[binarysolo]

Amazon third party seller (low 8s) here: last time this happened was during COVID and it ended up being a permanent FBA shipping price increase.

Practically speaking shipping accounts for 10-20% of the sale price, so realistically it's the seller who will absorb it and maybe pass on costs to the buyers, but we're talking about 3.5% of 10-20%, which is really a 1% price increase, so a noticeable but not make-or-break issue in the death-by-1000-cuts.

The Andy-led Amazon is less forgiving than the Jeff "your margin is my opportunity"-led Amazon on profitability so price shocks have passed through to sellers much more immediately than prior years where Amazon would just move slowly and stably.

The bigger Amazon news recently is on DD+7 and how Amazon basically increased their float and delayed payments on all sellers, and that's been kinda a pain to navigate.

[ilamont]

Amazon still charges ebook publishers the same “delivery fee” for each sold digital copy (US$0.15/megabyte) as it did in the mid 2000s when Kindles came with 3g chips.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634500

[klysm]

Maybe the technical requirements at the time were a good excuse but as soon as you demonstrate the market will tolerate that why on earth would you remove it?

[PaulRobinson]

To turn around the famous quote: "Amazon's margin is someone else's opportunity". :)

The Amazon flywheel is all about reducing costs to consumers. The moment that stops happening, consumers can get caught by offers elsewhere, and the flywheel can start to go backwards.

[morelandjs]

I physically twitch every time I hear a flywheel mentioned. Intended to be evocative of certain physics without actually substantiating any of it.

[knollimar]

What does it mean, really? I see it used more like catalyst or enablar than momentum storage. I'm still unsure.

[scns]

Are record companies still charging artists for vinyl breakage on mp3 downloads?

[cma]

AWS egress prices have been the same for a decade despite massive networking advancements.

In two decades, since 2006, they've only come down by about 50%.

[hnav]

That's not exactly true, they expanded the free tier from 1 to 100GB/mo (1TB/mo out of CloudFront) and dropped egress from ~20c/GB to ~9c/GB. This was due to pressure from the Bandwidth Alliance formed by all the other Clouds and spearheaded by Cloudflare.

[cma]

~20c/GB to ~9c/GB was the 2006-2026 halving I mentioned. Two decades to drop by half.

[hnav]

Accounting for inflation that's more like dropped by 75%. As AWS position as market leader erodes we'll likely see further drops.

[MagicMoonlight]

And it costs them nothing, because they have free peering agreements with every network.

[zobzu]

i fully expect it yo be permanent. they know its likely to come back down.

[Brainspackle]

Do you buy off Temu and re-sell on amazon?

[binarysolo]

I dunno why that's a whole meme, but nobody of any scale is doing that. We produce products through factories like most established sellers.

[joemi]

It may or may not be anyone of scale (I haven't been keeping track of the seller names), but there sure are a LOT of sellers who do that. Practically every search result I've looked for on Amazon in the past few years is flooded with people reselling Chinese brand goods or Chinese no-name brand goods. Even when I search for a specific US -brand product, the results are filled with similar (or similar-ish) Chinese goods that are all selling the same few product variations.

Glad to hear that's not you, though. Amazon definitely doesn't need any more people reselling like that. And good luck! I used to sell used books on Amazon (both seller-fulfilled and FBA) when I worked at a book store and year after year it became more and more of a nightmare until it simply wasn't worth our time anymore.

[binarysolo]

It's prob the other way around -- for almost a decade, Amazon's made it incredibly accessible for any Chinese factory, trading company, and middleman to spin up new brands on Amazon to reduce American brands and resellers' pricing powers. So the guys on Temu are selling their stuff rebranded on Amazon because it's fairly easy to spin up new stores and brands, while making it difficult for US sellers to do likewise.

Even worse (this actually happened to us a couple years back), Chinese companies outright steal our images/assets and then put them on other channels like Temu or Aliexpress, selling their knockoffs there pretending to be us. We were only made aware of this when we noticed products asking to be RMA'd from our support email, but with order receipts coming in from Aliexpress.

I digress, but the beatings will continue until morale improves...