9 ms·

The difference is between retailer and marketplace. Both Amazon and Costco are retailers, and both could use that knowledge to decide what products to self-sour

The difference is between retailer and marketplace. Both Amazon and Costco are retailers, and both could use that knowledge to decide what products to self-source for better retail margins. Either way, still a retailer, but maybe also a manufacturer / wholesaler. But Amazon is also a marketplace. In that role it acts as a "rentable retail space". Using the data of the retailers in your marketplace to decide what to make/wholesale and then retail is another layer. You could easily argue that it reduces to the same thing. But societally we've excepted that the retailer is a full layer in the system and gets full access to the data flowing through it. The marketplace itself is historically more of a fee-for-use type of thing, so its not an ingrained concept for us.

Manuel_D 5y ago
I'm still not understanding the distinction here. Costco and Amazon both sell company-brand products, alongside non-company products. Costco and Amazon collect and analyze sales data from the sale of both company and non-company products.
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  When Costco sells a product they’ve already bought it (a retailer) on the other hand when Amazon sells something they’re just acting as a middle party for the item in most cases.
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    I'm not sure how Costco works specifically, but that's not the case in all retail. At GameStop, game publishers only got paid when their games sold not when they were put on the shelves. If there are 100 disk cases put on the shelves for Call of Battlefield and none of them sold, eventually GameStop would return them and the publisher got nothing.
  - hammock 5y ago
    >When Costco sells a product they’ve already bought it (a retailer) In practice that's not the case at all. Many if not most retailers require suppliers to buy back unsold inventory
  - mrandish 5y ago
    That's often not the case. Retailers like Costco, Walmart, Best Buy etc have a wide variety of different selling arrangements. I've sold products through all three and often did so on terms that gave them full right of return for any unsold product as well as significantly delayed payment. This combination basically nets out to be financially the same as pure consignment. They won't pay me for my product until well after it has sold-thru to an end user. Everything that's unsold comes back to me (and they bill me for shipping both ways!) In the meantime, all I have is basically an "IOU" promise to someday pay IF it eventually sells (and they always drag out the payment beyond the already-extended due date). Also, if I want to be featured in their circular I have to "buy" that just like an ad in a magazine except the retailer will (usually) DFI (deduct from invoice) the "ad" cost, which means they just owe me less (if and when the product sells and they actually pay). The same is true for getting my product displayed on an end cap or with in-store signage. The big retailers bring in new products to "test" all the time and do so at basically no financial risk to themselves (other than the opportunity cost of the shelf space) while capturing all the sales data.
    - soperj 5y ago
      >(and they always drag out the payment beyond the already-extended due date) That's pretty much their business model isn't it? Make money on investing for the days between product sold and payment.
      - vkou 5y ago
        You can only make a little money on that because interest rates are near zero, and investments with non-zero returns carry risk.
- eropple 5y ago
  Amazon sells products and facilitates others' sales. If Amazon carried the entirety of their inventory themselves like Costco or like Walmart used to be (before the expansion of their own online marketplace), it would be a distinctly different situation.
  - 8note 5y ago
    That doesn't sound aligned with the California case yesterday?
- FactolSarin 5y ago
  All of Amazon's "we're not actually a monopoly" and "we're not responsible for defective products" arguments are based on this. They claim they are very much NOT a Costco or Walmart.
- cgriswald 5y ago
  You have the wrong mental model. Amazon isn’t Costco. Amazon is a shopping mall that has access to its tenants’ sales information and also owns an anchor store in the same mall. Costco can determine that Best Brand shoes sell in its stores and decide to source shoes themselves and stop carrying Best Brand. Amazon can determine that the Footlocker in their mall is making a killing selling Best Brand shoes and either sell Best Brand shoes in their anchor store or source their own shoes, all at a price that Footlocker can’t match. They can also advertise those shoes throughout their mall and change the layout so customers have to walk past their cheaper shoes to get to the Footlocker.
  - awillen 5y ago
    This explanation doesn't explain the difference to me at all. Costco can see that vodka sells well, so they can make Kirkland brand vodka. They control the layout of the store, so they can change the layout so people see Kirkland brand first when they get to the liquor section. They know the pricing of other vodkas and which ones sell well, so they can source Kirkland vodka at an ideal price point. None of what you've described about Amazon differentiates it from Costco at all.
    - 411111111111111 5y ago
      I think the only difference is that Amazon is a digital marketplace, so they can and do let their users pioneer what gets sold. Space is at a premium with a physical location, so the likelihood of an actual store exploiting that is extremely unlikely
      - awillen 5y ago
