Otherwise I feel it's a chicken and egg. It's like saying we need Amazon or a similar big known marketplace so that customers can find you and buy from you, but at the same time, we don't like the concentration of power it brings.

So if nobody tries to open an online store on their own anymore, what then?

One should likely have both, their own store, and an amazon store

The fact that we do not shop at Amzn for those items do not really change the reality of ecommerce in 2020

My experience with these huge companies is you can either get stuck in Algo Hell where you either get automated responses or are redirected to people who can't help you.

Or try to get your story to the top of HN, that seems to work with Google

I was at Audible for many years, and at least within that section of Amazon this would have been very sound advice.

If any complex legal procedures, economic regulations, or necessary international standards must be followed to sell your product, there is a strong chance that Amazon's policies are being handled by a single GM/PM type who can directly handle the internal tooling necessary to remedy the ongoing issue.

At the very least, Amazon might suddenly talk to you or reverse their decision to ban you with a Congress person breathing down their neck.

Amazon, Google and Facebook have laid a path of destruction far and wide through this practice of lifetime bans.

Today these bans mean being excluded from the online business world (achieving scale is almost impossible without them).

If you're a farmer selling to a grocery chain, they have all the power in how your product is sold and marketed. If they feel your product is subpar, whether rightly or wrongly, and drop you, you have essentially zero recourse.

There are a few grocery chains with national reach (and they've been further consolidating), but none controls major markets (rural regions are often another story).

Amazon is World - China.

I live in NYC where Walmart is banned so we're left with the Mom-and-Pop stores + the permitted national retailers like Walgreens and CVS both of which charge multiples over products available on Amazon. We're talking like 300% more for items like toothpaste and other toiletries. And in-store experiences that flat-out suck. Everyone knows this and that's why practically no one cares about Amazon's bad PR or their questionable HR practices behind the scenes. In one ear and out the other.

Execution and customer service is everything and right now and Amazon's execution for customers has been amazing for a long time now. This isn't like a 37Signals space where you can one-down the competition. You one-up or go bust. I can't sympathize with your situation without more details being shared. Whatever your response was to that case must not have been up to Amazon's standards. It seems unlikely they would randomly pick on revenue generating sellers without cause.

Why would you even consider associating with them again? Ban them for life as well and do your business somewhere else.

The ethos of the GP was obvious, not to mention that many plantations were not slave plantations, but rather sharecropper plantations (which is most likely what GP means). So even looking at the metaphor from a historical context, there's no "yikes" to be had. Maybe instead of polluting one of the few remaining decent communities on the internet, your time would be better spent reading a history book or two.

HN is one of the last communities where I can see someone post a contrarian opinion and have an actual discussion about that opinion instead of it vanishing from downvotes. I don't ever want HN to become like reddit, and in that context calling out reddit specifically makes sense.

The sad thing is HN is slowly trending towards being like reddit as the community grows. I see more and more instances of people using downvote as an 'I disagree' button or posting low-effort comments. To that end, yeah, I think the community should do what it can to call those behaviours out.