17 ms·

Jeff Bezos can’t promise Amazon employees don’t access independent seller data

312 points by pabo 6y ago

tantalor 6y ago
> “I do not think that’s systematically what’s going on,” Bezos said. “Third-party sellers in aggregate are doing extremely well on Amazon.” Cool so cheating is okay if you do it only a little, great take.
- mc32 6y ago
  That's having your cake and eating it too. I hope congress does something to curb this behavior where these platforms glean information from hard working businesses and use that data to inform the platforms' tactics.
  - lemmsjid 6y ago
    I'm honestly intrigued as to how this is so morally unambiguous. Walmart, any-given-supermarket, Costco, etc., have in-house brands (for example Kirkland with Costco). These became prominent in the 90's and there was similar discussion at the time about the ethics of a supermarket introducing competitors to the brands it stocks. Such controversy has died down and now it is commonplace. Looking at some updated articles, in-house brands at those retailers have in many (most?) cases outsold their branded competitors, so in-house brands like Kirkland are actually the largest brands in the country. So my question is: what makes Amazon different, behaviorally, than Costco, Walmart, Vons, etc.? Both use an (arguably) unfair data asymmetry to introduce in-house branded products to compete with the external brands they also sell. You then have brands like Trader Joe's that go out of their way to have an in-house brand, and make few exceptions. On open question is: who is this behavior actually hostile to? I think it's now conventional wisdom that if you're a brand selling in Vons or Trader Joe's that you need some special sauce to compete successfully with an inevitably-introduced in-house brand. So what is that special sauce? You have some brands that are exclusive because of their provenance or method of creation (say, a particular Scotch). But then you have many brands that are actually manufactured in the same locations and by the same people as the in-house brands, wherein the brand itself is a middleman who created a particular formulation or price/materials ratio that may or may not be the best one. These would seem to be the most vulnerable to Amazon building an in-house competitor, or Walmart, or Vons, etc. I suppose, looking for the other side of the argument, that the question would be if Amazon has so much monopolistic market clout that the third party has no way to exist once the in house brand has taken over. E.g. as though Costco were the only supermarket period, or, more accurately, if Trader Joe's were the only supermarket period.
    - vkou 6y ago
      > So my question is: what makes Amazon different, behaviorally, than Costco, Walmart, Vons, etc.? Both use an (arguably) unfair data asymmetry to introduce in-house branded products to compete with the external brands they also sell. You then have brands like Trader Joe's that go out of their way to have an in-house brand, and make few exceptions. The difference is that Costco very clearly discriminates about whose products it will stock on shelves, whereas Amazon is more like a flea market that charges people for renting bazaar stalls to sell from, and POS machines for processing payments. I'm not sure that should result in legislative differences, but that is a pretty significant difference between the two.
      - lemmsjid 6y ago
        It's interesting how perspectives differ and I'm not disagreeing with yours. If you'd asked me before this discussion whether or not I felt, given those criteria, that Amazon was a store or a flea market, I'd say I'd prefer Amazon to act like a store, and while it does have flea market aspects, I'd be happy for it to move away from them and in the store direction. The times I've actively disliked Amazon was when I bought some cheap but well-reviewed product and got something that was below cheap quality. I realized at those times that my natural expectation of Amazon was that it had some quality threshold for what it sold. I realized my thinking about Amazon did need to become flea-market-like, e.g. look that gift horse in the mouth! Except that isn't viable online where you can't personally evaluate what you're buying, especially on the low end of the market. I now like buying Amazon Basics at the low end price tier because it has a certain quality bar. I'd be more than happy, from a pure consumerist perspective, for Amazon to be mainly stocked with high quality third parties, its in-house brand filling in the cheaper side of the market, and then non-premium third parties who have somehow successfully competed with the in-house brand with some angle (say, sourcing a cheaper process that still gets results).
    - mc32 6y ago
      I wouldn’t be mad if they had their own products without using data mining to compete against their sellers. It’s that they use advanced data intelligence to compete. If they competed naively (had a hard wall between their market place division and their consumer products division, I wouldn’t have an issue.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
Question. What would a system capable of proving “this didn’t happen” look like?
- actuator 6y ago
  Audit trail of data source access? Though then, you would need to differentiate between legitimate access and using it for your own products.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    Suppose the data is accessed by one employee who routinely accesses data of this sort for legitimate purposes — but the employee takes a copy of the data (even just a summary) and sneakernets it over to the in-house brands. How can this attack vector be mitigated?
    - actuator 6y ago
