I bring up this point every time something like this comes up and people usually say that somehow Amazon using "Analytics" and better ranking is the difference.

Walmart's Great Value is exactly the same idea and is created and promoted the exact same way both in the their stores and on their website.

I think what astonish me the most is that people are opposed to something that is actually a plus for the customer. Amazon Basics is definitely one of the great thing on Amazon right now. Instead of random cheap garbage I can buy stuff that I know will be "good enough" at a great price.

Amazon owns a larger % of the online ecommerce market than Walmart owns of either the brick-and-mortar or ecommerce, which I think is a notable distinction... Amazon is approaching half of all ecommerce sales.

If Walmart is 10% of brick-and-mortar sales it's hard to argue that store brands are too competitive. 90% of that market is not walmart.

When Amazon approaches the majority of all ecommerce sales, it starts to become a bigger problem when they control the marketplace and start to undercut your products.

In general I think the fair thing to do is to make the marketplace distinction (even for store brands, which are often white-labeled third-party generics sold under multiple names anyway). You run the marketplace that allows others to sell their products, or you sell your products directly... you shouldn't be able to coordinate both as one business.

It’s only a plus for the customer in the short term. It kills the companies doing innovation and optimizing the products. Sure it makes the current crop of products cheaper (and lower quality bc Amazon basics often mimic the top product but with cheaper parts) but it puts the innovators out of business. Amazon is too big to care about innovating on small products and too big to do it well if even if they did.

If the companies being copied don't have patents on the products, are they really innovating?

They are not. They are rent-seeking. If you didn’t convince your customers of your brand value or at leadt get a patent, you probably didn’t innovate and thus a free economy makes you vulnerable to competition from more efficient businesses. Surprise! The consumer benefits and the rent-seeker has to try something else.

This “everything is fine as long as the price is lower” logic is what’s wrong with our current lax anti-trust laws.

Why is it wrong? The goal of anti-trust laws isn't to protect inefficient businesses. It's to promote competition, and the entire point of having competition is that it lowers prices for consumers.

> It's to promote competition,

What happens when everything is free/subsidised by advertising? How do you assess the competitiveness of Facebook when they don't charge anything to use Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, ...

This might be a plus for the customer in the short term, but how is it a plus in the long term, when the innovation which creates the new products is snuffed?

How exactly does this practice hurt innovation in products?

Do you think Amazon is going to innovate on niche products? Why would they steal other peoples designs if that were the case. They put the original company in financial straits or out of business and then don’t do any meaningful iteration on the products

Amazon isn't stealing IP and building their own factories. They are cutting out middle men and going straight to the producers themselves. Cutting out the middle man gives the inventors greater income and the consumers lower prices.

Do you have any proof of stealing unique designs? I'd expect those to be protected by patents.

Not everything nifty is patentable. Not to mention patents dont pretext the little guy and anyone can wholesale clone anything without reprisal

First order effect might be a benefit to consumers, but this kills competition. Those brands and products that amazon copies could eventually die out, and now there's less competition in the market and less forces for better products for customers.

Do we have any evidence of this? Walmart still sells non-great value products (started in 1993!) while I get why copying a niche product might cause the original manufacturer to die out and if there are examples of this I am more than willing to change my opinion.

If you actually take a look at their offering (https://www.amazon.ca/-/en/stores/page/BFAE3282-E15B-47EE-90...), most of these are legitimately "basics", things that existed 50-100 years ago. Wilson won't die out because Amazon sells a volleyball, nor will Duracell because of offbrand AA batteries

Do we know that one can avoid counterfeit goods via Amazon's brands? I'd think that one could mix in counterfeit goods the same way one could with any other product.

Does Amazon allow third party selling of Amazon Basics? If not, it seems unlikely that it would suffer from the same commingling issues.

That's my question. Do they "allow" it? Probably not. Is it possible for it to happen? Not sure.

White Label store brands are anticompetitive. They are a form of the pricing discrimination games that retailers and manufacturers play to allow one set of companies to capture multiple segments of business with the same product. It should be illegal for the same retailer to sell both a name brand product and the equivalent product as a white label.

The only way to avoid co-mingling of inventory is to buy Amazon Basics products because they are clearly marked.

This gives every non Amazon brand a massive disadvantage because they will be associated with scams.

