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(1) You don't think HD and Lowes and Safeway and Walmart and every big retailer doesn't use their sales data to decide which products to try to disintermediate
by repiret 7y ago
(1) You don't think HD and Lowes and Safeway and Walmart and every big retailer doesn't use their sales data to decide which products to try to disintermediate distributors and other middle-men in the supply chain?
(2) I'll concede HD and Lowes have a lot of departments without store brands [1], but raise you the local grocery store, which doesn't.
[1]: The pattern I see is that the stuff marketed mostly to contractors is less likely to be infected with crappy store brands than the stuff marked mostly to DIY'ers. I suspect its in part because pros will learn whats quality and whats crap a lot faster than DIYers, because the latter only buy a ceiling fan or whatever once a decade.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7y agoAmazon has done a lot more than you describe. Their marketplace has been a major online venue for retailers not just manufacturers and distributors. Companies (typically small) that focused on small niches (e.g. triathlon equipment). Amazon has siphoned off the best-sellers and high margin items from these sellers, making their businesses somewhere between less profitable and completely unviable. The model here is not "Safeway and Walmart and every big retailer [ using their sales data]". It's more akin to the flagship store in a mall actually owning the mall, and requiring that all customers check out via their registers. Every other vendor in the mall surrenders all their sales data to the flagship, which it uses to decide how to use its own internal spaces to sell with higher volume and/or profit. The own-brand stuff that Amazon is doing is dubious, but sure, I agree that many large retailers do it. Most large retailers do not operate 3rd party retail marketplaces, however, where they can siphon sales data from largely unsuspecting 3rd party retailers.