      Yeah, this was what I was referring to. There is no way to control this and I am guessing this is why Jeff Bezos wasn't committing on this not being violated as well.
    - nerfhammer 6y ago
      Bureaucracy. A company that size, these people probably wouldn't know each other and at the scale needed would require significant organization to accomplish this. You would need a team of people doing this full time which requires bureaucracy.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  A hard regulatory barrier between the product side and the sales platform side. This already exists in the financial sector. What you would call an "investment bank" is actually a holding company with a number of subsidiaries. The investment bank subsidiary does capital raising and M&A advisory, while the broker-dealer does market transactions. These are separated by a "Chinese wall" or a "firewall". There are criminal penalties for circumventing the wall.
aahhahahaaa 6y ago
>Before the Journal’s report came out, Amazon had told Congress that it doesn’t access sales data to help guide the launch of its own products. This is insanely hard to believe. Amazon just started selling batteries and other random goods under their Basics brand based on ZERO inside sales knowledge? I'd love to see how they enforce that.
- actuator 6y ago
  Playing the devil's advocate here. You can get this data easily from market research reports and sales data of the respective companies also.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- tuna-piano 6y ago
  Look closely. Amazon claimed they don't access individual seller data, but they do access aggregated product data. However, in at least one case the aggregated data was only between two sellers: Amazon Warehouse (which only sold a few returned items) and the original seller. "Amazon draws a distinction between the data of an individual third-party seller and what it calls aggregated data, which it defines as the data of products with two or more sellers." https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...
  - aahhahahaaa 6y ago
    Ah there it is. That makes a lot more sense... honestly at their scale I don't think they should be able to do this, aggregate or not. They're about 50% of all online sales in the US, where compared to brick-and-mortar, Walmart gets a lot of flak as a small-business killer despite only accounting for 15% of all physical retail sales.
    - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tuna-piano 6y ago
First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it to gain success in some aspects of online retail. But to the proponents of the "market power has helped Amazon strangle so many industries", you have to answer - how did market power help: -Amazon grow Whole Foods? -AWS become the most popular cloud service? -Kindle become the most popular ereader? It seems to me a much better explanation than "market power abuse" is that Amazon's culture and people have enabled it to dominate a variety of unconnected industries.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  I think you're right that Amazon has come to dominate a lot of markets on merit. But it's still the case that having overly dominant players in a market is bad for... well everyone except the dominant player. It doesn't matter why or how it came to be.
  - darawk 6y ago
    This is not universally true. It's bad if the dominant player uses their dominance to deliver sub-par quality at high prices. But so far Amazon doesn't seem to be doing that, at least in my user experience of it. It is bad that they might one day be able to parlay their dominance into harming consumers, but the dominance itself is not necessarily a bad thing, IMO.
    - apahwa 6y ago
      I completely disagree, the quality of products on Amazon has gone downhill over the past 5 years. You may attribute this to influx of bad merchants but it really comes down to Amazon not having the same incentives to properly rank items and remove bad actors. Instead it created Amazon Basics brand and steers users towards it. The influx of misc brand names and items that look exactly like each other just helps confuse consumers and make them lean towards Amazon Basics.
shanemhansen 6y ago
So I used to work with someone from Amazon retail. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that Amazon mined their seller data to undercut them. We sold on Amazon and he constantly told us that we were fools to do so. He even mentioned that prior to accepting a position he had looked up our seller performance to make sure he was going to a good company. Maybe policies have since changed. At the time I was also told the most popular "test" SKU used by Amazon engineers was a 50 gallon barrel of lube.
- dastbe 6y ago
  I can't comment on any of the meaty stuff, but I can comment on the silly. > At the time I was also told the most popular "test" SKU used by Amazon engineers was a 50 gallon barrel of lube. Not knowing when this was, but I can say around 2013-2015 that this wasn't a general thing[0]. Could there have been an engineer who used it a lot? Sure, but there's a lot of them. Even if you disregard the crudity of it, it also just doesn't make for a good test ASIN outside of a small number of verticals. You'd much rather test with real ASINs where possible (which is almost 100% of the time), or with something idiomatic to the experience you're developing. EDIT: though maybe people have become inspired by https://observer.com/2015/07/at-1k-55-gallon-bottle-of-lube-is-amazon-prime-days-best-deal/ https://observer.com/2015/07/at-1k-55-gallon-bottle-of-lube-... ? Still, it stands to reason that you want to test with real products whenever you can.
  - cwkoss 6y ago
