9 ms·

Amazon's Stealth Brands: Everything on Amazon Is Amazon

181 points by pdog 8y ago

benologist 8y ago
Bezos recently talked about how Amazon would eventually fail, it seems inevitable when you commandeer your vendors' profits and claw back any disposable income your workers have and demand massive tax breaks to complement massive tax manipulations. Vacuum up all the money and what will people spend on Amazon? Apple seems to do the same under Cook too, focusing obsessively on making sure their suppliers don't have any undue profit whilst they themselves demand $100s in profit per telephone, to toss on $100s of billions they desperately avoid taxes on. The only profit these organizations want to pursue anymore comes at someone else's expense, rather than creating more value.
- odonnellryan 8y ago
  Bad for people as a whole? Sure. Good for people who have 1/10th+ of their portfolio in Amazon? Absolutely.
  - imustbeevil 8y ago
    Down 12% in the last month though. I guess you could say everything is down, but that's kind of the point when billionaires and corporations hoard all of the money.
    - i_cant_speel 8y ago
      That's my fault personally. I recently put a significant amount of money into it. It happens every time I buy something.
      - odonnellryan 8y ago
        We should team up and start a fund that just shorts whatever we buy :)
      - lurquer 8y ago
        You too? For the benefit of the greater good, I’ve stopped investing for several years. I just couldn’t stomach the damage I was doing to the markets.
    - odonnellryan 8y ago
      Sure, but look at it YTD.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    depends on when they bought their shares...
- simonebrunozzi 8y ago
  Source?
- petra 8y ago
  >> Bezos recently talked about how Amazon would eventually fail Peter Thiel said: " So anyone who has a monopoly will pretend that they are in incredible competition". This seems like one of those cases.
dixie_land 8y ago
and your point is?
- sctb 8y ago
  We just asked you to please stop posting unsubstantively like this. Would you mind re-reading the guidelines and following them more closely? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
onetimemanytime 8y ago
They're pulling a Google...they've started to eat their tail. Google, for those that don't know, started with the goal of sending you to the best site. Today, oh well, it's virtually all ads /google products. They're trying to make you click their most profitable ads
- odonnellryan 8y ago
  I half agree. Google is still pretty good for finding information on many subjects.
  - scottlegrand2 8y ago
    Indeed but the cognitive load of scrolling through those ads, especially on mobile, is part of why everything is perceived as sucking these days IMO. It's like there's a late-stage capitalism barrier to entry to get to the good stuff on every platform these days. I mean who out there actually wants autoplay videos and unending push notifications?
0xddd 8y ago
What is the idea with these garish MS Paint graphics? Am I the only one finding them incredibly distracting?
- dvtrn 8y ago
  No, that really threw me off too, not because it's objectively bad, but because I know and have seen how NYT is capable of some really impressive feats creating visualizations and visual aides for their stories; it's objectively bad considering the source.
  - Cenk 8y ago
    Yes, because the graphics are a visual joke. The illustrator, Tarcy Ma, does great work: http://tracyma.com http://tracyma.com
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      the graphics are a visual joke. It sailed way over my head apparently, what's the punchline here?
      - bobthepanda 8y ago
        It seems to be parody of conspiracy sites. Which would make sense, given that none of this is actually that crazy or hidden as a conspiracy. Intentional terrible graphic design has been used before by other notable publications like Bloomberg: http://incitrio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/tim-cook-bloomberg-cover-01.png http://incitrio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/tim-cook-bloo...
petra 8y ago
So Amazon offering more and more business services, or in other words doing more tasks that other businesses used to do. And the interesting thing is, that they found almost a risk free way(for them), to do those tasks. Which fits Bezos's experience as an investor, always dealing with profit vs risk. For example, for small/medium companies, creating efficient supply chains for varying demand was risky. But for Amazon, with it's size and great demand control and forecasting, it's probably not that risky. The same with creating a new private brand - Amazon has a lot of knowledge of what sells, They control free ad inventory, and they control their customer, via search. So it would be interesting to ask: what things businesses do are still risky - and would be left to external companies to do ? And what risky things can Amazon de-risk and take in-house ?
notatoad 8y ago
This was actually a fairly interesting article, except for the strange tone - amazon isn't hiding that these are their brands, they seem to be flagged as "our brand" all over the place. so what's with the mspaint red circles pointing out incredibly obvious associations? Is this supposed to be satire, or does the author really believe they've discovered some sort of conspiracy here?
- drharby 8y ago
  Its popular to paint amzn as a boogyman