Difference is that in retailers, they take on the risk and product research. They buy the items from manufacturers, sell it and then sometimes they make their own cheap unlabeled versions (usually buying from the same manufacturer).

Amazon is offering a big open marketplace where they invite people to offer goods, then they observe which goods sell well and how are they made, then the push out the sellers and they offer their own versions of it, essentially pushing the risk onto sellers and only reaping the benefits.

They are abusing the trust of sellers on their platform and they get away with it because of their sheer size.

> Amazon is offering a big open marketplace where they invite people to offer goods, then they observe which goods sell well and how are they made, then the push out the sellers and they offer their own versions of it, essentially pushing the risk onto sellers and only reaping the benefits.

But this is exactly what is done at innumerable retailers like Walgreens and Safeway. The retailer is a "marketplace" (they sell multiple brands for each product) who controls "search placement" (where each product is displayed, e.g., eye height vs. near the floor) and have insider information on how well the different products sell. They use this advantage to make their own knock-off brands, and its generally a win for the consumer.

At an absolute minimum, meeting with a brand to look at their proprietary production processes to duplicate their look and feel. A practice called out in the article.

retailers don't work to hide the name brand option or promote their generic alternative over it, usually. Amazon might well have gone further than advertising tricks; if they just failed to make alternative listing available to some number of users... how could that be proved?

They may not work to hide the name brand option. They just choose to not offer the brand's products in the store at all, right?

We don't hear about Wal-mart deciding to place Procter & Gamble's laundry detergent on the fourth row down and their private label at eye level in the store, do we?

> We don't hear about Wal-mart deciding to place Procter & Gamble's laundry detergent on the fourth row down and their private label at eye level in the store, do we?

Because that's not at all how Walmart operates. All of the laundry detergent is on the same aisle and the generic versions are immediately next to their brand-name equivalents.

They do, though, by giving it favorable shelf space. Sometimes the even put tags on their product that say "Compare to X!" to point shoppers to compare prices with the equivalent product.

> retailers don't work to hide the name brand option or promote their generic alternative over it

They can put brand option on the bottom shelf while the store brand generics on the mid/top shelf so its easier for customers to pick up.

To add, a general argument is that retailers buy their stock and thus have the right to analyze sales of it, but this is a dying practice. Costco, for instance, demands a 6 month delayed payment on inventory[0], which effectively means they are following the Amazon route by being a marketplace for inventory which the distributor still owns.

0: https://youtu.be/mvk5tVMZQ_U?t=7195

As all monopoly related things: market power. There are at least half a dozen retailers in my tiny home town alone, all with a good market share, they would have to coordinate to push a competing product that ends up driving everyone else out of the market. Amazon doing that by itself with a product on the other hand is devastating on competing products, because it has by far the largest online market share making it impossible to compete on equal terms with a possibly inferior product pushed by Amazon.

Retailers generally want to sell brand goods, and the cheaper own label stuff is there to provide a range of prices. An exception would be budget retailers like Lidl who only sell their own goods.

This is not accurate. They attempt to maximize their profits and private label brands is a major effort to do that across retail.

“With its billion-dollar private labels, Target has become a master at spotting trends, copying them, and capitalizing on them”

“Target, for its part, seemed to see the C9 contract’s expiration as a chance to do what it increasingly does best: develop and launch a stylish brand internally—and keep all the revenue for itself.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90661935/retail-thrives-on-copyi...

Wrong on both facts. They often make equal profit on their own brands, and Lidl sells other brands.

Scale, and the imbalance of data that favors Amazon. You don't walk into a retailer and shout out "I WANT TO BUY A BACKPACK".

because amazon owns the marketplace and has access enormous information on what sells well and can use for its own benefits. This creates unfair competition.

Walmart owns Walmart stores and has enormous information on what sells well and can use for its own benefits

Walmart doesn't know where I live/lived, what I've purchased for the past decade, what I might be mildly interested in (searched for at one point), what movies I watch, what books I read, etc, etc.

Walmart cannot cater it's experience to what it thinks I might buy. Amazon can.

It's just not the same. There is a huge asymmetry of information (from both suppliers and customers) that makes Amazons overall practice feel much more predatory.

Oh, and Amazon is 50% of all online retail. Walmart is something like 10% of all brick and mortar retail.