And if I don't like Tesco I can go to Asda. If Tesco won't sell my product I can try and sell it to Sainsbury's or Waitrose.
The equivalent with Amazon is "If I don't like Walmart, there is some guy with a market stall selling fish, another with apples, a store 5 miles away that has carrots...". Or even, "Tescos won't buy my carrots so I will just drive them to every person myself".
I have said it a few times, you can't be the marketplace and sell through that marketplace. Imagine finding the NYSE were trading shares, and were giving themselves 30ms advantage over everyone else (if you can't imagine, have a browse of the Cryptocurrency markets). Imagine a commodities market who own 90% of the oil themselves, and price themselves into every order (maybe onions...).
To be competitive, you can and you should.
Amazon is a platform company. Platforms commoditize the complements. They didn’t have toys, so partner Toys’R’Us, didn’t have shoes, so partner Zappos, etc.
As the platform, platforms observe transactions, such that through time, they can value complements and decide to co-exist, acquire, or compete.
This is by now a well-known strategy.
Rabbit hole: https://www.gwern.net/Complement
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nyse-jeffrey-c-sprecher-kelly-l...
1. There's limited space at the front of a brick and mortar store. It's not practical to put most of the items at the front, so anyone who's not just there for a bag of chips ends up looking through the aisles anyways.
2. Brick-and-mortar stores usually only sell a few forms of same product. If I want olive oil, there's some store brand, some italian-looking brand, and maybe a brand that advertises some sort of magical health benefits. There might be a few variations for the level of refinement/virginity. It's easy for me to look at all the options and compare them. When I look at a search page on Amazon, there's often 100's of hits, and it's often pretty unclear if there's any difference between them that I'd care about (see https://www.amazon.com/s?k=olive+oil).
There's limited space on the frontpage of Amazon.com, too. If I go to Amazon looking for chips, I won't see it on the front page so I'm going to end up going to the Chips section of the site. If you're just at the store for a bag of chips, you go the chips aisle, which is also meticulously planned to specifically influence which brand of chips you will buy. I fail to see how this is any different than going to the Chips section of Amazon and seeing a specially arranged selection of chips.
>2. Brick-and-mortar stores usually only sell a few forms of same product. If I want olive oil, there's some store brand, some italian-looking brand, and maybe a brand that advertises some sort of magical health benefits. There might be a few variations for the level of refinement/virginity. It's easy for me to look at all the options and compare them. When I look at a search page on Amazon, there's often 100's of hits, and it's often pretty unclear if there's any difference between them that I'd care about (see https://www.amazon.com/s?k=olive+oil).
I don't really see what this has to do with the topic at hand. Can you clarify your point?
So in reality, if your product is on page 5, it is perhaps as good as not being on Amazon anyway for that particular query.
If you look at it this way, the space constraint isn't much different than brick and mortar.
Then you throw in Amazon Shopping ads (aka Sponsored Products) and the shelf space metaphor gets muddled further, because it's like as if every store visitor saw unique and different endcap displays and shelving ordering. There is less individual tailoring to search results than you might expect on Amazon (especially compared to information search engines like GoogleBingBingGo) but it is still a factor.
Then there is the factor of endemic counterfeiting in some categories, so the sketchier the listings are the more likely you are to just buy a counterfeit product, which would never happen in a typical brick and mortar retail shop.
IMO Amazon's private labels are so minor and make up such a small portion of store sales that it ranks very low on the scale of things that Amazon does that are morally/legally questionable.
But they are, which is what you're missing. Again, these stores spend millions and millions of dollars collecting these requests and arranging their store in response. They collect feedback and rearrange the shelves nearly every day based on requests (which can be actual verbal/written requests on their website or to store workers, or derived from things like sales numbers).
You can think of it in this way: each time someone goes to the "Chips" aisle, that is a implicit "request" from the customer that they want to buy chips, and the store has arranged their aisle in such a way that influences which chips you buy, just as Amazon arranges their search results page.
Stores maximizing the revenue they receive from their average customer, which they do quite aggressively as you note, feels very different from what Amazon is doing.
>the store has arranged their aisle in such a way that influences which chips you buy, just as Amazon arranges their search results page.
To make a somewhat silly comparison that illustrates how this is is not "just" like Amazon - I have never been in a grocery store that places their brand of chips on both ends of the chips aisle. I might find my chips before I see their brand. Amazon, on the other hand, can rearrange their shelves for every customer, and so their ability to manipulate the consumer experience is much greater.
Ultimately the arranging of physical displays, no matter the amount of zeal or data involved, seems categorically different to me than stores which can arranged differently not only for every customer, but every customer request. I think you're saying they're basically the same thing - in which case we'll just have to agree to disagree.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=lp_16310101_nr_n_6?fst=as%3Aoff...
To extend it again to the grocery store example, if I walk into a Target and ask the customer service person for their recommendation for some crackers, and they walk over to the Cracker aisle and point directly at the Target brand crackers instead of the Nabisco ones, are you saying that's problematic?
I don't think there's anything wrong with stores recommending something in general. For instance, I don't think there's anything wrong with the "amazon's choice" label that Amazon uses.
This feels different to me, because as I said originally, this isn't Amazon recommending their brand. Amazon still ranks search results based on some combination of popularity and (probably) profitability.
To return to the in-store scenario: let's say you asked someone in Target to recommend crackers. The employee has a recommendation, but to hear it you first need to be shown the Target brand crackers, and then the employee will give you their recommendation.
Grocery stores (and all other brick-and-mortars) spend tons and tons of money and effort specifically arranging their stores to influence which products you will buy. It's done on the scale of which aisle certain products are on, all the way down to the scale of specifically which shelf (and even exact inches away from eye level) certain products are on.
Every single time you walk into a store, the first product you see (maybe in front of the entryway, maybe it's a big banner hanging from the ceiling, or maybe it's the design of the shelf near the cash register) is all meticulously planned.