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  The idea is that over time AMZN will push their products even more, to the point of hurting consumers and other sellers. Don't see the (potential--at least) bias? Amazon instead of showing you the best product, will show you the most profitable-to-them product. Yeah, same category and good enough but still, it stinks...
  - nordsieck 8y ago
    > The idea is that over time AMZN will push their products even more, to the point of hurting consumers Do you think that supermarkets selling house brands hurts consumers?
    - physcab 8y ago
      No single supermarket controls 49% of all product related searches on the internet
      - briandear 8y ago
        If I search for Coca Cola and Amazon shows me "Amazon-Cola" and I ultimately scroll down and see Coca Cola -- no big deal. If Amazon decides to not sell Coca Cola at all, I'm still not buying "Amazon Cola." If you're shopping for name brands already, there really isn't much discovery necessary. If you aren't, then the competing brands should do something to differentiate themselves -- lower prices, higher quality, better advertising perhaps. If I'm buying a generic product to begin with, I don't particularly care what "store brand" it happens to be. And, if we want to talk manufacturing -- the "brands" are all that could be "hurt" -- the actual manufacturing of the product still happens, regardless of who sticks their label on it. A wheat farmer doesn't particularly care what brand the distributor sticks on the final package. He's still getting paid the prevailing price of wheat.
thenanyu 8y ago
The most telling paragraph in the article is the last one: > "As is often the case with Amazon, what seem like strange or inexplicable new behaviors are often old retail strategies unfolding on the internet, quickly, and in plainer view. Brooke Mille is no more a lie than any other brand: It’s just newer and faster and more online. And it has a lot more company." In other words, nothing new here, Amazon is doing what retailers have always done, just on Internet scale. As someone who worked in retail for a long time, I kept waiting for the punchline but I should have read that last paragraph first. It's hard for me to figure out why this is newsworthy. I wish the New York Times would stop publishing stuff like this. Amazon does a lot that is interesting, evil, novel, etc. to report on. This article just adds noise.
- petra 8y ago
  >> In other words, nothing new here Up until now, when i read stories about the market share of Amazon private brands(and i'm quite curious about that subject), i never heard about those kind of hidden brands mentioned in the story. And of course, they we're mentioned in market share calculations. Taking that into account, it's possible that Amazon has or will have: 1. A large/dominating market share in many categories. 2. It would be a secret, preventing questions about a monopoly to rise.
- draw_down 8y ago
  I generally dislike this response to stories. It’s about something significant happening in our world, that’s worth considering and paying attention to. It doesn’t have to have started 4 hours ago.
- tedunangst 8y ago
  The Times has somewhat recently decided that they are going to demonstrate that they understand the tech industry by reporting on anything and everything that happens, although this often gives the opposite impression. As they say, man bites dog is a story. Dog bites man is not. But if you're new to the dog bite beat, you may not know what's news and what's not.
- winningcontinue 8y ago
  It's not only the nytimes but readers on hackernews and other general social networks. It's attracted a discussion from their users. This article makes the top 10% of most active posts in the past 24 hours. Readers see Amazon and assume something sinister is going on that they need to pay attention to, when it's probably not the case. I blame the readers as much as the publishers. After all, journalism today is all about chasing the readers and clicks.
aresant 8y ago
On the extreme end of "brand value you've got Kanye West selling a 100% cotton t-shirt for $120. (1) On the other end you've got Amazon not even bothering with a logo and selling a 100% cotton t-shirt for $14.99. (2) And the Amazon shirt is rated 4.5+ stars. As a consumer I love what Amazon is doing, Retail "brands" are the most notorious of all of the middle men. And they had to be - how do you deliver a product to a physical retail location that needs at least a 2 - 3x on each product sold to pay the rent, the front of house employees, etc? As a result these "brands" were never product innovators, mostly they're perfunctory with giant marketing budgets to build their "brand value". Remember Nike's "pumps" innovation back in the day? Was that a product innovation or was that a marketing innovation? And this reality in retail brands has led to all sorts of notorious abuses - on the subject of Nike they famously figured out how to arbitrage child labor - relying on shit hold labor conditions for ~30 years until they got caught truly well and good with their pants down w/a famous LIFE Magazine story.(3) Amazon's supply chain innovations flattened the market, and now we see cases as laid out here where the overseas factory owner is building the brands, or building the brands in collaboration with Amazon. It's not going to be perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Amazon is clearly in the middle of calibrating their own own morale compass, but as a consumer I delight in seeing the mid-market retail kings getting stomped on. (1) https://www.okayplayer.com/news/style-kanye-west-apc-120-plain-white-hiphop-t-shirt-sells-out.html https://www.okayplayer.com/news/style-kanye-west-apc-120-pla... (2) https://www.amazon.com/Goodthreads-Short-Sleeve-Crewneck-Cotton-T-Shirt/dp/B06XW6GDZC/ https://www.amazon.com/Goodthreads-Short-Sleeve-Crewneck-Cot... (3) http://mallenbaker.net/article/clear-reflection/nike-and-child-labour-how-it-went-from-laggard-to-leader http://mallenbaker.net/article/clear-reflection/nike-and-chi...
