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Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals

200 points by thm 3y ago

HaHaHackerNews 3y ago
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reaperman 3y ago
https://archive.is/CHgpq https://archive.is/CHgpq (bit tricky to get to this, the most recent capture showed the paywall, had to go to an older capture, figured this might not be intuitive for even a lot of HN users) This "Big River" program seems like a proper use of classic "dogfooding" techniques (bastardizing that word to say testing your competitor's food, rather than its established meaning for eating your own food). It doesn't seem so different from a widget company testing and dismantling a competitor's hardware device. It's scaled up a lot, but anything related to global logistics has to be to get any good info. The difference perhaps is that hardware is occasionally / often (depending on the widget) protected by patents. In logistics it's less likely to be (but still possible, especially given the existence of "business process" patents). Part of that scale here is also how many people they have working on it to get a super detailed picture of how their competitors are doing what they do. I definitely have a cautious reaction about it, but I was expecting something that might violate regulations and statutes around trade secrets, and I don't see anything that obviously does. It's a bit creepy due to the nature of what investigating logistics involves, but it doesn't seem improper. There are plenty of practices Amazon perpetuates that I do believe are improper, but this didn't immediately strike me as one of them - but I'll keep an open mind if other people here make a strong case for it. One of the things I don't think belongs in today's economy is someone who runs a platform/marketplace to also compete on that platform/marketplace. That is something I strongly criticize Amazon for doing. -------Edit--------- Response to a now-deleted reply: Yes, it's an issue if Big River is helping Amazon compete with its competitors, but it wouldn't be an issue if Amazon wasn't participating in its own marketplace. I'd propose the remedy to be "stop doing the bad thing" rather than "stop doing the thing which appears to be mostly fine on the surface but also may be dual-purposed to assist in doing the bad thing". Where my own argument falls apart is store-brands for supermarkets. I like buying affordable, quality products under the HEB, "Great Value" (Wal-Mart), and "Kirkland" (Costco) brands. I also don't think it's appropriate to make a law that prevents Amazon from doing it while exempt these other companies - or else both self-enforcement and enforcement by the government both get too difficult. Business managers would rationalize that they're more of a "Costco/Kirkland" than an "Amazon/Amazon Basics" and no one within the org would be able to push back with "No, I cannot do that clearly illegal thing." So I'm not sure what the right answer should be - whether that's Costco needing to divest their Kirkland to a truly independent third-party and maybe have a rigorous quality testing program they can say "We recommend this brand because we know they meet our highest standards at a great price", or if there's some other way to regulate it. There is precedent for the general concept, if not the exact implementation I propose. The SEC has a wide range of strictly-enforced regulations controlling what companies can do on markets they operate (or anyone who acts as a broker-dealer) that it mostly created a "de facto" ban on companies which run a stock/commodity/FX/etc market from also participating in that market. They can afford rules that slice the concept very close to the bone because they have very strong, harsh, and vigilant enforcement. For the SEC paradigm, see Fair Access Rule, Regulation of Broker-Dealers / Duty of Best Execution, Market Maker Rules, Anti-Manipulation Rules, and Conflict of Interest policies. It's really very illegal for an exchange or a market operator to prioritize its transactions or its affiliated participants’ transactions over those of others. I'm not sure the FTC/etc can afford that same luxury, as they haven't demonstrated an ability to enforce rules aggressively and universally.
- deleted 3y ago
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- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  The issue wouldn't be "business process patents", it'd be trade secrets. If Amazon is having to do research via shell companies to figure out what those improvements are and copy them, it seems like a pretty straightforward argument that they're non-public competitive secrets. The misrepresentation is what's improper, since the information presumably wouldn't be available to Amazon directly.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    I don't think that's a straightforward argument. It's certainly not a completely unreasonable argument, but if Amazon can determine these things from using the publicly-facing services the way they're intended to be used, then it's quite reasonable to argue those competitive advantages are not "non-public". I generally view trade secrets through a very conservative lens, >90% of the time, if it smells like a trade secret violation, I firmly believe that it very much is a violation. Most people think I usually take this too far for their liking. So I'm already biased towards thinking this could be a violation, and I'm still concluding that it probably isn't. (Though trying to ever guess what the verdict of a USA vs. FAAMG case, or whether the USA will even pursue the case, is about as fruitful as reading tea leaves).
    - lazide 3y ago
      It is a big question - if you upload your code + keys to AWS infrastructure, are you really protecting them enough to be able to claim trade secret protection? Especially if you’re knowingly a competitor to Amazon in some other way? I could see it going either way in court.
