Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merchant Funds

Re:Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merc... by bdibs on Thursday May 09, 2019 @05:41PM (#19872713)

Amazon's in the perfect position to give loans to their sellers. They have all the data in the world about how a seller is doing on the platform, so why not make some (relatively) safe money off interest and boosted sales?

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Re:Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merc... by mcpherrinm on Friday May 10, 2019 @03:07AM (#19875718)

Loaning money to their merchants allows their merchants to buy more inventory to ship to Amazon to sell. Thus Amazon benefits by making more sales, too.

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Re:Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merc... by pbhjpbhj on Friday May 10, 2019 @05:34AM (#19876318)

It's crazy really, they loan the money they would in the past have to use to buy stock, but they also don't have to pay for warehousing (straight away).

Presumably it helps with inventory management too - like the loanee indicates the inventory they're buying which means Amazon can factor that in.

Then they charge interest ...

However, whilst this sounds good for Amazon, is it more efficient - in economic terms - or does it just reduce Amazon's risks and costs.

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Re:Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merc... by vkou on Thursday May 09, 2019 @06:01PM (#19872866)

And the best part is that because they can hold money from sales for months, before remitting it to a merchant, they can loan that money right out to other merchants.

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Re:Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merc... by ikeboy on Thursday May 09, 2019 @07:20PM (#19873485)

Huh?

In the vast majority of cases money is released within 2 weeks of a sale. The exceptions are if an account gets suspended, or if there's a sudden increase in sales and it's flagged, in which case they might hold it for another week or two.

The only time money is held for over a month is if the account was suspended and not reinstated by then.

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Re:Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merc... by bootlooped on Friday May 10, 2019 @12:30AM (#19875059)

Some sellers even get settlements weekly or more frequently. I'm not sure how, but I know it was at least possible sometime in the past.

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Re:Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merc... by epanchin on Friday May 10, 2019 @02:11AM (#19875465)

Two weeks still sounds like a considerable float to lend from.

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Re:Amazon Hit by Extensive Fraud with Hackers Siphoning Merc... by ikeboy on Friday May 10, 2019 @02:16AM (#19875483)

They have a bank backing the loans anyway, it's not their own cash.

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