- twoodfin 8y ago
  Remember Nike's "pumps" innovation back in the day? Reebok was the pump. Nike was “air”.
- Matthias247 8y ago
  > On the other end you've got Amazon not even bothering with a logo and selling a 100% cotton t-shirt for $14.99. (2) How is that better or different than any offerings from H&M? Or any of the other even lower end brands?
Agathos 8y ago
I wonder: if I sell something on Amazon and make it an Amazon-exclusive brand, will I find it easier to keep counterfeit knockoffs out of their inventory?
- ikeboy 8y ago
  Yes, you pay an extra 5% commission or so but get real "gating", nobody else can sell it
mikeash 8y ago
"Is Amazon" meaning "is made by other manufacturers and white-labeled for Amazon" apparently. Why is this interesting?
- ikeboy 8y ago
  Antitrust concerns when they compete with their own vendors and give themselves advantages
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Are they competing with their own vendors when they’re paying those vendors to make the stuff?
    - ikeboy 8y ago
      They aren't paying the same people. If I sell my own brand, and they make their own brand and pay someone else to make it, they're competing with me on a platform they control and they give themselves advantages - such as showing up ahead of me in search (Google got fined a lot of money for this exact practice), putting links to their products on my product page saying "buy our brands instead" (yes, they really do this, see https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/amazon-is-testing-a-new-feature-that-promotes-its-private-label-brands-inside-a-competitors-product-listing.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/amazon-is-testing-a-new-feat...), giving themselves exemptions from policies they apply to third party sellers like review manipulation bans (see Vine program), etc
lucas_membrane 8y ago
I don't read the gray lady on account of the paywall, but this is something I have noticed somewhat in recent days. For the usual reasons of distrust of excessive economic power, I have not bought from Amazon for a few years. However, as part of that, I have bought from Abebooks until the last month, when I learned that it was owned by Amazon. I had previously run some quick searches trying to learn who owned Abebooks, and did not find anything. It is also not evident on the Abebooks website. Looking for another source for books, I found an on-line vendor that looks similar to Abebooks, listing used and new books for sale from various booksellers in diverse places. I checked it out and could not link it to any overly large enterprises. That was good, and the other site prices are not obviously higher than Abebooks, but the new site adds $4 shipping on each book, so my cost for used books is now up about 25%. Not good, but I'll pay it to not feed the monster. So, as both Abebooks and the new site list used books for sale by various bookstores, many of the same books are listed on both sites, and my new vendor might even present a better selection of what I look for. That's good. But some of the vendors that offer the lowest prices deal only through abebooks.com, ie Amazon/Bezos, and they list very many books on the Amazon/Bezos site. Coincidentally, one of them, the Book Depository, shown as being located in England, is owned by Amazon, ships free to the US, but when the packages arrive, they appear to have been shipped from the US. All of that is business as usual for a megacorp, but another bookshop that sells beaucoups of books through Amazon's abebooks is Seattle Goodwill, a non-profit. This raises my eyebrows because I live in a state near Seattle in which Goodwill's non-profit status has been in question because of high compensation given to its executives. I suspect that the relationship between Amazon and Goodwill may be somewhat complex. Amazon gives its customers free shipping to donate items to tax-exempt Goodwill, Goodwill then sells the items through an Amazon subsidiary, Amazon gets a commission on the sale, what's going on? Goodwill is a non-profit that does 'job-training'. Are 'trainees' not earning Seattle's high minimum wage part of this business? What does this operation look like? Anyone know?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ctvo 8y ago
The article doesn't go into the most important advantage Amazon has: it has data on what sells well and what markets it should enter using existing brands on its marketplace. With this data, it enters markets and undercuts its competition at the perfect price point.
- briandear 8y ago