      - reaperman 3y ago
        That's a different bar than the one most relevant to this article. No one in the general public could access your data on AWS the same way Amazon could. But Amazon can use other logistics platforms the same way that the general public would and get all this information about how those platforms operate. The bar you're talking about is more "How much do you have to protect data you give to a third party, such that it still remains a trade secret from that third party?" Currently, all of AWS is covered by the blanket statement here[0]: > As a customer, you own your customer content, and you select which AWS services can process, store, and host your customer content. We do not access or use your customer content for any purpose without your agreement. That should provide a good caliber of ammunition for trade-secrets claims against Amazon if they violate this, because not only can the rest of the public not access your data on AWS, you have every reasonable belief that Amazon is not allowed to either. I can't find any resources that suggest this policy is any different for their AI API's. Microsoft Azure also has strong protections around their branded offerings of OpenAI GPT-3/4 API's. 0: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/
moi2388 3y ago
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- OJFord 3y ago
  I don't pay for (or otherwise have legitimate access to) the WSJ either, but note that it's explicitly allowed by the site guidelines.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    This was definitively broadcast by a Tell HN post[0] that 'dang made 9 years ago. He has been consistent in his communication of the HN policies around paywalls across many comments every year, increasingly so over the past year.[1] Submitters should note that "hard" paywalls are banned. If readers can't use something like archive.today, 12ft.io, or archive.org to get around the paywall, then the article is not allowed. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=paywall%20author%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - nickthegreek 3y ago
      WSJ links are allowed. You can access this article using Bypass Paywall Clean extensions. Another commenter also posted the archive.is link to this article: https://archive.is/CHgpq https://archive.is/CHgpq
      - reaperman 3y ago
        Thanks for pointing me to Bypass Paywall Clean. I often wish that either Safari's extension ecosystem/API wasn't so anemic, or even better, Apple provided Safari with actually-effective ad-blockers and paywall readers.
        aspenmayer 3y ago
        As far as Safari-compatible ad blocking extensions, I've been reasonably satisfied with AdGuard, and it's free with some paid nice-to-haves which I don't use, but hear good things about. It's available on nearly every browser and operating system, including Android and iOS. It's also open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard https://adguard.com https://adguard.com https://github.com/AdguardTeam https://github.com/AdguardTeam
YPPH 3y ago
An internal crisis-management paper gave advice on what to say if discovered. What the internal crisis-management paper did not give advice on is what to say if the "advice on what to say if discovered" was discovered.
- philwelch 3y ago
  I would propose issuing a passive-aggressive press release titled, “Inside the Wall Street Journal’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Amazon”.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Isn't this kind of the first clue that you're working on something unethical? Writing a doc about what to do if you're caught? Doesn't sound like activity that I would be proud to put on my resume.
  - abadpoli 3y ago
    Pretty much any big project at a big company is going to have a “guidelines on what to say if the press or someone asks you about your work” document. It’s mandatory training at most companies. I’ve never been on a project that didn’t, and none of them are things I would consider even close to unethical. This team sounds interesting but I get the feeling the WSJ is trying hard to make it seem like some sort of clandestine spy operation. This practice isn’t uncommon… I’ve worked at airlines and they sometimes have people fly on a competitor airline and they don’t broadcast broadly “hey united flight attendant!! I work at American Airlines!” but it isn’t because they’re trying to be a spy. The subsidiary is literally called “big river” (Amazon is a big river), the employees of Big River listed amazon as their employer on LinkedIn, and it took a simple google search to see the owner of Big River was Amazon… they weren’t exactly trying hard to hide it. A spy operation this was not.
  - xkcd-sucks 3y ago
    "What to say if the moon lander crashes and the astronaut dies", "what to say if Trump starts spouting nonsense about your project faster than you can refute it", etc.
23B1 3y ago
Would rather DOJ go after AMZN and their peers than Livenation. Priorities vs. pandering.
- deleted 3y ago
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- maximinus_thrax 3y ago
  Isn't Amazon already being sued by the FTC?