    50 gallon barrel of lube was a real SKU, I remember a friend sending me the link because he found it amusing. Was a couple thousand dollars IIRC
    - dastbe 6y ago
      It is, but it's a single particular ASIN. And given the majority of the time issues/changes arise due the particular characteristics of a particular item (is it pantry? is it prime? is it a garment? is it a toiletry? etc. etc.) using any one particular ASIN isn't going to be viable for most developers.
kome 6y ago
"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" – From the classic scene in Casablanca, 1942 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME)
justicezyx 6y ago
I see no fault on Amazon's side about using the data that are accessible to them, and exploit whatever value from them. Naturally, the competition is for a winner to emerge. Not to continuously drag on in a competition. What Amazon did is natural and reasonable in a competition. Secondly, it's a reasonable thing for a platform to access aggregate sales data. Amazon is a retail platform. It's entirely unreasonable to forbid them from using such data for the benefits of the sellers and buyers, and for their platform to function better. In the end, this is a value judgement: * Is it still a valuable thing to let the small retailers to operate independently, and be free from of systematic data-driven competition from platforms? My feeling is that the small retailers are just an inefficient way of using society resources. And I support Amazon's strategy.
draw_down 6y ago
Ultimately it’s just crazy, trying to pretend that such utterly rampant capitalists don’t act like capitalists. I just don’t see the point.
hluska 6y ago
Does anyone believe Bezos?
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Not believe as in he can guarantee they didn't?
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Not believe as in “this is not a good faith answer”.
    - hluska 6y ago
      Exactly. Thanks for taking me literally. You definitely don’t deserve the downvotes but it appears the average ‘hacker’ here trusts Bezos more than us. Interesting, hey??
      - IanSanders 6y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23996125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23996125
  - hluska 6y ago
    No, I’m asking literally. “Does anyone believe Bezos?” I sure don’t - a man with that much control and who is known for being that demanding doesn’t strike me as the type of person who could actually not know something like that (if he cared to find out). But, judging by the downvotes, the average person trusts him more than me. That’s very interesting... Edit - I can’t fucking believe I have to use ‘literally’ to be taken literally. Edit 2 - Fuck again. “I literally can’t fucking believe I have to use ‘literally’ to be taken literally. :)
granzymes 6y ago
"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he can't guarantee employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers to develop the company's own products" There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? The best Amazon can do is have policies, logs and access controls and punish employees if they break those policies. And Bezos committed to doing that.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? don't make third party sales data available to Amazon at all? Can't exploit data you don't keep. The same way Signal prevents data problems: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=20 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=2... The method is so good, it would even save Amazon storage space!
  - gruez 6y ago
    How is this possible? At the very least you need to store each customer's order history. From there you can work backwards to get sales numbers for a particular product or seller. Access controls don't work either, because at the end of the day it's stored on a server somewhere and someone must have access.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      encrypt the data by default and let the third party sellers and customers have exclusive access? Why does Amazon need access to anyone's history?
      - makoz 6y ago
        Disclaimer work at AWS. Customer disputes? Returns? Presumably you'll need some sort of history. At the very least saying Person X bought Y product
        6y ago
panny 6y ago
Any mention if the same non-guarantee applies to third party intellectual property on AWS? There doesn't seem to be much to stop them from "borrowing" code from AWS customers without anyone being the wiser.
- partiallypro 6y ago
  I don't think that is a concern, I think a concern is them looking at traffic patterns and network infrastructure setups within AWS so they could potentially one-up them on that front. They aren't going to steal someone's code from their own servers.
- monadic2 6y ago
  This is why you encrypt, it’s not impossible to bypass but it would make it a gargantuan task.
  - IanSanders 6y ago
    If it runs on aws, it must be decrypted at some point. If it's not, then you're using it as a storage only. There are studies on "decryptionless" data computation but nowhere near practical stage yet
- belval 6y ago
  IP theft is no joke and isn't some grey area of the law. By accessing and reusing code that belongs to someone else it would simply break the law and no-one would even try that considering how stupid it is. Now anti-competitive behavior is much harder to control for and that's what would be at play here.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
He should have said he can neither confirm nor deny. Not sure I am against commodity goods being driven to razor thin profit margins.
- IanSanders 6y ago
  >commodity goods being driven to razor thin profit margins. that's not the only factor
