Go ahead, call up your local 7-11 and ask them what their sales were for the quarter. They'll tell you to fuck off.
The FBA middlemen are more like traveling salesmen - they take an order, send it in to HQ, and HQ ships it to the 7-11. They don’t do anything but take orders. They are Tom Smykowski - they take the plans to the engineers!
You’re complaining that the storefront that the goods are sold through has its own sales information. The amount of sales you have through Amazon may be a trade secret, but it is not a trade secret from Amazon.
It's hard for me to say Amazon shouldn't be able to do it while every grocery store can, but there seems to be a quantitative difference because of the ridiculous number of options online vs the finite shelf space of a brick and mortar.
All the same economic games are played. Items are placed on specific shelves to drive specific sales, etc. Sale numbers are known by the store and they get their cut.
The distinguisher is supposed to be in the quality. Premium vs generic. That doesn't seem to play out healthily in Amazon's marketplace.
Maybe one difference is the consumable nature of the grocery products vs what one typically buys online (Amazon batteries as opposed to an animal carrier). Or maybe we have given up too much with the consolidation of grocery chains the last few decades and that is equally problematic.
I’m all in favor of suppliers competing with each other, as that’s in the best interests of society overall. But when the platforms/marketplaces themselves participate in that competition they have tremendous advantages, which is anti-competitive, and it benefits no one but themselves.
Amazon is actually more open than other stores about this information, giving product rankings so that you could decide to knock off popular products too.
Edit: Also companies like Google scan emails for information. Amazon stopped including prices in their emails because Google was getting a direction stream of sales data with full costing info.
On amazon, if you want to browse "electric bike tires with motors" you will have to browse through dozens of full electric bikes, electric scooters, hoverboards, tires without motors, tricycles, and all sorts of close but not quite what you're looking for items to find 1 that you might be interested in.
Want to price shop them? Good luck finding others to compare with.
It would be like looking for a 5 lb bag of white sugar in the grocery store so you go to the sugar isle and finding 1 half pound bag of brown sugar amongst all of the flour and seasonings and honey and agave nectar and sweet n low in the first 100 feet.
Any grocery store organized like that would fail and be replaced by a company with decent organizational flow.
But amazon makes money by charging the vendors on its market for visibility, in addition to listing fees, storage fees, and whatever else.
Amazon has a perverse incentive to not show you, the customer, what you are looking for when there is anything else close enough to what you are looking for that they will make more money for selling to you.
There isn't a better word than evil for this, even if it is the benign sort of evil that only added to the chaos and misery of the world without directly harming anyone.
They have an inside advantage that no one else on the planet outside of ebay and Alibaba (and its ilk) have.
It entrenches them and enriches them unjustly. They make profit off of their competitors and have the option of destroying anyone who rubs them the wrong way without repercussion. The capitalistic market cannot speak on the matter as there is a monoposonistic gatekeeper on the market path.
No one who sells on Amazon is a competitor. If you are selling on Amazon you are a customer, and every once in a while, Amazon comes in and starts selling your goods for less than you can because they decided they would make more money without you in the picture.
For a little proof, try to find Ammoon products on Amazon. They used to be everywhere. And the information isn't exactly public but there was a falling out between Ammoon and Amazon and now you can't buy Ammoon products on Amazon, but you can find Lekato and Sumimma and Joyo and Cuvave knock offs of the exact same products, and not long after this happened, Amazon started selling cheap guitar pedals under their Amazon Basics brand.
You may say, sure, whatever, but the primary product Ammoon sold was the cheapest ($35) looper pedal on the market.
Amazon undercut that price (to $26.50) and also booted their closest competitor and biggest customer in the guitar pedal looper segment.
Who would defend that kind of scummy action?
The fact that they didn't sell every single product on planet earth doesn't mean they aren't a competitor. They are practically in the market for "easy to manufacture by a third party in china consumer products" market. If a company adds so little value that Amazon's 5th rate people (The best minds at Amazon aren't sitting up at night worrying about the guitar pedal looper market) can beat them, they aren't adding value. And, one single distribution channel (the amazon website) doesn't define a market (with almost zero exceptions, amazon's website not being one).
if amazon captures a large ratio of people buying goods online, i would certainly consider amazon itself a market. But unless they also control some other aspect of the online market, it would be hard to claim they're a monopoly tbh.
_Anyone_ can setup an e-commerce site and sell online. Amazon doesn't quite fully control the hosting, IP and backend servers completely!
How many companies will not enter the market because of Amazon's monopoly? How many products will never get invented because of the awareness of the system?