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Yes, in a way that's likely specifically relevant to the root comment in this chain. However, that same root comment is not super-relevant to the posted article.
aorloff 3y ago
Amazon should be investigated for anticompetitive practice around the Amazon Warrants Program where they force vendors to give Amazon equity to keep doing business
- deleted 3y ago
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swozey 3y ago
That ended on a bit of a cliff hanger. Did I miss it? How/why were these communications leaked? Most of it reads like investigative journalism, as in looking up business addresses and employee linkedin etc. but a lot of it is clearly coming from someone internal. So this is still going on? None of these vendors kicked them off their marketplaces? Is everyone just now finding out about this? Having them go to conferences and pose as other vendors is.. kind of gross. I wouldn't appreciate having to do that at all. > Globally, in total, Big River gained access to rival marketplaces including Alibaba, Etsy, Real.de, Wish and Rakuten, among many other platforms. In 2019, the team set a goal to get onto 13 additional new marketplaces, according to an internal company document.
makerdiety 3y ago
So, can we now safely say that it is inappropriate to upload and execute the code to our artificial general intelligences on Amazon Web Services? Even encryption there won't work, because important and secret source code shouldn't be running on something like Amazon's cloud servers. So, what's an artificial general intelligence gonna do? Where would be a good place for it to hide and run its source code that needs protection from prying eyes and human alignment motivated modification?
- reaperman 3y ago
  There's nothing in this particular article which suggests that Amazon would aim to violate any contractual agreements you make with them against hoovering up your AWS data to compete with you. If you use services which don't include any protections against that, then I'd expect those services to use your data against you if you posed a threat to their business. Perhaps there could be a legal requirement that this type of protection be mandated, I'm not entirely sure what the downside would be, besides yet more regulatory bloat.
  - makerdiety 3y ago
    It is indeed reasonable to interpret Amazon's Big River project as being not anything indicative of clandestine malware or something. But something unprecedented like artificial general intelligence is very likely to pose a threat to giant enterprises and businesses. A significant threat actually. So maybe super-intelligence would press lobbied government regulation into a protective service for its source code? Maybe there's already source code protecting regulation primed and ready for the super-intelligence's arrival? Like ethical rules that commercial entities must follow.
    - reaperman 3y ago
      Big River isn't about software so I don't understand the connections you're making.
      - makerdiety 3y ago
r0ks0n 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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wannacboatmovie 3y ago
Everyone just now realizing Amazon plays dirty? They're not the shining example of corporate ethical behavior we thought?
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  [flagged]
- throwawayqqq11 3y ago
  Just imagine how long it would take the public to realize such dirty play by alibaba.
- 11101010001100 3y ago
  I'm shocked that a company subscribes to the means justify the ends approach to problem solving!
j45 3y ago
Secret Operation? The cloud is someone else's computer.
alephnerd 3y ago
I don't want to be that guy, but every single business has a "Competitve Intel" department. They generally fall under PM or PMM. Their activities range from comparing datasheets to digging into pricing to actually playing with competitors software after buying a license via a shell or a partner (very common practice done by startups)
- verall 3y ago
  Project Management Management?
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Product Marketing Management
- TrainedMonkey 3y ago
  Any kind of intelligence gathering is a natural consequence of size. For companies, it starts at the startup stage with researching target market / competition / existing solutions in search of a PMF. Later on companies do more extensive research before launching product lines. At this stage people doing research are still pretty close to the product being launched. As companies get larger, product launch costs and separation between execs and people who do work grows. At this point there is extensive review before execs write the big checks. A lot of times it's outside consulting. At Amazons scale and their quarterly KPI pushing it's not that much of a stretch that they will have a dedicated org which scours internet for any and all intelligence techniques that would give them an edge.
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    You’re forgetting promo packets and yearly ratings. When you’re desperate to show success for either climbing the career ladder or keep your high paying job, some people start flirting with ethical & legal boundaries.
- ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  There's even a rather long Wikipedia article on such competitor information gathering and analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_intelligence.
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
Every time IBM's name gets mentioned the FAANG-bangers bring up the Holocaust and with good reason. But the more that comes out, the more we see just how dirty and evil modern big tech as a whole is. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Beware those telling you what you want to hear.
- GiorgioG 3y ago
  How naive is everyone thinking that businesses are benevolent and really care about some cause? Maybe a private firm can make more conscious decisions, but the reality is the market puts pressure on everyone's behavior. Business's sole purpose is to make money. Everything else is window dressing.
tithe 3y ago
Busted: Japanese business entity search of "ビックリバーサービスジャパン" ("Big River Services Japan") via Japan's National Tax Agency -- https://www.houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp/henkorireki-johoto.html?selHouzinNo=7011003007165 https://www.houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp/henkorireki-johoto.html?... -- shows the following address for this entity: 東京都目黒区下目黒１丁目８番１号. A quick search for this address shows this page -- https://bb-building.net/tokyo/deta/1506.html https://bb-building.net/tokyo/deta/1506.html -- which surprise, is the Amazon Japan HQ. Interestingly, the address was later changed to a more low-profile building, which doesn't list any corporate tenant.