iammru 6y ago
I'm surprised that people are surprised.
llsf 6y ago
Bezos cannot guarantee that employees may have access 3rdparty sales data. Can any big retail like Walmart, Costco, Safeway, etc. can guarantee that no employee ever looked at 3rdparty sales data ? If Walmart sees a cheap item flying off the shelves, and thinks that it can make a cheap copy of it, then Walmart would do it. Isn't how store brand work ? and they often use a white label producer anyway (i.e. same factory, different packaging/label). Walmart, Costco, etc. they know precisely what products you buy and how often. They can push you next time to buy their own version of it, by sending you a discount for for it, or simply rearrange the shelves in store. I understand that sellers with little to no competitive advantage, are very vulnerable to such practices. But this is hardly new with Amazon. They could avoid selling through those channels (that is why you find some products only through producer website, or direct sales). Amazon has 35% of the e-commerce market in US, or 6% of retail market in US (Walmart has 9% of retail market in US). Amazon does not do as well in the rest of the world. The 35% of the e-commerce market is in US. And even that 35% includes being an agent for 3rdparty sellers. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-market-share19 https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...
- 8note 6y ago
  Given that they're third party companies, i think the question is if Walmart can data mine the sales data from other stores in the same mall?
- libertine 6y ago
  Isn't this straight forward? If the employees responsible for product development for Amazon brands have credentials to access 3rd party data, then assume they used it. Doesn't matter if only one used it, or all of them - they had access to it, all the rest is semantics/claims/smoke&mirrors.
jxramos 6y ago
Bezos gave an incredibly forthright set of testimony. I like how he continued to answer in the affirmative when the interrogator continued to drop the aggregate quantity scope. Can they do it for 3 sellers, yes, for 2 yes. That's basic mathematics, the aggregation will take place over however many are in the pool be it 100, 50 or even 3. Seems like Bezos stuck to the facts and reality on that one. His comment about trying to give helpful answers too when questioned about organized stolen goods. Bezos did a fine job, his replies were coherent, concise, and didn't bumble trying to coordinate and mobilize a bunch of caveats and statements with extensive justifying or clarifying context that could not be delivered in the compressed timescale he was afforded.
- alexpetralia 6y ago
  Yes, he easily had the most substantive and thoughtful responses of the 4 in my opinion.
ideals 6y ago
Curious as to what the response is like on internal email lists like @seattle-chatter. How are employees responding to Bezos remarks today?
NoblePublius 6y ago
What AmazonBasics product isnt a commodity Made in China?
uji 6y ago
ex-AWS employee here. I worked in one of the managed services (can't say which one because it might reveal my identity). In Managed services, instances are created in AWS VPC so employees have access to underlying VM. We have used that capability to get stats about the type of customer workloads, and devised feature products based on that.
- sf_sugar_daddy 6y ago
  When I worked for a different managed services provider we did the same thing, it's not illegal or anything (depending on the contract/terms .. etc) Most IT departments do the same on smaller scales (reading cowokers emails, slack convos ..etc) it's a job perk 'revenge of the nerds' and all that
- single_source 6y ago
  whoa...
ozten 6y ago
This was a waste of time. A 1 year study produced concrete details that can be investigated. Then the most senior congress people get 2 minutes of sounds bites and no progress is made. It is a farce. There may well be real violations of public trust or illegal activity, but this is not the way to effectively examine those reports. They don't even let the CEOs talk long enough to commit perjury. It is a dog and pony show for congress and the CEOs.
- onetimemanytime 6y ago
  Obviously, in 5 minutes nothing can be done. I suppose in smaller setting, maybe sub-committees, but not here. Here the idea is that later DOJ starts looking around and let them talk for hours and days. Will it happen?
  - ozten 6y ago
    I agree with sub-committees and more focused time. It doesn't make sense for this sub-committee to tackle so many disparate businesses. Imagine in 1982 Congress had hearings with AT&T, Exxon Mobile, Ford, Amoco, DuPont, Boeing, and Eastman Kodak. They probably wouldn't have had the focus to force the breakup of the Bell Systems.
- gundmc 6y ago
  It's politics. This wasn't for any actual investigation or enforcement (that's what the DOJ and FTC are doing), this was for the re-election campaigns.
Hokusai 6y ago
Gently reminder that Amazon uses to astroturf social sites. If this post sees a unfair amount of pro-Amazon statements is possible that is part of Amazon's PR strategy. - "Amazon workers are being paid to defend the company on Twitter": https://mashable.com/article/amazon-warehouse-twitter-defense/ https://mashable.com/article/amazon-warehouse-twitter-defens... But do not call on people just for siding with Amazon most people are just expressing their own opinion freely and deserve respect. Just adjust how you read the threads to account for biased results on voting and side representation.
seemslegit 6y ago
Jeff Bezos probably also can't promise they won't use startups AWS usage to find out as much as they can about their business in an M&A or just competitive analysis scenario.