  Then consumers win. The competitors can lower their prices/increase their quality/improve efficiency and consumers get to buy better products for less.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    Amazon often has higher prices than Walmart & Target, but people still don't shop Walmart online because Amazon is convenient. Amazon knows the perfect price point to stop people from shopping around to other online outlets, that doesn't mean it is giving the lowest price to consumers. People will, in person, buy something from Walmart instead of Kroger over $2, but Amazon has somehow figured out how to keep people on their site by properly measuring demand elasticity. Not to mention most listings on Amazon now are ads for products on Amazon. Tide, etc pay for top placements in the stores. So Amazon gets fulfillment cut and money from ad revenue. It's pretty impressive.
mogadsheu 8y ago
Bezos read about Rockefeller’s old plays. Standard Oil had a large number of small subsidiary oil companies under different names, many of which weren’t clearly understood to be owned by Standard. It was one of their ways of preventing anti-trust accusations against them. Amazon Prime is effectively a postal commerce version of Standard’s rail rebate system. Lots of respect to those guys, whether you agree with their actions on a moral basis or not. They’ve been reading up on their history.
- winningcontinue 8y ago
  Amazon as a retailer doesn't make much money. Margins are thin, and even thinner with their free shipping. Creating their own private brands of consumer products are not going to make them much money, but it'd make sure they control not just the sale but the production of the item itself.
dschuler 8y ago
"it's about the scale that Amazon does it at" "it's just they do it on a massive scale" "This is something that Amazon is great at" "Target is doing the same...but they just don't have the massive scale" "As a consumer I love what Amazon is doing" "Lots of respect to those guys" "the most important advantage Amazon has: it has data...with this data, it enters markets and undercuts its competition at the perfect price point" At some point I feel like I'm being astroturfed. People are amazed Amazon sells pasta and batteries under their own brand? Sounds like Ikea to me. Amazon has several problems they haven't corrected in years - generally not great prices, fake products being co-mingled with genuine items, fake reviews, flaky or slow shipping (esp. with their own delivery people). I've even had a few brand new books arrive with binding or cover damage. Ugh.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  They really need verified vendors that Amazon can vouch for. These vendors would need to be tested without knowing by Amazon to make sure third party ones are not being sneaky. Especially if customers complain.
  - dpau 8y ago
    I'm wondering if the presence of fakes on Amazon (and the many complaints of them) are in fact helping Amazon's own branded items? Personally when I'm shopping for basics on Amazon I often just go for the AmazonBasics version because I can at least put a little faith in it. Whereas who knows where the other stuff comes from. Perhaps it's a feature, not a bug?
    - npunt 8y ago
      I have a similar take on the incentive misalignment with fakes + store brands. Two counterfactuals to consider: 1. For this to be true, consumers will have to know Amazon is behind the brands. Works for AmazonBasics, but the ones in this story I'm not so sure since their providence is a bit buried. 2. Fakes appear more often in higher-end products. Store brands (like AmazonBasics, Kirkland, etc) are typically geared at low/med end of market. Both of these hinge on brand perception. If Amazon can improve brand perception of their store brands, they're going to be more willing to say 'these are Amazon brands' on their listings. And the more they can do that, the more incentive misalignment exists on fakes. I don't think 'these aren't fake' is enough to improve brand perception alone as quality matters a lot, but it probably does contribute. Of course, every retail category is different. I imagine there are some categories today where the intersection between fake problem + Amazon brand means the incentives are aligned to soft-pedal any real progress on fakes.
diebir 8y ago
Amazon is useless for high end outdoor gear. Not just gear even, but clothing. If something is available, it is often past years models, odd colors, sizes and the prices are non-competitive.
viburnum 8y ago
This is so Amazon can sell you garbage and avoid tarnishing their brand. For a while anyway.
dana321 8y ago
Amazon definitely focus on quantity, not quality. Everything works.. Just and no more. Their web interfaces and APIs are clunky, and there is a lack of any way to flag up an undelivered package.
sgustard 8y ago
Amazon's been well known for relentless A/B testing of every last pixel in their checkout UI. This is simply an extension of that A/B testing mentality to individual products. Flood the user's search results with a litany of similar and confusingly-branded products and see what sticks.
dqpb 8y ago
The real story here is why is NYT systematically attacking all the FAANG companies?
Animats 8y ago
As the article points out, Costco just sells their own stuff under the Kirkland brand. Much Kirkland stuff is made by major US brands, and is often identical to the branded product, but cheaper. They don't bother hiding that it's their own brand.[1] Amusingly, Costco sells their Kirkland items on Amazon. Or, rather, somebody called "ShippedFast" does. Now who's ShippedFast? They seem to be in Florida and the phone number maps to a residence. But Amazon doesn't disclose the identity of the seller. [1] https://hip2save.com/2018/09/11/brands-costco-kirkland-items/ https://hip2save.com/2018/09/11/brands-costco-kirkland-items...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

