amazon, they're penalized.

Not to mention increasing ad costs, which at this point is another fee.

It's not for the benefit of the consumer, it's for the benefit of Amazon: Amazon wants people to buy on Amazon at the lowest cost for the consumer and at the highest margin for Amazon - they won't sacrifice their fees.

[RankingMember]

Hell, even something as simple as their sorting/filtering is so broken/clunky as to be anti-consumer. Try sorting lowest-to-highest and seeing how hard it is to actually understand the final price of everything that pops up (amidst all the sponsored trash).