312 points by pabo 6y ago

> “I do not think that’s systematically what’s going on,” Bezos said. “Third-party sellers in aggregate are doing extremely well on Amazon.” Cool so cheating is okay if you do it only a little, great take.

mc32 6y ago
That's having your cake and eating it too. I hope congress does something to curb this behavior where these platforms glean information from hard working businesses and use that data to inform the platforms' tactics.
- lemmsjid 6y ago
  I'm honestly intrigued as to how this is so morally unambiguous. Walmart, any-given-supermarket, Costco, etc., have in-house brands (for example Kirkland with Costco). These became prominent in the 90's and there was similar discussion at the time about the ethics of a supermarket introducing competitors to the brands it stocks. Such controversy has died down and now it is commonplace. Looking at some updated articles, in-house brands at those retailers have in many (most?) cases outsold their branded competitors, so in-house brands like Kirkland are actually the largest brands in the country. So my question is: what makes Amazon different, behaviorally, than Costco, Walmart, Vons, etc.? Both use an (arguably) unfair data asymmetry to introduce in-house branded products to compete with the external brands they also sell. You then have brands like Trader Joe's that go out of their way to have an in-house brand, and make few exceptions. On open question is: who is this behavior actually hostile to? I think it's now conventional wisdom that if you're a brand selling in Vons or Trader Joe's that you need some special sauce to compete successfully with an inevitably-introduced in-house brand. So what is that special sauce? You have some brands that are exclusive because of their provenance or method of creation (say, a particular Scotch). But then you have many brands that are actually manufactured in the same locations and by the same people as the in-house brands, wherein the brand itself is a middleman who created a particular formulation or price/materials ratio that may or may not be the best one. These would seem to be the most vulnerable to Amazon building an in-house competitor, or Walmart, or Vons, etc. I suppose, looking for the other side of the argument, that the question would be if Amazon has so much monopolistic market clout that the third party has no way to exist once the in house brand has taken over. E.g. as though Costco were the only supermarket period, or, more accurately, if Trader Joe's were the only supermarket period.
  - vkou 6y ago
    > So my question is: what makes Amazon different, behaviorally, than Costco, Walmart, Vons, etc.? Both use an (arguably) unfair data asymmetry to introduce in-house branded products to compete with the external brands they also sell. You then have brands like Trader Joe's that go out of their way to have an in-house brand, and make few exceptions. The difference is that Costco very clearly discriminates about whose products it will stock on shelves, whereas Amazon is more like a flea market that charges people for renting bazaar stalls to sell from, and POS machines for processing payments. I'm not sure that should result in legislative differences, but that is a pretty significant difference between the two.
    - lemmsjid 6y ago
      It's interesting how perspectives differ and I'm not disagreeing with yours. If you'd asked me before this discussion whether or not I felt, given those criteria, that Amazon was a store or a flea market, I'd say I'd prefer Amazon to act like a store, and while it does have flea market aspects, I'd be happy for it to move away from them and in the store direction. The times I've actively disliked Amazon was when I bought some cheap but well-reviewed product and got something that was below cheap quality. I realized at those times that my natural expectation of Amazon was that it had some quality threshold for what it sold. I realized my thinking about Amazon did need to become flea-market-like, e.g. look that gift horse in the mouth! Except that isn't viable online where you can't personally evaluate what you're buying, especially on the low end of the market. I now like buying Amazon Basics at the low end price tier because it has a certain quality bar. I'd be more than happy, from a pure consumerist perspective, for Amazon to be mainly stocked with high quality third parties, its in-house brand filling in the cheaper side of the market, and then non-premium third parties who have somehow successfully competed with the in-house brand with some angle (say, sourcing a cheaper process that still gets results).
  - mc32 6y ago
    I wouldn’t be mad if they had their own products without using data mining to compete against their sellers. It’s that they use advanced data intelligence to compete. If they competed naively (had a hard wall between their market place division and their consumer products division, I wouldn’t have an issue.

fennecfoxen 6y ago

Question. What would a system capable of proving “this didn’t happen” look like?

actuator 6y ago
Audit trail of data source access? Though then, you would need to differentiate between legitimate access and using it for your own products.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Suppose the data is accessed by one employee who routinely accesses data of this sort for legitimate purposes — but the employee takes a copy of the data (even just a summary) and sneakernets it over to the in-house brands. How can this attack vector be mitigated?
  - actuator 6y ago
    Yeah, this was what I was referring to. There is no way to control this and I am guessing this is why Jeff Bezos wasn't committing on this not being violated as well.
  - nerfhammer 6y ago
    Bureaucracy. A company that size, these people probably wouldn't know each other and at the scale needed would require significant organization to accomplish this. You would need a team of people doing this full time which requires bureaucracy.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
rmrfstar 6y ago
A hard regulatory barrier between the product side and the sales platform side. This already exists in the financial sector. What you would call an "investment bank" is actually a holding company with a number of subsidiaries. The investment bank subsidiary does capital raising and M&A advisory, while the broker-dealer does market transactions. These are separated by a "Chinese wall" or a "firewall". There are criminal penalties for circumventing the wall.