        Unlikely? I literally just described an example of Costco doing this right now with vodka. That's not a hypothetical - Kirkland brand vodka is a real thing. Your logic is backwards - when space is at a premium, making the most profit off each item in that space is critical. It makes more sense for Costco to do this than it does for Amazon, not less.
- Closi 5y ago
  > Costco and Amazon collect and analyze sales data from the sale of both company and non-company products. It's similar, although personally I think the relationship between the companies is meaningfully different: Costco purchases product from manufacturers, and may choose to source product from other manufacturers (including under its own brand name). It uses it's own sales data to make this decision. Amazon acts as a marketplace for other businesses to list and sell their own products. These businesses are online retailers which use the Amazon platform, and pay Amazon fees for this service. Amazon is then using other retailers sales data in order to inform it's own business. The difference is with Costco it is their own sales data, while in Amazon it is the sales data of other retailers. It would be an issue if Walmart had access to Costco's sales data and not visa-versa (this would provide Walmart with an unfair competitive advantage). Similarly other smaller online retailers do not get access to Amazon's sales data, but Amazon get's access to the other retailers sales data who use their platform, and will then use this to compete with them.
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    Amen.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Despite this I don't see how the case is that Amazon is being anti competitive while Costco isn't - just because they purchase and resell inventory doesn't mean Costco (or Walmart or Sams Club etc) doesn't hold the same power over their product suppliers that Amazon does to do data science on their sales to determine what new products to make in-house. Plus, walmart is now a marketplace as well. This overpriced GPU is 'Sold & shipped by Monoprice Inc'. It's only a matter of time before Walmart commits the same anticompetitive acts as Amazon using Marketplace data. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Zotac-NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3080-Graphic-Card-10-GB-GDDR6X/919301773 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Zotac-NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3080-Gra...
    - fredophile 5y ago
      Analyzing their own sales and analyzing other people's sales on their platform are two different things. Saying that Walmart may also try to do this in the future does not make it right or excusable.
- foerbert 5y ago
  I think the difference they are getting at is something akin to this. In one situation you run a stall and buy products from people to sell at that stall. At some point you use what you've learned doing this to sell your own product. In the other, you don't buy anything from anybody. Instead, you rent out a stall for other people to sell things from. You then watch the stall and use that information to open your own stall. The first case seems pretty normal to most people, I think. The person you were buying from originally doesn't inherently get some kind of assurance that you will always buy from them in the future. There's no difference to the seller if you buy from somebody else, don't sell any of that product, or make your own. We just don't expect that buying goods from somebody inherently adds any other kind of obligation. It's two equal parties making an exchange, and nothing more. The second case, however, I think is not so clear cut. All of the sudden you have a lasting relationship between two unequal parties. These are the sorts of situations where you tend to find more implicit or inherent obligations on the participants. It's no longer the guy you sold that thing to not buying from you again, it's your landlord competing with you. I'm not trying to pick a side here, so much as I am trying to explain why people might not see the two situations as identical. And of course there are plenty of real-world complications too.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- LanceH 5y ago
  Costco buys products and resells them. Costco's research numbers are paid for entirely by Costco. Amazon rents space to merchants where those items are sold through the site for a fee. Amazon is never on the hook for a sale and is basically getting paid to do the market research to set up as a competitor. Yes, Costco does do some referral sales but I can't think of anything which has gone on to be a Kirkland product.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  Costco buys the products it sells. Then it decides how and for how much they will be sold. Their product, paid for. That’s the difference
legutierr 5y ago
This explanation makes the most sense to me, but there is something that you are leaving out. Not only is Amazon a marketplace, but it is THE marketplace. Amazon has an effective monopoly on small-seller logistics and marketplace services in the United States (and many other places), soup-to-nuts. If you are anything other than a massive corporation, any manufacturer that chooses not to sell through Amazon and utilize all or most of its services (marketplace listing, payments, warehousing, delivery) will be at a massive cost disadvantage and will not be able to compete with other sellers that do choose to participate with Amazon. And more significantly, perhaps, if you don't sell through Amazon's marketplace, you are often unable to compete with Amazon itself.
- awillen 5y ago