181 points by pdog 8y ago

Bezos recently talked about how Amazon would eventually fail, it seems inevitable when you commandeer your vendors' profits and claw back any disposable income your workers have and demand massive tax breaks to complement massive tax manipulations. Vacuum up all the money and what will people spend on Amazon? Apple seems to do the same under Cook too, focusing obsessively on making sure their suppliers don't have any undue profit whilst they themselves demand $100s in profit per telephone, to toss on $100s of billions they desperately avoid taxes on. The only profit these organizations want to pursue anymore comes at someone else's expense, rather than creating more value.

odonnellryan 8y ago
Bad for people as a whole? Sure. Good for people who have 1/10th+ of their portfolio in Amazon? Absolutely.
- imustbeevil 8y ago
  Down 12% in the last month though. I guess you could say everything is down, but that's kind of the point when billionaires and corporations hoard all of the money.
  - i_cant_speel 8y ago
    That's my fault personally. I recently put a significant amount of money into it. It happens every time I buy something.
    - odonnellryan 8y ago
      We should team up and start a fund that just shorts whatever we buy :)
    - lurquer 8y ago
      You too? For the benefit of the greater good, I’ve stopped investing for several years. I just couldn’t stomach the damage I was doing to the markets.
  - odonnellryan 8y ago
    Sure, but look at it YTD.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  depends on when they bought their shares...
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
Source?
petra 8y ago
>> Bezos recently talked about how Amazon would eventually fail Peter Thiel said: " So anyone who has a monopoly will pretend that they are in incredible competition". This seems like one of those cases.

dixie_land 8y ago

and your point is?

sctb 8y ago
We just asked you to please stop posting unsubstantively like this. Would you mind re-reading the guidelines and following them more closely? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

onetimemanytime 8y ago

They're pulling a Google...they've started to eat their tail. Google, for those that don't know, started with the goal of sending you to the best site. Today, oh well, it's virtually all ads /google products. They're trying to make you click their most profitable ads

odonnellryan 8y ago
I half agree. Google is still pretty good for finding information on many subjects.
- scottlegrand2 8y ago
  Indeed but the cognitive load of scrolling through those ads, especially on mobile, is part of why everything is perceived as sucking these days IMO. It's like there's a late-stage capitalism barrier to entry to get to the good stuff on every platform these days. I mean who out there actually wants autoplay videos and unending push notifications?

0xddd 8y ago

What is the idea with these garish MS Paint graphics? Am I the only one finding them incredibly distracting?

dvtrn 8y ago
No, that really threw me off too, not because it's objectively bad, but because I know and have seen how NYT is capable of some really impressive feats creating visualizations and visual aides for their stories; it's objectively bad considering the source.
- Cenk 8y ago
  Yes, because the graphics are a visual joke. The illustrator, Tarcy Ma, does great work: http://tracyma.com http://tracyma.com
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    the graphics are a visual joke. It sailed way over my head apparently, what's the punchline here?
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      It seems to be parody of conspiracy sites. Which would make sense, given that none of this is actually that crazy or hidden as a conspiracy. Intentional terrible graphic design has been used before by other notable publications like Bloomberg: http://incitrio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/tim-cook-bloomberg-cover-01.png http://incitrio.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/tim-cook-bloo...

petra 8y ago

So Amazon offering more and more business services, or in other words doing more tasks that other businesses used to do. And the interesting thing is, that they found almost a risk free way(for them), to do those tasks. Which fits Bezos's experience as an investor, always dealing with profit vs risk. For example, for small/medium companies, creating efficient supply chains for varying demand was risky. But for Amazon, with it's size and great demand control and forecasting, it's probably not that risky. The same with creating a new private brand - Amazon has a lot of knowledge of what sells, They control free ad inventory, and they control their customer, via search. So it would be interesting to ask: what things businesses do are still risky - and would be left to external companies to do ? And what risky things can Amazon de-risk and take in-house ?

notatoad 8y ago

This was actually a fairly interesting article, except for the strange tone - amazon isn't hiding that these are their brands, they seem to be flagged as "our brand" all over the place. so what's with the mspaint red circles pointing out incredibly obvious associations? Is this supposed to be satire, or does the author really believe they've discovered some sort of conspiracy here?

