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.