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> When a grocery store puts something on it's shelves, the store itself bought it from the manufacturer. They have already made their money. On Amazon, manufact
by jonknee 7y ago
> When a grocery store puts something on it's shelves, the store itself bought it from the manufacturer. They have already made their money. On Amazon, manufacturers don't make money when the item is listed, they make it only if and when a customer buys the product.
It's way more complicated than that. Manufacturers pay stores to carry their products, feature their products in special places in stores, get forced to take buy back unsold product, get paid way later on invoices, etc etc.
- bduerst 7y agoOnly certain big box retailers do that, like Best Buy, whose business model have them leasing floor space in their physical locations, which has tangible scarcity. Amazon is not leasing retail floor space, so to GP's point, any comparisons between Amazon's open platform and traditional physical retail spaces are moot.
- jonknee 7y agoI think retail stores controlling what you see based on how much money they get which is quite similar to Amazon controlling what you see in a search result based on profitability, but I guess we can agree to disagree. However, it's not just stores like Best Buy. Your local grocery store almost certainly makes a large percentage of their profit from companies paying for shelf space. End caps don't come out of thin air.
- bduerst 7y agoAgain, comparisons with physical retail are moot because, in your grocery store, nobody can walk in off the street and start selling off the shelves. The grocery store is not an open e-commerce platform but a curated service with physical scarcity. People don't have an issue with Amazon default sorting to best selling either. The problem is that Amazon is slowly pushing out the competition on their platform to focus their own products and labels. If there's any analogy, it would be similar Google removing search result links to Bing or Yandex.
- vinay_ys 7y ago> Again, comparisons with physical retail are moot because, in your grocery store, nobody can walk in off the street and start selling off the shelves. The grocery store is not an open e-commerce platform but a curated service with physical scarcity. So, if Amazon marketplace was an invite-only, curated marketplace and not an "open" marketplace, this wouldn't be a problem?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]