aahhahahaaa 6y ago

>Before the Journal’s report came out, Amazon had told Congress that it doesn’t access sales data to help guide the launch of its own products. This is insanely hard to believe. Amazon just started selling batteries and other random goods under their Basics brand based on ZERO inside sales knowledge? I'd love to see how they enforce that.

actuator 6y ago
Playing the devil's advocate here. You can get this data easily from market research reports and sales data of the respective companies also.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tuna-piano 6y ago
Look closely. Amazon claimed they don't access individual seller data, but they do access aggregated product data. However, in at least one case the aggregated data was only between two sellers: Amazon Warehouse (which only sold a few returned items) and the original seller. "Amazon draws a distinction between the data of an individual third-party seller and what it calls aggregated data, which it defines as the data of products with two or more sellers." https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...
- aahhahahaaa 6y ago
  Ah there it is. That makes a lot more sense... honestly at their scale I don't think they should be able to do this, aggregate or not. They're about 50% of all online sales in the US, where compared to brick-and-mortar, Walmart gets a lot of flak as a small-business killer despite only accounting for 15% of all physical retail sales.
  - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tuna-piano 6y ago

First of all, people like to complain about Amazon owned brands. But this is just retailing 101, nothing new here. Walk around a Costco and try and find a non Costco branded product in a variety of categories. People seem to love Costco's Kirkland brand and (personally) I also enjoy the AmazonBasics brand. Why have I never heard a peep about Costco? You can make an argument that Amazon's market power has enabled it to gain success in some aspects of online retail. But to the proponents of the "market power has helped Amazon strangle so many industries", you have to answer - how did market power help: -Amazon grow Whole Foods? -AWS become the most popular cloud service? -Kindle become the most popular ereader? It seems to me a much better explanation than "market power abuse" is that Amazon's culture and people have enabled it to dominate a variety of unconnected industries.

nicoburns 6y ago
I think you're right that Amazon has come to dominate a lot of markets on merit. But it's still the case that having overly dominant players in a market is bad for... well everyone except the dominant player. It doesn't matter why or how it came to be.
- darawk 6y ago
  This is not universally true. It's bad if the dominant player uses their dominance to deliver sub-par quality at high prices. But so far Amazon doesn't seem to be doing that, at least in my user experience of it. It is bad that they might one day be able to parlay their dominance into harming consumers, but the dominance itself is not necessarily a bad thing, IMO.
  - apahwa 6y ago
    I completely disagree, the quality of products on Amazon has gone downhill over the past 5 years. You may attribute this to influx of bad merchants but it really comes down to Amazon not having the same incentives to properly rank items and remove bad actors. Instead it created Amazon Basics brand and steers users towards it. The influx of misc brand names and items that look exactly like each other just helps confuse consumers and make them lean towards Amazon Basics.

shanemhansen 6y ago

So I used to work with someone from Amazon retail. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that Amazon mined their seller data to undercut them. We sold on Amazon and he constantly told us that we were fools to do so. He even mentioned that prior to accepting a position he had looked up our seller performance to make sure he was going to a good company. Maybe policies have since changed. At the time I was also told the most popular "test" SKU used by Amazon engineers was a 50 gallon barrel of lube.

dastbe 6y ago
I can't comment on any of the meaty stuff, but I can comment on the silly. > At the time I was also told the most popular "test" SKU used by Amazon engineers was a 50 gallon barrel of lube. Not knowing when this was, but I can say around 2013-2015 that this wasn't a general thing[0]. Could there have been an engineer who used it a lot? Sure, but there's a lot of them. Even if you disregard the crudity of it, it also just doesn't make for a good test ASIN outside of a small number of verticals. You'd much rather test with real ASINs where possible (which is almost 100% of the time), or with something idiomatic to the experience you're developing. EDIT: though maybe people have become inspired by https://observer.com/2015/07/at-1k-55-gallon-bottle-of-lube-is-amazon-prime-days-best-deal/ https://observer.com/2015/07/at-1k-55-gallon-bottle-of-lube-... ? Still, it stands to reason that you want to test with real products whenever you can.
- cwkoss 6y ago
  50 gallon barrel of lube was a real SKU, I remember a friend sending me the link because he found it amusing. Was a couple thousand dollars IIRC
  - dastbe 6y ago
    It is, but it's a single particular ASIN. And given the majority of the time issues/changes arise due the particular characteristics of a particular item (is it pantry? is it prime? is it a garment? is it a toiletry? etc. etc.) using any one particular ASIN isn't going to be viable for most developers.