drharby 8y ago
Its popular to paint amzn as a boogyman
onetimemanytime 8y ago
The idea is that over time AMZN will push their products even more, to the point of hurting consumers and other sellers. Don't see the (potential--at least) bias? Amazon instead of showing you the best product, will show you the most profitable-to-them product. Yeah, same category and good enough but still, it stinks...
- nordsieck 8y ago
  > The idea is that over time AMZN will push their products even more, to the point of hurting consumers Do you think that supermarkets selling house brands hurts consumers?
  - physcab 8y ago
    No single supermarket controls 49% of all product related searches on the internet
    - briandear 8y ago
      If I search for Coca Cola and Amazon shows me "Amazon-Cola" and I ultimately scroll down and see Coca Cola -- no big deal. If Amazon decides to not sell Coca Cola at all, I'm still not buying "Amazon Cola." If you're shopping for name brands already, there really isn't much discovery necessary. If you aren't, then the competing brands should do something to differentiate themselves -- lower prices, higher quality, better advertising perhaps. If I'm buying a generic product to begin with, I don't particularly care what "store brand" it happens to be. And, if we want to talk manufacturing -- the "brands" are all that could be "hurt" -- the actual manufacturing of the product still happens, regardless of who sticks their label on it. A wheat farmer doesn't particularly care what brand the distributor sticks on the final package. He's still getting paid the prevailing price of wheat.

thenanyu 8y ago

The most telling paragraph in the article is the last one: > "As is often the case with Amazon, what seem like strange or inexplicable new behaviors are often old retail strategies unfolding on the internet, quickly, and in plainer view. Brooke Mille is no more a lie than any other brand: It’s just newer and faster and more online. And it has a lot more company." In other words, nothing new here, Amazon is doing what retailers have always done, just on Internet scale. As someone who worked in retail for a long time, I kept waiting for the punchline but I should have read that last paragraph first. It's hard for me to figure out why this is newsworthy. I wish the New York Times would stop publishing stuff like this. Amazon does a lot that is interesting, evil, novel, etc. to report on. This article just adds noise.

petra 8y ago
>> In other words, nothing new here Up until now, when i read stories about the market share of Amazon private brands(and i'm quite curious about that subject), i never heard about those kind of hidden brands mentioned in the story. And of course, they we're mentioned in market share calculations. Taking that into account, it's possible that Amazon has or will have: 1. A large/dominating market share in many categories. 2. It would be a secret, preventing questions about a monopoly to rise.
draw_down 8y ago
I generally dislike this response to stories. It’s about something significant happening in our world, that’s worth considering and paying attention to. It doesn’t have to have started 4 hours ago.
tedunangst 8y ago
The Times has somewhat recently decided that they are going to demonstrate that they understand the tech industry by reporting on anything and everything that happens, although this often gives the opposite impression. As they say, man bites dog is a story. Dog bites man is not. But if you're new to the dog bite beat, you may not know what's news and what's not.
winningcontinue 8y ago
It's not only the nytimes but readers on hackernews and other general social networks. It's attracted a discussion from their users. This article makes the top 10% of most active posts in the past 24 hours. Readers see Amazon and assume something sinister is going on that they need to pay attention to, when it's probably not the case. I blame the readers as much as the publishers. After all, journalism today is all about chasing the readers and clicks.

aresant 8y ago

On the extreme end of "brand value you've got Kanye West selling a 100% cotton t-shirt for $120. (1) On the other end you've got Amazon not even bothering with a logo and selling a 100% cotton t-shirt for $14.99. (2) And the Amazon shirt is rated 4.5+ stars. As a consumer I love what Amazon is doing, Retail "brands" are the most notorious of all of the middle men. And they had to be - how do you deliver a product to a physical retail location that needs at least a 2 - 3x on each product sold to pay the rent, the front of house employees, etc? As a result these "brands" were never product innovators, mostly they're perfunctory with giant marketing budgets to build their "brand value". Remember Nike's "pumps" innovation back in the day? Was that a product innovation or was that a marketing innovation? And this reality in retail brands has led to all sorts of notorious abuses - on the subject of Nike they famously figured out how to arbitrage child labor - relying on shit hold labor conditions for ~30 years until they got caught truly well and good with their pants down w/a famous LIFE Magazine story.(3) Amazon's supply chain innovations flattened the market, and now we see cases as laid out here where the overseas factory owner is building the brands, or building the brands in collaboration with Amazon. It's not going to be perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Amazon is clearly in the middle of calibrating their own own morale compass, but as a consumer I delight in seeing the mid-market retail kings getting stomped on. (1) https://www.okayplayer.com/news/style-kanye-west-apc-120-plain-white-hiphop-t-shirt-sells-out.html https://www.okayplayer.com/news/style-kanye-west-apc-120-pla... (2) https://www.amazon.com/Goodthreads-Short-Sleeve-Crewneck-Cotton-T-Shirt/dp/B06XW6GDZC/ https://www.amazon.com/Goodthreads-Short-Sleeve-Crewneck-Cot... (3) http://mallenbaker.net/article/clear-reflection/nike-and-child-labour-how-it-went-from-laggard-to-leader http://mallenbaker.net/article/clear-reflection/nike-and-chi...