  This just isn't really true. It depends on what type of product you're selling, but there are a huge number of independent ecommerce stores that do extremely well. I sell dog treat mix (coopersdogtreats.com) - I do much better both in terms of margins and overall sales on my own website (with traffic coming primarily via paid FB ads) than on Amazon. That's not even including other huge marketplaces like walmart.com, Chewy, Etsy, etc. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on small-seller logistics - I'm about to move all of my logistics over to a 3PL, and there are plenty that will cost-effectively work with startups (ShipBob, Shipmonk, etc. - just Google "ecommerce 3PL" and you'll see what I mean). How much Amazon plays into your business obviously depends on the category, but the idea that it's impossible to compete in ecommerce unless you're on Amazon is an easily disproven myth.
  - rossjudson 5y ago
    I'm curious about how you would compare Amazon vs your own site. Things like Amazon's buyer-friendly return policy comes to mind...which clearly come at a cost for sellers (and buyers, fairly directly).
    - awillen 5y ago
      I have a very small number of returns on Amazon, since my product can't be used and then returned. Amazon isn't terrible, but it has two big problems for me. First, margins are lower because I'm not only paying them a cut of every sale, I'm also paying for Amazon advertising. Second, I don't have a relationship with the buyer, which is the real killer. I do really well with repeat sales via email, and those are where the real margin is since I'm not paying to acquire those users again. On my site, I can afford to break even (or even lose a little money) on the first sale, where I must make money on each sale on Amazon. I will say the one big difference between my product and many on Amazon is that it's not something that you seek out - very few people are searching for "dog treat mix" on Amazon (or Google/Bing/etc.). Amazon does have some types of advertising that work well for targeting other luxury dog goods, but my volume is going to be limited there. Facebook advertising works better for me, because I can target people by demographics and explain the product in an ad. To that point, it may be important to be on Amazon if you're in a commodity business. On the other hand, it sucks to be in a commodity business for so many other reasons that I hardly think it's reasonable to pin the blame on Amazon for the difficulties there. The one thing I will say about Amazon vs. Shopify that surprised me is that Amazon's support tends to be quite competent (at least if you call them - you get nothing but canned responses via email), while Shopify's is just terrible. They can help with basic issues using the software, but when it comes to real problems, like bugs in reporting (or more recently in my case, a bug where they undercharged a customer), they just say they'll get back to you and never do unless you are incredibly aggressive about hounding them.
chaostheory 5y ago
> But Amazon is also a marketplace. In that role it acts as a "rentable retail space". Most brick and mortar retailers also sell space to manufacturers. Product positioning in the store and even on the shelves isnt solely due to UX
lsaferite 5y ago
So how do you factor in the recent ruling in California? > An appeals court in California has ruled that Amazon can be held liable for products sold through its marketplace by a third-party seller That seems to obviate the distinction of 'marketplace facilitator' vs. 'retailer' for them. That makes them much more like Costco with a special relationship with vendors to set up vendor-specific sections in their store. Personally, I've always detested the 3rd-party market in Amazon and wouldn't mind seeing it go away.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  Amazon doesn't see it that way, their optimised their business as an ad platform + logistic solution. Higher margins there than bothering acting as sellers with risky margins.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  Amazon doesn't see it that way, their optimised their business as an ad platform + logistic solution. Higher margins there than bothering acting as sellers with lower and not even guaranteed margins.
dehrmann 5y ago
> But Amazon is also a marketplace Meanwhile, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24174276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24174276 "Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court" It seems both regulators and Amazon want whether or not it's a marketplace to go both ways whenever it's convenient.
- cowpig 5y ago
  In an ideal world regulators want to define Amazon as whatever best fits with the public's best interest (as opposed to what is convenient)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    It's hard to make new laws to address specific problems with Amazon and at times it acts like both; sometimes it's mostly a marketplace and other times it does things like mixing inventory that make it more like a retailer (in the sense that they're presenting a unified front for multiple suppliers).
- mdoms 5y ago
  There's nothing definitional about "marketplace" that says you don't have to bear responsibility for what is bought and sold on your marketplace.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  You're misreading the ruling. The ruling is for state law not federal and says the following, "The Appellate Court didn’t agree with Amazon’s stance. It noted that the product had been listed on Amazon, was stored in an Amazon warehouse, had payment facilitated by Amazon, and shipped it out in Amazon packaging, proving it to have a hand in getting it to Bolger and thus liable under California law." So, this stance will change depending on the product and what law is being alleged to have been broken.
tlogan 5y ago
Majority of big retails also rent majority of their shelves to vendors. This is called consignment contract. So no big difference...
Nasrudith 5y ago
That sounds awfully like the Platform vs Publisher distinction "logic".