kome 6y ago

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" – From the classic scene in Casablanca, 1942 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME)

justicezyx 6y ago

I see no fault on Amazon's side about using the data that are accessible to them, and exploit whatever value from them. Naturally, the competition is for a winner to emerge. Not to continuously drag on in a competition. What Amazon did is natural and reasonable in a competition. Secondly, it's a reasonable thing for a platform to access aggregate sales data. Amazon is a retail platform. It's entirely unreasonable to forbid them from using such data for the benefits of the sellers and buyers, and for their platform to function better. In the end, this is a value judgement: * Is it still a valuable thing to let the small retailers to operate independently, and be free from of systematic data-driven competition from platforms? My feeling is that the small retailers are just an inefficient way of using society resources. And I support Amazon's strategy.

draw_down 6y ago

Ultimately it’s just crazy, trying to pretend that such utterly rampant capitalists don’t act like capitalists. I just don’t see the point.

hluska 6y ago

Does anyone believe Bezos?

mhh__ 6y ago
Not believe as in he can guarantee they didn't?
- monadic2 6y ago
  Not believe as in “this is not a good faith answer”.
  - hluska 6y ago
    Exactly. Thanks for taking me literally. You definitely don’t deserve the downvotes but it appears the average ‘hacker’ here trusts Bezos more than us. Interesting, hey??
    - IanSanders 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23996125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23996125
- hluska 6y ago
  No, I’m asking literally. “Does anyone believe Bezos?” I sure don’t - a man with that much control and who is known for being that demanding doesn’t strike me as the type of person who could actually not know something like that (if he cared to find out). But, judging by the downvotes, the average person trusts him more than me. That’s very interesting... Edit - I can’t fucking believe I have to use ‘literally’ to be taken literally. Edit 2 - Fuck again. “I literally can’t fucking believe I have to use ‘literally’ to be taken literally. :)

granzymes 6y ago

"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he can't guarantee employees have never used sales data from individual third-party sellers to develop the company's own products" There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? The best Amazon can do is have policies, logs and access controls and punish employees if they break those policies. And Bezos committed to doing that.

Barrin92 6y ago
>There's no way he could make that guarantee. How can you prove a negative? don't make third party sales data available to Amazon at all? Can't exploit data you don't keep. The same way Signal prevents data problems: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=20 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1280166087577997312?s=2... The method is so good, it would even save Amazon storage space!
- gruez 6y ago
  How is this possible? At the very least you need to store each customer's order history. From there you can work backwards to get sales numbers for a particular product or seller. Access controls don't work either, because at the end of the day it's stored on a server somewhere and someone must have access.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    encrypt the data by default and let the third party sellers and customers have exclusive access? Why does Amazon need access to anyone's history?
    - makoz 6y ago
      Disclaimer work at AWS. Customer disputes? Returns? Presumably you'll need some sort of history. At the very least saying Person X bought Y product
      - 6y ago

panny 6y ago

Any mention if the same non-guarantee applies to third party intellectual property on AWS? There doesn't seem to be much to stop them from "borrowing" code from AWS customers without anyone being the wiser.

partiallypro 6y ago
I don't think that is a concern, I think a concern is them looking at traffic patterns and network infrastructure setups within AWS so they could potentially one-up them on that front. They aren't going to steal someone's code from their own servers.
monadic2 6y ago
This is why you encrypt, it’s not impossible to bypass but it would make it a gargantuan task.
- IanSanders 6y ago
  If it runs on aws, it must be decrypted at some point. If it's not, then you're using it as a storage only. There are studies on "decryptionless" data computation but nowhere near practical stage yet
belval 6y ago
IP theft is no joke and isn't some grey area of the law. By accessing and reusing code that belongs to someone else it would simply break the law and no-one would even try that considering how stupid it is. Now anti-competitive behavior is much harder to control for and that's what would be at play here.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

He should have said he can neither confirm nor deny. Not sure I am against commodity goods being driven to razor thin profit margins.

