8 ms·

>using sales data to gain an unfair advantage over smaller sellers on the Marketplace platform I'd love to see how this applies to store brands and shelf place

>using sales data to gain an unfair advantage over smaller sellers on the Marketplace platform I'd love to see how this applies to store brands and shelf placement in retail stores as well.

Nasrudith 7y ago
Really that seems to be an obvious pretext in a way worrying to rule of law from how blatantly selective it is. Literally every merchant large enough for store brands uses their own sales data to gain an advantage! They know they get a good deal of sales so they can reduce expenses by vertical intergrating commodities.
- danmaz74 7y ago
  But no real world grocery chain has anything near a monopoly. The whole point of antitrust law is that businesses in dominant positions have additional limits to what they can do.
  - pitaj 7y ago
    And neither is Amazon.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      During Black Friday, Amazon on its own represented a sizable, double-digit portion of all sales in the US. On its own. Amazon doesn't need to be a monopoly to be an antitrust concern. It just needs to have a dominant market position (a monopoly is just a per se example of such).
      - repolfx 7y ago
        "Dominant market position" would be something like more than 90% of retail sales. Clearly, their market share is nowhere near that. I don't really get why everyone is bashing Amazon here. They sell a lot of stuff, and they sell it well. By the very act of selling they get data on what is being sold - what kind of retail business could last more than 12 hours without knowing data about its own sales operations? But apparently in the EU that's now illegal. Or more realistically, it's illegal if you're rich enough to pay huge fines directly into the pockets of the EU Commission, which is desperate for money and can directly levy fines without needing to win a court case in front of a neutral judiciary.
        gamblor956 7y ago
        No, at that % they would be a de facto monopoly. Dominant generally means >50%, though depending on the market it could be an even letter percentage than that. I'm not bashing on Amazon, I'm a regular customer. But I'm trying to explain how antitrust generally works. EU has more rigorous antitrust rules than the US. If Amazon has antitrust issues under US laws, then it has a serious antitrust problem under EU laws.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    And Walmart is bigger than Amazon in the United States. I don't have numbers at hand of the EU as a whole to compare but I would be surprised if Amazon were bigger than leading grocery store chains.
    - malka 7y ago
      there is no "leading grocery store chains", there are A LOT of them. Of course, many of them belong to the same group, but even with that, we are nowhere near a monopoly.
      - jklinger410 7y ago
        Kroger and Walmart are certainly leading grocery store chains. I would argue that Amazon is also not near a monopoly. Google, Ali Express, eBay, NewEgg, Overstock, and so many direct to consumer brands and marketplaces also are healthy competition.
- libertine 7y ago
  The boom of white-label, or retailer-brand products was definitely fueled by sales data. What may have started as a simple analysis to evaluate share of shelf, easily could turn to "what if we sold these"? The main difference vs Amazon is the Reviews data (that's worth what's worth with all of the fake reviews), and you can't buy on Amazon without using your account so every sale is bound to an specific person. In that regard no retailer has this data. Even those who have loyalty programs that end up being a tracking card, people can still buy without using cards.
  - october_sky 7y ago
    > In that regard no retailer has this data. Not true, this is tracked by loyalty cards and to a lesser extent, by the credit cards that are used
    - libertine 7y ago
      > Not true, this is tracked by loyalty cards and to a lesser extent, by the credit cards that are used Like I said, you're not obliged to be in a loyalty program, and you can buy in cash, debit card - at least in Europe that's pretty common. Plus I didn't want to go through the whole type of sellers on amazon. You have: Products sold by Amazon: these are all amazon brands + products from other brands (maybe this is the closest to the retailers) Products Fulfilled by Amazon: Where amazon only deals with fulfilling and customer service (to some extent), and Shops pay referral fees and fulfillment fees; And you have Fulfilled by Merchant: where people set shops and pay only referral fees (this is maybe the closest to set a quiosque in a mall); So it's quite tricky, yet Amazon gathers data on everything.
      - mulmen 7y ago
        And you don't think a purchase history is associated with your debit card? In the US (not sure about EU countries), there is price discrimination based on loyalty program membership. Some retailers (Costco) require membership to even walk in the door.
- nolok 7y ago
  It's actually not blatantly selective, you're merely misunderstanding the set of rules they are looking at. Most of the places you probably think of as "in a similar situation yet not bothered" [like retail stores] are NOT marketplace, they do NOT sell shelf space. They buy the product, and then they resell it to the end consummer. They are the seller. Amazon presents itself as a marketplace, and gets a few advantages from that (such as being able to shift responsabilities for some issues to the "real" seller), and as such they must act like one on other aspects too. Other French exemples of marketplaces with such rules to follow would be cdiscount for exemple (2nd after amazon in volume).
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago
    I don't know how it works in the EU but in the US stores definitely sell shelf space, and retailers don't always own the products they are selling to the end consumer. Physical retail stores are often essentially modeled as aggregators of consumers, access to which is sold to manufacturers -- it is a platform of sorts. Most of the market arrangements in online retail are mirrored in physical retail. This isn't as clear a distinction in practice as you are making it out to be.
    - nolok 7y ago