Manuel_D 5y ago

I'm still not understanding the distinction here. Costco and Amazon both sell company-brand products, alongside non-company products. Costco and Amazon collect and analyze sales data from the sale of both company and non-company products.

NegativeLatency 5y ago
When Costco sells a product they’ve already bought it (a retailer) on the other hand when Amazon sells something they’re just acting as a middle party for the item in most cases.
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  I'm not sure how Costco works specifically, but that's not the case in all retail. At GameStop, game publishers only got paid when their games sold not when they were put on the shelves. If there are 100 disk cases put on the shelves for Call of Battlefield and none of them sold, eventually GameStop would return them and the publisher got nothing.
- hammock 5y ago
  >When Costco sells a product they’ve already bought it (a retailer) In practice that's not the case at all. Many if not most retailers require suppliers to buy back unsold inventory
- mrandish 5y ago
  That's often not the case. Retailers like Costco, Walmart, Best Buy etc have a wide variety of different selling arrangements. I've sold products through all three and often did so on terms that gave them full right of return for any unsold product as well as significantly delayed payment. This combination basically nets out to be financially the same as pure consignment. They won't pay me for my product until well after it has sold-thru to an end user. Everything that's unsold comes back to me (and they bill me for shipping both ways!) In the meantime, all I have is basically an "IOU" promise to someday pay IF it eventually sells (and they always drag out the payment beyond the already-extended due date). Also, if I want to be featured in their circular I have to "buy" that just like an ad in a magazine except the retailer will (usually) DFI (deduct from invoice) the "ad" cost, which means they just owe me less (if and when the product sells and they actually pay). The same is true for getting my product displayed on an end cap or with in-store signage. The big retailers bring in new products to "test" all the time and do so at basically no financial risk to themselves (other than the opportunity cost of the shelf space) while capturing all the sales data.
  - soperj 5y ago
    >(and they always drag out the payment beyond the already-extended due date) That's pretty much their business model isn't it? Make money on investing for the days between product sold and payment.
    - vkou 5y ago
      You can only make a little money on that because interest rates are near zero, and investments with non-zero returns carry risk.
eropple 5y ago
Amazon sells products and facilitates others' sales. If Amazon carried the entirety of their inventory themselves like Costco or like Walmart used to be (before the expansion of their own online marketplace), it would be a distinctly different situation.
- 8note 5y ago
  That doesn't sound aligned with the California case yesterday?
FactolSarin 5y ago
All of Amazon's "we're not actually a monopoly" and "we're not responsible for defective products" arguments are based on this. They claim they are very much NOT a Costco or Walmart.
cgriswald 5y ago
You have the wrong mental model. Amazon isn’t Costco. Amazon is a shopping mall that has access to its tenants’ sales information and also owns an anchor store in the same mall. Costco can determine that Best Brand shoes sell in its stores and decide to source shoes themselves and stop carrying Best Brand. Amazon can determine that the Footlocker in their mall is making a killing selling Best Brand shoes and either sell Best Brand shoes in their anchor store or source their own shoes, all at a price that Footlocker can’t match. They can also advertise those shoes throughout their mall and change the layout so customers have to walk past their cheaper shoes to get to the Footlocker.
- awillen 5y ago
  This explanation doesn't explain the difference to me at all. Costco can see that vodka sells well, so they can make Kirkland brand vodka. They control the layout of the store, so they can change the layout so people see Kirkland brand first when they get to the liquor section. They know the pricing of other vodkas and which ones sell well, so they can source Kirkland vodka at an ideal price point. None of what you've described about Amazon differentiates it from Costco at all.
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    I think the only difference is that Amazon is a digital marketplace, so they can and do let their users pioneer what gets sold. Space is at a premium with a physical location, so the likelihood of an actual store exploiting that is extremely unlikely
    - awillen 5y ago