IanSanders 6y ago
>commodity goods being driven to razor thin profit margins. that's not the only factor

iammru 6y ago

I'm surprised that people are surprised.

llsf 6y ago

Bezos cannot guarantee that employees may have access 3rdparty sales data. Can any big retail like Walmart, Costco, Safeway, etc. can guarantee that no employee ever looked at 3rdparty sales data ? If Walmart sees a cheap item flying off the shelves, and thinks that it can make a cheap copy of it, then Walmart would do it. Isn't how store brand work ? and they often use a white label producer anyway (i.e. same factory, different packaging/label). Walmart, Costco, etc. they know precisely what products you buy and how often. They can push you next time to buy their own version of it, by sending you a discount for for it, or simply rearrange the shelves in store. I understand that sellers with little to no competitive advantage, are very vulnerable to such practices. But this is hardly new with Amazon. They could avoid selling through those channels (that is why you find some products only through producer website, or direct sales). Amazon has 35% of the e-commerce market in US, or 6% of retail market in US (Walmart has 9% of retail market in US). Amazon does not do as well in the rest of the world. The 35% of the e-commerce market is in US. And even that 35% includes being an agent for 3rdparty sellers. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-market-share19 https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...

8note 6y ago
Given that they're third party companies, i think the question is if Walmart can data mine the sales data from other stores in the same mall?
libertine 6y ago
Isn't this straight forward? If the employees responsible for product development for Amazon brands have credentials to access 3rd party data, then assume they used it. Doesn't matter if only one used it, or all of them - they had access to it, all the rest is semantics/claims/smoke&mirrors.

jxramos 6y ago

Bezos gave an incredibly forthright set of testimony. I like how he continued to answer in the affirmative when the interrogator continued to drop the aggregate quantity scope. Can they do it for 3 sellers, yes, for 2 yes. That's basic mathematics, the aggregation will take place over however many are in the pool be it 100, 50 or even 3. Seems like Bezos stuck to the facts and reality on that one. His comment about trying to give helpful answers too when questioned about organized stolen goods. Bezos did a fine job, his replies were coherent, concise, and didn't bumble trying to coordinate and mobilize a bunch of caveats and statements with extensive justifying or clarifying context that could not be delivered in the compressed timescale he was afforded.

alexpetralia 6y ago
Yes, he easily had the most substantive and thoughtful responses of the 4 in my opinion.

ideals 6y ago

Curious as to what the response is like on internal email lists like @seattle-chatter. How are employees responding to Bezos remarks today?

NoblePublius 6y ago

What AmazonBasics product isnt a commodity Made in China?

uji 6y ago

ex-AWS employee here. I worked in one of the managed services (can't say which one because it might reveal my identity). In Managed services, instances are created in AWS VPC so employees have access to underlying VM. We have used that capability to get stats about the type of customer workloads, and devised feature products based on that.

sf_sugar_daddy 6y ago
When I worked for a different managed services provider we did the same thing, it's not illegal or anything (depending on the contract/terms .. etc) Most IT departments do the same on smaller scales (reading cowokers emails, slack convos ..etc) it's a job perk 'revenge of the nerds' and all that
single_source 6y ago
whoa...

ozten 6y ago

This was a waste of time. A 1 year study produced concrete details that can be investigated. Then the most senior congress people get 2 minutes of sounds bites and no progress is made. It is a farce. There may well be real violations of public trust or illegal activity, but this is not the way to effectively examine those reports. They don't even let the CEOs talk long enough to commit perjury. It is a dog and pony show for congress and the CEOs.

onetimemanytime 6y ago
Obviously, in 5 minutes nothing can be done. I suppose in smaller setting, maybe sub-committees, but not here. Here the idea is that later DOJ starts looking around and let them talk for hours and days. Will it happen?
- ozten 6y ago
  I agree with sub-committees and more focused time. It doesn't make sense for this sub-committee to tackle so many disparate businesses. Imagine in 1982 Congress had hearings with AT&T, Exxon Mobile, Ford, Amoco, DuPont, Boeing, and Eastman Kodak. They probably wouldn't have had the focus to force the breakup of the Bell Systems.
gundmc 6y ago
It's politics. This wasn't for any actual investigation or enforcement (that's what the DOJ and FTC are doing), this was for the re-election campaigns.

Hokusai 6y ago

Gently reminder that Amazon uses to astroturf social sites. If this post sees a unfair amount of pro-Amazon statements is possible that is part of Amazon's PR strategy. - "Amazon workers are being paid to defend the company on Twitter": https://mashable.com/article/amazon-warehouse-twitter-defense/ https://mashable.com/article/amazon-warehouse-twitter-defens... But do not call on people just for siding with Amazon most people are just expressing their own opinion freely and deserve respect. Just adjust how you read the threads to account for biased results on voting and side representation.

seemslegit 6y ago

Jeff Bezos probably also can't promise they won't use startups AWS usage to find out as much as they can about their business in an M&A or just competitive analysis scenario.