twoodfin 8y ago
Remember Nike's "pumps" innovation back in the day? Reebok was the pump. Nike was “air”.
Matthias247 8y ago
> On the other end you've got Amazon not even bothering with a logo and selling a 100% cotton t-shirt for $14.99. (2) How is that better or different than any offerings from H&M? Or any of the other even lower end brands?

Agathos 8y ago

I wonder: if I sell something on Amazon and make it an Amazon-exclusive brand, will I find it easier to keep counterfeit knockoffs out of their inventory?

ikeboy 8y ago
Yes, you pay an extra 5% commission or so but get real "gating", nobody else can sell it

mikeash 8y ago

"Is Amazon" meaning "is made by other manufacturers and white-labeled for Amazon" apparently. Why is this interesting?

ikeboy 8y ago
Antitrust concerns when they compete with their own vendors and give themselves advantages
- mikeash 8y ago
  Are they competing with their own vendors when they’re paying those vendors to make the stuff?
  - ikeboy 8y ago
    They aren't paying the same people. If I sell my own brand, and they make their own brand and pay someone else to make it, they're competing with me on a platform they control and they give themselves advantages - such as showing up ahead of me in search (Google got fined a lot of money for this exact practice), putting links to their products on my product page saying "buy our brands instead" (yes, they really do this, see https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/amazon-is-testing-a-new-feature-that-promotes-its-private-label-brands-inside-a-competitors-product-listing.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/02/amazon-is-testing-a-new-feat...), giving themselves exemptions from policies they apply to third party sellers like review manipulation bans (see Vine program), etc

lucas_membrane 8y ago

I don't read the gray lady on account of the paywall, but this is something I have noticed somewhat in recent days. For the usual reasons of distrust of excessive economic power, I have not bought from Amazon for a few years. However, as part of that, I have bought from Abebooks until the last month, when I learned that it was owned by Amazon. I had previously run some quick searches trying to learn who owned Abebooks, and did not find anything. It is also not evident on the Abebooks website. Looking for another source for books, I found an on-line vendor that looks similar to Abebooks, listing used and new books for sale from various booksellers in diverse places. I checked it out and could not link it to any overly large enterprises. That was good, and the other site prices are not obviously higher than Abebooks, but the new site adds $4 shipping on each book, so my cost for used books is now up about 25%. Not good, but I'll pay it to not feed the monster. So, as both Abebooks and the new site list used books for sale by various bookstores, many of the same books are listed on both sites, and my new vendor might even present a better selection of what I look for. That's good. But some of the vendors that offer the lowest prices deal only through abebooks.com, ie Amazon/Bezos, and they list very many books on the Amazon/Bezos site. Coincidentally, one of them, the Book Depository, shown as being located in England, is owned by Amazon, ships free to the US, but when the packages arrive, they appear to have been shipped from the US. All of that is business as usual for a megacorp, but another bookshop that sells beaucoups of books through Amazon's abebooks is Seattle Goodwill, a non-profit. This raises my eyebrows because I live in a state near Seattle in which Goodwill's non-profit status has been in question because of high compensation given to its executives. I suspect that the relationship between Amazon and Goodwill may be somewhat complex. Amazon gives its customers free shipping to donate items to tax-exempt Goodwill, Goodwill then sells the items through an Amazon subsidiary, Amazon gets a commission on the sale, what's going on? Goodwill is a non-profit that does 'job-training'. Are 'trainees' not earning Seattle's high minimum wage part of this business? What does this operation look like? Anyone know?