      Unlikely? I literally just described an example of Costco doing this right now with vodka. That's not a hypothetical - Kirkland brand vodka is a real thing. Your logic is backwards - when space is at a premium, making the most profit off each item in that space is critical. It makes more sense for Costco to do this than it does for Amazon, not less.
Closi 5y ago
> Costco and Amazon collect and analyze sales data from the sale of both company and non-company products. It's similar, although personally I think the relationship between the companies is meaningfully different: Costco purchases product from manufacturers, and may choose to source product from other manufacturers (including under its own brand name). It uses it's own sales data to make this decision. Amazon acts as a marketplace for other businesses to list and sell their own products. These businesses are online retailers which use the Amazon platform, and pay Amazon fees for this service. Amazon is then using other retailers sales data in order to inform it's own business. The difference is with Costco it is their own sales data, while in Amazon it is the sales data of other retailers. It would be an issue if Walmart had access to Costco's sales data and not visa-versa (this would provide Walmart with an unfair competitive advantage). Similarly other smaller online retailers do not get access to Amazon's sales data, but Amazon get's access to the other retailers sales data who use their platform, and will then use this to compete with them.
- hirako2000 5y ago
  Amen.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Despite this I don't see how the case is that Amazon is being anti competitive while Costco isn't - just because they purchase and resell inventory doesn't mean Costco (or Walmart or Sams Club etc) doesn't hold the same power over their product suppliers that Amazon does to do data science on their sales to determine what new products to make in-house. Plus, walmart is now a marketplace as well. This overpriced GPU is 'Sold & shipped by Monoprice Inc'. It's only a matter of time before Walmart commits the same anticompetitive acts as Amazon using Marketplace data. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Zotac-NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3080-Graphic-Card-10-GB-GDDR6X/919301773 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Zotac-NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-3080-Gra...
  - fredophile 5y ago
    Analyzing their own sales and analyzing other people's sales on their platform are two different things. Saying that Walmart may also try to do this in the future does not make it right or excusable.
foerbert 5y ago
I think the difference they are getting at is something akin to this. In one situation you run a stall and buy products from people to sell at that stall. At some point you use what you've learned doing this to sell your own product. In the other, you don't buy anything from anybody. Instead, you rent out a stall for other people to sell things from. You then watch the stall and use that information to open your own stall. The first case seems pretty normal to most people, I think. The person you were buying from originally doesn't inherently get some kind of assurance that you will always buy from them in the future. There's no difference to the seller if you buy from somebody else, don't sell any of that product, or make your own. We just don't expect that buying goods from somebody inherently adds any other kind of obligation. It's two equal parties making an exchange, and nothing more. The second case, however, I think is not so clear cut. All of the sudden you have a lasting relationship between two unequal parties. These are the sorts of situations where you tend to find more implicit or inherent obligations on the participants. It's no longer the guy you sold that thing to not buying from you again, it's your landlord competing with you. I'm not trying to pick a side here, so much as I am trying to explain why people might not see the two situations as identical. And of course there are plenty of real-world complications too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
LanceH 5y ago
Costco buys products and resells them. Costco's research numbers are paid for entirely by Costco. Amazon rents space to merchants where those items are sold through the site for a fee. Amazon is never on the hook for a sale and is basically getting paid to do the market research to set up as a competitor. Yes, Costco does do some referral sales but I can't think of anything which has gone on to be a Kirkland product.
elzbardico 5y ago
Costco buys the products it sells. Then it decides how and for how much they will be sold. Their product, paid for. That’s the difference

