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why marketplaces are able to compete with their sellers is beyond me.
by sharemywin 7y ago
why marketplaces are able to compete with their sellers is beyond me.
- dec0dedab0de 7y agoWhy sellers would use a market place that is obviously going to compete with them is beyond me.
- 542458 7y agoBecause for any individual seller there’s a heavy short/medium term advantage to using the marketplace in the form of dramatically increased reach and simplified logistics.
- dazc 7y agoYou could ask why people start businesses that rely on buying stuff for x and then selling it for y when that business model has already been fully exploited? There is a supermarket chain called Aldi who's entire business seems to rely upon copying branded products yet they are lauded for offering great value?
- oehpr 7y agoYou got two answers that are telling you this is good and normal, but I have a third one: They're the only game in town at this point.
- philmcc 7y agoBecause there's not another marketplace where you can, with some effort and very little actual innovation, turn a $5,000 investment into a six (and sometimes seven) figure a year revenue stream.
- graeme 7y agoEvery retail store does this.
- timdev2 7y agoMany retail stores do this to their vendors. Amazon does it to it's "sellers", which are really just a category of "customers". As an amazon seller, you pay for the privilege of selling through their platform.
- sharemywin 7y agoTo me this a form of bundling and should probably be illegal.
- graeme 7y agoYou would forbid the entire existing system of retail? Do you have an example of any country that operates this way? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
- sebwi 7y agoWell, because marketplaces like Amazon have a strategy for that: learn from sellers, imitate their products, offer your imitated product prominently on your "neutral" marketplace and crush the competition with a lower price until they have to give up or let themselves be bought [1]. That's nothing really new. The difference with Amazon is just the scale. [1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/amazon-doesnt-just-want-to-dominate-the-market-it-wants-to-become-the-market/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/amazon-doesnt-just...
- tomcooks 7y agoit's the normal development of the capitalist market, right before eating itself.