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ctvo 8y ago

The article doesn't go into the most important advantage Amazon has: it has data on what sells well and what markets it should enter using existing brands on its marketplace. With this data, it enters markets and undercuts its competition at the perfect price point.

briandear 8y ago
Then consumers win. The competitors can lower their prices/increase their quality/improve efficiency and consumers get to buy better products for less.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Amazon often has higher prices than Walmart & Target, but people still don't shop Walmart online because Amazon is convenient. Amazon knows the perfect price point to stop people from shopping around to other online outlets, that doesn't mean it is giving the lowest price to consumers. People will, in person, buy something from Walmart instead of Kroger over $2, but Amazon has somehow figured out how to keep people on their site by properly measuring demand elasticity. Not to mention most listings on Amazon now are ads for products on Amazon. Tide, etc pay for top placements in the stores. So Amazon gets fulfillment cut and money from ad revenue. It's pretty impressive.

mogadsheu 8y ago

Bezos read about Rockefeller’s old plays. Standard Oil had a large number of small subsidiary oil companies under different names, many of which weren’t clearly understood to be owned by Standard. It was one of their ways of preventing anti-trust accusations against them. Amazon Prime is effectively a postal commerce version of Standard’s rail rebate system. Lots of respect to those guys, whether you agree with their actions on a moral basis or not. They’ve been reading up on their history.

winningcontinue 8y ago
Amazon as a retailer doesn't make much money. Margins are thin, and even thinner with their free shipping. Creating their own private brands of consumer products are not going to make them much money, but it'd make sure they control not just the sale but the production of the item itself.

dschuler 8y ago

"it's about the scale that Amazon does it at" "it's just they do it on a massive scale" "This is something that Amazon is great at" "Target is doing the same...but they just don't have the massive scale" "As a consumer I love what Amazon is doing" "Lots of respect to those guys" "the most important advantage Amazon has: it has data...with this data, it enters markets and undercuts its competition at the perfect price point" At some point I feel like I'm being astroturfed. People are amazed Amazon sells pasta and batteries under their own brand? Sounds like Ikea to me. Amazon has several problems they haven't corrected in years - generally not great prices, fake products being co-mingled with genuine items, fake reviews, flaky or slow shipping (esp. with their own delivery people). I've even had a few brand new books arrive with binding or cover damage. Ugh.

giancarlostoro 8y ago
They really need verified vendors that Amazon can vouch for. These vendors would need to be tested without knowing by Amazon to make sure third party ones are not being sneaky. Especially if customers complain.
- dpau 8y ago
  I'm wondering if the presence of fakes on Amazon (and the many complaints of them) are in fact helping Amazon's own branded items? Personally when I'm shopping for basics on Amazon I often just go for the AmazonBasics version because I can at least put a little faith in it. Whereas who knows where the other stuff comes from. Perhaps it's a feature, not a bug?
  - npunt 8y ago
    I have a similar take on the incentive misalignment with fakes + store brands. Two counterfactuals to consider: 1. For this to be true, consumers will have to know Amazon is behind the brands. Works for AmazonBasics, but the ones in this story I'm not so sure since their providence is a bit buried. 2. Fakes appear more often in higher-end products. Store brands (like AmazonBasics, Kirkland, etc) are typically geared at low/med end of market. Both of these hinge on brand perception. If Amazon can improve brand perception of their store brands, they're going to be more willing to say 'these are Amazon brands' on their listings. And the more they can do that, the more incentive misalignment exists on fakes. I don't think 'these aren't fake' is enough to improve brand perception alone as quality matters a lot, but it probably does contribute. Of course, every retail category is different. I imagine there are some categories today where the intersection between fake problem + Amazon brand means the incentives are aligned to soft-pedal any real progress on fakes.

diebir 8y ago

Amazon is useless for high end outdoor gear. Not just gear even, but clothing. If something is available, it is often past years models, odd colors, sizes and the prices are non-competitive.

viburnum 8y ago

This is so Amazon can sell you garbage and avoid tarnishing their brand. For a while anyway.

dana321 8y ago

Amazon definitely focus on quantity, not quality. Everything works.. Just and no more. Their web interfaces and APIs are clunky, and there is a lack of any way to flag up an undelivered package.

sgustard 8y ago

Amazon's been well known for relentless A/B testing of every last pixel in their checkout UI. This is simply an extension of that A/B testing mentality to individual products. Flood the user's search results with a litany of similar and confusingly-branded products and see what sticks.

dqpb 8y ago

The real story here is why is NYT systematically attacking all the FAANG companies?

Animats 8y ago

As the article points out, Costco just sells their own stuff under the Kirkland brand. Much Kirkland stuff is made by major US brands, and is often identical to the branded product, but cheaper. They don't bother hiding that it's their own brand.[1] Amusingly, Costco sells their Kirkland items on Amazon. Or, rather, somebody called "ShippedFast" does. Now who's ShippedFast? They seem to be in Florida and the phone number maps to a residence. But Amazon doesn't disclose the identity of the seller. [1] https://hip2save.com/2018/09/11/brands-costco-kirkland-items/ https://hip2save.com/2018/09/11/brands-costco-kirkland-items...

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