      Oh there is a very clear distinction, and even one aspect of it that is even super clear for an end user like you and me: warranty (it's not the only or even main one, but it's one that as direct effect for you and me when we buy things). Current law for electronics is, 2 year warranty minimum, your point of contact is the seller. Oftentimes after a few month they redirect you to the manufacturer for the warranty, but if you get in conflict with him, in terms of the law, the onus of the 2 year warranty is on the seller. So if I buy a Samsung phone in Carrefour, and my phone fails, usually after the first week they will redirect me to Samsung, but if Samsung refuses to deal with me for one reason or another, it's Carrefour that has the obligation to fix my issue. The law was made that way with the benefit of the end user in sight, I used Samsung but I could have used "random brand with no presence here and very hard to contact", so since it's the store that sold it to you, they are the one responsible to fix the issue. When going through a marketplace, the seller is not the marketplace. Now, Amazon is rather clean on that one, and they deal with it as if they were, but buy from Cdiscount's or Fnac.com's marketplace and quickly you realize that hiding behind "I'm a marketplace" covers their ass since you need to deal with the actual seller, even if it's some random chinese import company. And in the end, whether the distinction are large or not doesn't matter, they're two different things with different rights and obligations, and you're one, you can't benefit of being the other.
gamblor956 7y ago
I'd love to see how this applies to store brands and shelf placement in retail stores as well. I've noticed this comment constantly pop up on Amazon antitrust discussions. It's not the same thing. Retail stores buy the products they put on their shelves, at wholesale prices. They then mark up the prices to a retail price charged to the end buyer when they resell the products to the end buyer. For store brands, the store still pays for the goods up front, but they're usually just buying white-label products from suppliers that don't need to make up for marketing expenses, and so the wholesale prices are cheaper. There is no competitive concerns here because the product maker has already been paid for their goods. Amazon isn't being investigated for the products it buys from its suppliers. It pays for those and so it can do whatever it wants. It's being investigated for the products it doesn't, i.e., the "Marketplace" of third-party sellers where Amazon is using its internal data gathered from the third-party sellers to compete with them. There is a competitive concern here because Amazon controls the marketplace and is using its market position to compete against these third party sellers. There is no comparable analog to the physical/retail world because such an arrangement doesn't exist in the retail world. Contrast to ebay or etsy, which are all third-party sellers. No competitive concerns there, because they aren't trying to compete with their own sellers.
- jklinger410 7y ago
  1. Many retail agreements are much closer to Amazon Fulfillment than you might realize. I know Best Buy, for instance, starts new relationships with a "pay as you go" scheme. Meaning we would ship them a pallet, they would literally charge us a warehouse fee, and then pay us as the product sold, and refund us the warehouse fee upon a complete sellout within a certain time frame. We had to sell our way into a classic wholesale to retail relationship. 2. I am aware of how store brands work, thanks. Amazon does this with Amazon Basics brand, which is a point of contention in the monopoly. It is identical to a store brand. If a retailer buys whole-sale white labeled products to compete against yours at a competitive rate, that is competition. Please try again at hand-waving that away. 3. Walmart, Kroger, Trader Joe's, Whole foods, all use data they have gathered from selling products to determine which white label brands it wants to create and compete with other products. There is a competitive concern here because these retailers control shelf space and promotional material and uses their physical retail space and sales data to compete against brands. Walmart more-so than all the others. I think I am building a pretty good comparison here.
nolok 7y ago
I cannot talk for other places, but in the context of the EU the big point is presenting yourself as a marketplace / a third party that merely stores shelf placement (or the equivalent on your platform), instead of selling others' items yourself. Retail stores are not in the business of offering a marketplace for companies to buy shelf placement. When I go to a retail store and buy something, the seller is always the store. In terms of the laws, insurance, etc ... It changes a lot. Marketplaces have protections, but those protection come from their independance from one vendor or another. Same principle that made us force all of our national ISP to separate their fiber/network business from their actual ISP business, or why the national train companies were cut and separated from the rail lines companies ...
- vichu 7y ago
  You may be surprised to hear that it actually is the case that retail stores are very much in the business of selling shelf space (at least in the United States - I cannot say for the EU). It is known as a "slotting fee" and manufacturers pay it for limited shelf space in grocery stores for example. It is particularly important for the distribution of new products as stores would prefer not to take risks on an item that may or may not sell very well. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee https://www.vox.com/2016/11/22/13707022/grocery-store-slotting-fees-slotting-allowances https://www.vox.com/2016/11/22/13707022/grocery-store-slotti...
  - vermontdevil 7y ago
    And they don’t even stock the products on the shelf themselves. It’s usually the distributor of the product (coke, Pepsi etc) that will come in and stock themselves. Even do the awesome displays you see when you enter the store etc.
- ksec 7y ago
  I think there are a HUGE misunderstanding and difference of POV from EU and US. Much like how US ( consumers ) even view Cross Bleeding as GMO. What you said is mostly correct in EU, so I am not sure why you are getting downvoted. They do sell shelf placement ( in different stature ), however the marketplace and Retails protection is still in place.