legutierr 5y ago

This explanation makes the most sense to me, but there is something that you are leaving out. Not only is Amazon a marketplace, but it is THE marketplace. Amazon has an effective monopoly on small-seller logistics and marketplace services in the United States (and many other places), soup-to-nuts. If you are anything other than a massive corporation, any manufacturer that chooses not to sell through Amazon and utilize all or most of its services (marketplace listing, payments, warehousing, delivery) will be at a massive cost disadvantage and will not be able to compete with other sellers that do choose to participate with Amazon. And more significantly, perhaps, if you don't sell through Amazon's marketplace, you are often unable to compete with Amazon itself.

awillen 5y ago
This just isn't really true. It depends on what type of product you're selling, but there are a huge number of independent ecommerce stores that do extremely well. I sell dog treat mix (coopersdogtreats.com) - I do much better both in terms of margins and overall sales on my own website (with traffic coming primarily via paid FB ads) than on Amazon. That's not even including other huge marketplaces like walmart.com, Chewy, Etsy, etc. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on small-seller logistics - I'm about to move all of my logistics over to a 3PL, and there are plenty that will cost-effectively work with startups (ShipBob, Shipmonk, etc. - just Google "ecommerce 3PL" and you'll see what I mean). How much Amazon plays into your business obviously depends on the category, but the idea that it's impossible to compete in ecommerce unless you're on Amazon is an easily disproven myth.
- rossjudson 5y ago
  I'm curious about how you would compare Amazon vs your own site. Things like Amazon's buyer-friendly return policy comes to mind...which clearly come at a cost for sellers (and buyers, fairly directly).
  - awillen 5y ago
    I have a very small number of returns on Amazon, since my product can't be used and then returned. Amazon isn't terrible, but it has two big problems for me. First, margins are lower because I'm not only paying them a cut of every sale, I'm also paying for Amazon advertising. Second, I don't have a relationship with the buyer, which is the real killer. I do really well with repeat sales via email, and those are where the real margin is since I'm not paying to acquire those users again. On my site, I can afford to break even (or even lose a little money) on the first sale, where I must make money on each sale on Amazon. I will say the one big difference between my product and many on Amazon is that it's not something that you seek out - very few people are searching for "dog treat mix" on Amazon (or Google/Bing/etc.). Amazon does have some types of advertising that work well for targeting other luxury dog goods, but my volume is going to be limited there. Facebook advertising works better for me, because I can target people by demographics and explain the product in an ad. To that point, it may be important to be on Amazon if you're in a commodity business. On the other hand, it sucks to be in a commodity business for so many other reasons that I hardly think it's reasonable to pin the blame on Amazon for the difficulties there. The one thing I will say about Amazon vs. Shopify that surprised me is that Amazon's support tends to be quite competent (at least if you call them - you get nothing but canned responses via email), while Shopify's is just terrible. They can help with basic issues using the software, but when it comes to real problems, like bugs in reporting (or more recently in my case, a bug where they undercharged a customer), they just say they'll get back to you and never do unless you are incredibly aggressive about hounding them.

chaostheory 5y ago

> But Amazon is also a marketplace. In that role it acts as a "rentable retail space". Most brick and mortar retailers also sell space to manufacturers. Product positioning in the store and even on the shelves isnt solely due to UX

lsaferite 5y ago

So how do you factor in the recent ruling in California? > An appeals court in California has ruled that Amazon can be held liable for products sold through its marketplace by a third-party seller That seems to obviate the distinction of 'marketplace facilitator' vs. 'retailer' for them. That makes them much more like Costco with a special relationship with vendors to set up vendor-specific sections in their store. Personally, I've always detested the 3rd-party market in Amazon and wouldn't mind seeing it go away.

hirako2000 5y ago
Amazon doesn't see it that way, their optimised their business as an ad platform + logistic solution. Higher margins there than bothering acting as sellers with risky margins.
hirako2000 5y ago
Amazon doesn't see it that way, their optimised their business as an ad platform + logistic solution. Higher margins there than bothering acting as sellers with lower and not even guaranteed margins.

dehrmann 5y ago

> But Amazon is also a marketplace Meanwhile, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24174276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24174276 "Amazon Liable for Defective Third-Party Products Rules CA Appellate Court" It seems both regulators and Amazon want whether or not it's a marketplace to go both ways whenever it's convenient.

cowpig 5y ago
In an ideal world regulators want to define Amazon as whatever best fits with the public's best interest (as opposed to what is convenient)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rtkwe 5y ago
  It's hard to make new laws to address specific problems with Amazon and at times it acts like both; sometimes it's mostly a marketplace and other times it does things like mixing inventory that make it more like a retailer (in the sense that they're presenting a unified front for multiple suppliers).
mdoms 5y ago
There's nothing definitional about "marketplace" that says you don't have to bear responsibility for what is bought and sold on your marketplace.
IncRnd 5y ago
You're misreading the ruling. The ruling is for state law not federal and says the following, "The Appellate Court didn’t agree with Amazon’s stance. It noted that the product had been listed on Amazon, was stored in an Amazon warehouse, had payment facilitated by Amazon, and shipped it out in Amazon packaging, proving it to have a hand in getting it to Bolger and thus liable under California law." So, this stance will change depending on the product and what law is being alleged to have been broken.

tlogan 5y ago

Majority of big retails also rent majority of their shelves to vendors. This is called consignment contract. So no big difference...

Nasrudith 5y ago

That sounds awfully like the Platform vs Publisher distinction "logic".