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OK, so you are going to use something that Amazon has built with great effort (the universal catalogue) for free, to do something that directly helps Amazon's c

OK, so you are going to use something that Amazon has built with great effort (the universal catalogue) for free, to do something that directly helps Amazon's competitors. I know that not many people are defending capitalism, and even less people think that Amazon is basically OK. However, at the very least, they most definitely won't be happy about it, and will do everything to shut down this ability. Which would be bad, as Amazon product IDs can be fairly used for many other nice things.

nonameiguess 4y ago
I'm bumping this take. I'll never cry for Amazon or anything, and I'm sure the marginal impact of something like this existing would be almost nothing to them, but using their service for all the convenience it brings you in terms of product discoverability, but then paying some other vendor, seems both bizarrely mean-spirited and clearly not universalizable, in either direction. If every consumer did this, Amazon would make no money at all, the convenience of one-place discoverability would disappear, and we'd be back in some pre-Amazon world that is worse for consumers. If consumers did this to every business and not just Amazon, then it would become nearly impossible for anyone to make money selling commodity goods, returning us to some artisan/merchant economy where goods are generally high quality and unique, but also rare and expensive. Cory can argue Amazon is a monopoly and those are bad no matter what all day long, but the reality for consumers is monopolies are bad because no competition allows sellers to raise prices and degrade customer experience, neither of which has happened with Amazon (because hint, they don't actually have a monopoly on anything they sell). As he says himself, their prices are consistently low and the customer experience seems to be good enough that he would prefer using them to find things to buy even if he doesn't buy from them. If you tried to turn them into a kayak.com for retail, they'd either have to take a cut of every transaction, raising prices for all other sellers, or they'd have to make money purely from ads instead. How is that better? Whatever else you want to say about Amazon, unlike, say, Google or Facebook, at least they're monetizing the delivery of real value to consumers. They're not just delivering value to advertisers. The one truly bad thing about the Amazon customer experience, which is the unreliability of product ratings and the proliferation of counterfeit and low-quality goods, would be made even worse if all a seller needed to do to get your business is convince a browser extension their good is equivalent to what you're looking at on Amazon, without even needing to get onto the marketplace.

nonameiguess 4y ago

I'm bumping this take. I'll never cry for Amazon or anything, and I'm sure the marginal impact of something like this existing would be almost nothing to them, but using their service for all the convenience it brings you in terms of product discoverability, but then paying some other vendor, seems both bizarrely mean-spirited and clearly not universalizable, in either direction. If every consumer did this, Amazon would make no money at all, the convenience of one-place discoverability would disappear, and we'd be back in some pre-Amazon world that is worse for consumers. If consumers did this to every business and not just Amazon, then it would become nearly impossible for anyone to make money selling commodity goods, returning us to some artisan/merchant economy where goods are generally high quality and unique, but also rare and expensive. Cory can argue Amazon is a monopoly and those are bad no matter what all day long, but the reality for consumers is monopolies are bad because no competition allows sellers to raise prices and degrade customer experience, neither of which has happened with Amazon (because hint, they don't actually have a monopoly on anything they sell). As he says himself, their prices are consistently low and the customer experience seems to be good enough that he would prefer using them to find things to buy even if he doesn't buy from them. If you tried to turn them into a kayak.com for retail, they'd either have to take a cut of every transaction, raising prices for all other sellers, or they'd have to make money purely from ads instead. How is that better? Whatever else you want to say about Amazon, unlike, say, Google or Facebook, at least they're monetizing the delivery of real value to consumers. They're not just delivering value to advertisers. The one truly bad thing about the Amazon customer experience, which is the unreliability of product ratings and the proliferation of counterfeit and low-quality goods, would be made even worse if all a seller needed to do to get your business is convince a browser extension their good is equivalent to what you're looking at on Amazon, without even needing to get onto the marketplace.