>using sales data to gain an unfair advantage over smaller sellers on the Marketplace platform I'd love to see how this applies to store brands and shelf placement in retail stores as well.

Nasrudith 7y ago

Really that seems to be an obvious pretext in a way worrying to rule of law from how blatantly selective it is. Literally every merchant large enough for store brands uses their own sales data to gain an advantage! They know they get a good deal of sales so they can reduce expenses by vertical intergrating commodities.

danmaz74 7y ago
But no real world grocery chain has anything near a monopoly. The whole point of antitrust law is that businesses in dominant positions have additional limits to what they can do.
- pitaj 7y ago
  And neither is Amazon.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    During Black Friday, Amazon on its own represented a sizable, double-digit portion of all sales in the US. On its own. Amazon doesn't need to be a monopoly to be an antitrust concern. It just needs to have a dominant market position (a monopoly is just a per se example of such).
    - repolfx 7y ago
      "Dominant market position" would be something like more than 90% of retail sales. Clearly, their market share is nowhere near that. I don't really get why everyone is bashing Amazon here. They sell a lot of stuff, and they sell it well. By the very act of selling they get data on what is being sold - what kind of retail business could last more than 12 hours without knowing data about its own sales operations? But apparently in the EU that's now illegal. Or more realistically, it's illegal if you're rich enough to pay huge fines directly into the pockets of the EU Commission, which is desperate for money and can directly levy fines without needing to win a court case in front of a neutral judiciary.
      - gamblor956 7y ago
        No, at that % they would be a de facto monopoly. Dominant generally means >50%, though depending on the market it could be an even letter percentage than that. I'm not bashing on Amazon, I'm a regular customer. But I'm trying to explain how antitrust generally works. EU has more rigorous antitrust rules than the US. If Amazon has antitrust issues under US laws, then it has a serious antitrust problem under EU laws.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  And Walmart is bigger than Amazon in the United States. I don't have numbers at hand of the EU as a whole to compare but I would be surprised if Amazon were bigger than leading grocery store chains.
  - malka 7y ago
    there is no "leading grocery store chains", there are A LOT of them. Of course, many of them belong to the same group, but even with that, we are nowhere near a monopoly.
    - jklinger410 7y ago
      Kroger and Walmart are certainly leading grocery store chains. I would argue that Amazon is also not near a monopoly. Google, Ali Express, eBay, NewEgg, Overstock, and so many direct to consumer brands and marketplaces also are healthy competition.
libertine 7y ago
The boom of white-label, or retailer-brand products was definitely fueled by sales data. What may have started as a simple analysis to evaluate share of shelf, easily could turn to "what if we sold these"? The main difference vs Amazon is the Reviews data (that's worth what's worth with all of the fake reviews), and you can't buy on Amazon without using your account so every sale is bound to an specific person. In that regard no retailer has this data. Even those who have loyalty programs that end up being a tracking card, people can still buy without using cards.
- october_sky 7y ago
  > In that regard no retailer has this data. Not true, this is tracked by loyalty cards and to a lesser extent, by the credit cards that are used
  - libertine 7y ago
