Have you been on Amazon recently? Third party sellers dominate it.

Amazon is fundamentally a bazaar that does a good job of pretending to be a store, but the mask is starting to slip.

I’ve noticed this when shopping for certain things and I don’t like it. But honestly they were a store first and they still own the entire consumer experience. Whenever a third party seller from Amazon contacts me, I am usually surprised because in my mind, I’m buying from Amazon and not from them.

Third party sellers who use FBA in particular are more like suppliers to whom Amazon can outsource part of their job to. In that case I’d say Amazon is a store, with infinite shelf space, and a very permissive policy about letting suppliers stock some of that infinite shelf space themselves sometimes.

We’re in agreement about all the basic premises, I think the key points I’d push back with are:

(1) I can’t “easily” register as a seller with Costco, but I can with Amazon (Or so I believe)

(2) The ease with which non-company merchants can enter is a key property of the bazaar vs store dichotomy. Easier to enter, more bazaar-like

(3) Given (2) and (1), it seems like Amazon wants to be both a store and a bazaar, which my initial post articulated as a “problematic” state, at the least. Even if only problematic through novelty

This doesn’t make Amazon good or bad, I can just see where it leads to new discussion

Sure, but I think it’s somewhat dubious to be immediately suspicious of any successful business model that changes the basic assumptions. Once you start enshrining “this is how we’ve always done it” into law and policy you basically outlaw innovation and start operating in a prohibited-unless-explicitly-allowed rather than allowed-unless-explicitly-prohibited mode.