And even with this, with a monopoly it is not a race to the bottom. Once the monopoly is in place, you can raise the costs to whatever you want and the market has no choice but to grin and bear it or go without.
Monopolies are never good for the consumer.
For example, Amazon cannot swoop in and sell a cheaper Amazon Basics version of a product to which you own a critical patent.
They are really saying, though, that without barriers to entry and in a competitive market, players that don't innovate don't survive.
The problem with that is that this is not a competitive market, so the player that wins is not innovating, they just have market power because of their size.
That is the definition of winning a competitive market. The consumers win.
You don't need to have lower prices long term if you control the market.
I get the argument, but it's a grim reaper strategy taught in econ 101. It's a well known strategy and completely valid.
Consumers win in the short term but lose in the long term. Except they can just consume different products or wait for someone to re-enter the market.
It’s not like they’re putting banners over their product pics saying “hey, you know you can buy this exact same product for like half the price on alibaba if you’re willing to wait a couple more weeks for it right?”.
I don’t like Amazon consolidating this much power either but if they can push you out of your business that easily you weren’t the critical component of it.
Also, it's not like you have any choices. If you manufacture your products yourself, you have to fund a massive venture to handle the workload. If you outsource the products, then the companies you pay to manufacture your stuff can easily make knockoffs and then let drop shippers undercut you with inferior versions of your own products.
Look at a lot of the stuff for sale on Temu for instance. There are hundreds if not thousands of products that were invented, tested, and designed by Western companies that you can now buy a reasonable facsimile of on Temu for a quarter of the price.
This includes art work, enamel pins, battery packs, woodworking tools.
You're on a hard path either way, but if you make it to the point where you have a standout product knowing that at the final step Amazon can easily step in and price you out of existence, even if they had to take a loss on it just to destroy you, they could and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
That should be broken up. Monopolies are bad. Monopsonies are bad. They are bad for the country, bad for the people, and bad for the flow of money.
I hope we see record fines against them and that everyone affected by this gets to be part of an earth shattering nuclear verdict.
They started out as a retailer, and opened up a bunch of their infrastructure to competitors. The idea that they'd make it easy for competitors using their infrastructure to beat them makes zero sense.
Semantically, what company that (Relies on Amazon to operate) couldn't they destroy on a whim?
So the logical response wasn't to assume you were being circular. The logical response was to assume you were inferring Amazon is big enough and capable enough to squash any business.
Aramco? Air Canada? Samsung? Memory Express? Digikey? McMaster Carr? McDonald's? The Big R? Cantillion? Texas Instruments?
"Show me a business" is quite vague
I’m sure Amazon has put a sizable dent in their sales without even really trying.
Amazon now has special search tools for buying fasteners that make it easier to find exactly what you need.
Prices are cheap, risk is high, but prices are cheap.
Easier but they are no McMaster, by a long shot.
Then I still got the wrong part delivered. It doesn’t matter how great the selection tool is, the rule is always: garbage in, garbage out.
Unless, if the price wars are never over.
Almost never happens like that.
Especially anti-dumping rules are most often just exploited as a tool to get a competitor in trouble.
If your business depends on potential competitors for it's existence, then being eventually forced out seems like a pretty natural conclusion.
If people keep choosing to reward dishonest cheaters and criminals just to get something for lower cost, we are not in a good place. And either cheating or disguising the true nature of your company is becoming the easiest way to stand out in a commoditized world.
More important than how you vote is how you buy.
Alternative suggestion: modern monopolistic corporations are disproportionately powerful. If they can topple a country to sell bananas cheaper, they sure as hell can kill a small business, no matter how relevant that business is.
Sellers are offering a generic product without barriers to entry like trademark, patents. Somebody else notices and contracts the same manufacturer to produce it or finds someone else who will (or makes it themselves). The new entrant sells it for cheaper.
All I see is basic economics. Business cannot stay afloat if their marginal cost exceeds marginal revenue. This is the best outcome for consumers.
How does it victimize?
There is no victimhood if the business voluntarily transacts.
If it does well enough, Amazon can use the same manufacturer and release a branded "Amazon Basics" version that pops up in the same search for the same product but cheaper as Amazon doesn't have to pay someone else $112 for the listing and warehousing, and the original seller that did all of the actual "work" (as far as making it a profitable venture) is SOL.
Throw in a few dozen word salad named drop shippers who undercut Amazon in exchange for increased shipping times and the originator is wedged out of the market or cut to razor thin margins for years of effort.
Rinse and repeat.