    > Not true, this is tracked by loyalty cards and to a lesser extent, by the credit cards that are used Like I said, you're not obliged to be in a loyalty program, and you can buy in cash, debit card - at least in Europe that's pretty common. Plus I didn't want to go through the whole type of sellers on amazon. You have: Products sold by Amazon: these are all amazon brands + products from other brands (maybe this is the closest to the retailers) Products Fulfilled by Amazon: Where amazon only deals with fulfilling and customer service (to some extent), and Shops pay referral fees and fulfillment fees; And you have Fulfilled by Merchant: where people set shops and pay only referral fees (this is maybe the closest to set a quiosque in a mall); So it's quite tricky, yet Amazon gathers data on everything.
    - mulmen 7y ago
      And you don't think a purchase history is associated with your debit card? In the US (not sure about EU countries), there is price discrimination based on loyalty program membership. Some retailers (Costco) require membership to even walk in the door.
nolok 7y ago
It's actually not blatantly selective, you're merely misunderstanding the set of rules they are looking at. Most of the places you probably think of as "in a similar situation yet not bothered" [like retail stores] are NOT marketplace, they do NOT sell shelf space. They buy the product, and then they resell it to the end consummer. They are the seller. Amazon presents itself as a marketplace, and gets a few advantages from that (such as being able to shift responsabilities for some issues to the "real" seller), and as such they must act like one on other aspects too. Other French exemples of marketplaces with such rules to follow would be cdiscount for exemple (2nd after amazon in volume).
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  I don't know how it works in the EU but in the US stores definitely sell shelf space, and retailers don't always own the products they are selling to the end consumer. Physical retail stores are often essentially modeled as aggregators of consumers, access to which is sold to manufacturers -- it is a platform of sorts. Most of the market arrangements in online retail are mirrored in physical retail. This isn't as clear a distinction in practice as you are making it out to be.
  - nolok 7y ago
    Oh there is a very clear distinction, and even one aspect of it that is even super clear for an end user like you and me: warranty (it's not the only or even main one, but it's one that as direct effect for you and me when we buy things). Current law for electronics is, 2 year warranty minimum, your point of contact is the seller. Oftentimes after a few month they redirect you to the manufacturer for the warranty, but if you get in conflict with him, in terms of the law, the onus of the 2 year warranty is on the seller. So if I buy a Samsung phone in Carrefour, and my phone fails, usually after the first week they will redirect me to Samsung, but if Samsung refuses to deal with me for one reason or another, it's Carrefour that has the obligation to fix my issue. The law was made that way with the benefit of the end user in sight, I used Samsung but I could have used "random brand with no presence here and very hard to contact", so since it's the store that sold it to you, they are the one responsible to fix the issue. When going through a marketplace, the seller is not the marketplace. Now, Amazon is rather clean on that one, and they deal with it as if they were, but buy from Cdiscount's or Fnac.com's marketplace and quickly you realize that hiding behind "I'm a marketplace" covers their ass since you need to deal with the actual seller, even if it's some random chinese import company. And in the end, whether the distinction are large or not doesn't matter, they're two different things with different rights and obligations, and you're one, you can't benefit of being the other.

gamblor956 7y ago

I'd love to see how this applies to store brands and shelf placement in retail stores as well. I've noticed this comment constantly pop up on Amazon antitrust discussions. It's not the same thing. Retail stores buy the products they put on their shelves, at wholesale prices. They then mark up the prices to a retail price charged to the end buyer when they resell the products to the end buyer. For store brands, the store still pays for the goods up front, but they're usually just buying white-label products from suppliers that don't need to make up for marketing expenses, and so the wholesale prices are cheaper. There is no competitive concerns here because the product maker has already been paid for their goods. Amazon isn't being investigated for the products it buys from its suppliers. It pays for those and so it can do whatever it wants. It's being investigated for the products it doesn't, i.e., the "Marketplace" of third-party sellers where Amazon is using its internal data gathered from the third-party sellers to compete with them. There is a competitive concern here because Amazon controls the marketplace and is using its market position to compete against these third party sellers. There is no comparable analog to the physical/retail world because such an arrangement doesn't exist in the retail world. Contrast to ebay or etsy, which are all third-party sellers. No competitive concerns there, because they aren't trying to compete with their own sellers.

jklinger410 7y ago
1. Many retail agreements are much closer to Amazon Fulfillment than you might realize. I know Best Buy, for instance, starts new relationships with a "pay as you go" scheme. Meaning we would ship them a pallet, they would literally charge us a warehouse fee, and then pay us as the product sold, and refund us the warehouse fee upon a complete sellout within a certain time frame. We had to sell our way into a classic wholesale to retail relationship. 2. I am aware of how store brands work, thanks. Amazon does this with Amazon Basics brand, which is a point of contention in the monopoly. It is identical to a store brand. If a retailer buys whole-sale white labeled products to compete against yours at a competitive rate, that is competition. Please try again at hand-waving that away. 3. Walmart, Kroger, Trader Joe's, Whole foods, all use data they have gathered from selling products to determine which white label brands it wants to create and compete with other products. There is a competitive concern here because these retailers control shelf space and promotional material and uses their physical retail space and sales data to compete against brands. Walmart more-so than all the others. I think I am building a pretty good comparison here.

nolok 7y ago

I cannot talk for other places, but in the context of the EU the big point is presenting yourself as a marketplace / a third party that merely stores shelf placement (or the equivalent on your platform), instead of selling others' items yourself. Retail stores are not in the business of offering a marketplace for companies to buy shelf placement. When I go to a retail store and buy something, the seller is always the store. In terms of the laws, insurance, etc ... It changes a lot. Marketplaces have protections, but those protection come from their independance from one vendor or another. Same principle that made us force all of our national ISP to separate their fiber/network business from their actual ISP business, or why the national train companies were cut and separated from the rail lines companies ...

vichu 7y ago
You may be surprised to hear that it actually is the case that retail stores are very much in the business of selling shelf space (at least in the United States - I cannot say for the EU). It is known as a "slotting fee" and manufacturers pay it for limited shelf space in grocery stores for example. It is particularly important for the distribution of new products as stores would prefer not to take risks on an item that may or may not sell very well. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee https://www.vox.com/2016/11/22/13707022/grocery-store-slotting-fees-slotting-allowances https://www.vox.com/2016/11/22/13707022/grocery-store-slotti...
- vermontdevil 7y ago
  And they don’t even stock the products on the shelf themselves. It’s usually the distributor of the product (coke, Pepsi etc) that will come in and stock themselves. Even do the awesome displays you see when you enter the store etc.
ksec 7y ago
I think there are a HUGE misunderstanding and difference of POV from EU and US. Much like how US ( consumers ) even view Cross Bleeding as GMO. What you said is mostly correct in EU, so I am not sure why you are getting downvoted. They do sell shelf placement ( in different stature ), however the marketplace and Retails protection is still in place.