- mkumar10 3y ago
  Does Japan National Tax Agency also let you see other details - like parent company of the entity, or any other information? That's provided in countries like India or Vietnam in their corporate ministries/departments
  - tithe 3y ago
    To my knowledge, the NTA does not list directors or ownership. METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) has a portal to potentially display that information, but for private companies it may be missing, and thus the results may be no better than NTA's records: https://info.gbiz.go.jp/ https://info.gbiz.go.jp/ Public entities (which Big River Services Japan is not) can be searched through the JPX (Tokyo Stock Exchange): https://www2.jpx.co.jp/tseHpFront/CGK020010Action.do https://www2.jpx.co.jp/tseHpFront/CGK020010Action.do
  - lmm 3y ago
    > Does Japan National Tax Agency also let you see other details - like parent company of the entity, or any other information? Not from the tax agency. For a KK you can get a list of investors from the legal affairs bureau for a small charge, and for any kind of company you can get a history of who has ever been representative director or equivalent. AIUI it's possible to have a "silent partner" setup where you have a partnership or GK and the representative is a lawyer rather than the person actually operating and profiting from the company, but there always has to be at least one publicly named representative.
jrockway 3y ago
Is this a problem? This sounds like ordinary business development / product management. Let's say I started a cloud provider. A customer comes to me and says "we need something like BigQuery". The first thing I'd do is sign up for BigQuery and try it out, right? If you're making an online marketplace, you probably want to try using other peoples' online marketplaces. Make sure you're not missing something obvious. Implement their good ideas, rework their bad ideas. That's competition.
- tyingq 3y ago
  The analogy isn't perfect. It's somewhere in-between what you're describing, and say...getting a job on Google's BigQuery team to gather intel.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    It's not quite an employer/employee relationship, just a partnership. So this is kind of like starting your own video streaming website while being a Twitch Partner. I don't know if the T&C prohibit that, but they would probably be difficult to enforce. I feel like the courts would take a dim view of "if you ever sell a trinket on our platform, you are banned for life from ever working on e-commerce", but I guess you don't know until you try.
- HillRat 3y ago
  As far as competitive intelligence goes, this is pretty small stakes. In the industrial space it's pretty standard for major companies to create shell companies that buy up competitors' equipment and do full clean-room teardowns that result in engineering reports handed off to the designers back in the parent company. One can certainly argue as to whether this is dirty pool or not, but it's standard practice and everyone's factored it in as part of competition.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    Right, exactly. This is like those companies that buy new cars, tear them down, and sell anyone who wants a 1200 page report about all the new technology in the car. Frankly, I think you'd be crazy to not understand your competitors technology in depth. They might be onto something. If they don't want you to steal it, that's what patents are for. This process seems a lot more ethical than, say, hiring an employee and "hoping" that they'll have the same thought process at your company that led them to an innovative trade secret at their former job.
jonhohle 3y ago
This is just an anecdote, but it’s over a decade old, so I don’t think I’m giving away any secret sauce. When I worked on Prime we were trying to build a program to get the top 100 items that someone would want within an hour fulfillable in large metro areas (e.g. milk, batteries, toilet paper, whatever you frequently run to the store for because you need it now and it can’t wait). To determine what those items were, contractors were hired to go inventory Walmarts. One day it was reported that on the end caps of a particular Walmart were clipboards with all of the inventory in that particular isle. The contractor photo’s each page and was never questioned and it cut down on research time significantly.
- gruez 3y ago
  >To determine what those items were, contractors were hired to go inventory Walmarts How would this work? Is the assumption that more items on shelves = more sales volume? What if some items have less items on shelves but are restocked more regularly?
  - maxbond 3y ago
    [ES: Speculation] If you're sampling at or above the Nyquist rate, so presumably twice a day, you'll be able to capture changes in inventory. If you are also recording dates on boxes, you should be able to distinguish between sales and waste. Eg, you recorded an item as expiring tomorrow, and the next day it expires in 3 months - it probably got thrown away without being purchased. (Though this probably wouldn't work with things they can change dates on, like bakery items. It's a health code violation but a ubiquitous one.)
    - maxbond 3y ago
      It occurs to me that the refrigerators around the outside where high turnover items like milk and butter are kept are designed with a back door in the warehouse area so that they can be stocked throughout the day, so you would probably need to get more creative to accurately inventory the milk.
  - utensil4778 3y ago
mgdev 3y ago
Nothing new. Amazon's (now discontinued) browser extension [1] was, among other things, used to get competitive price information w/o being hit by crawling restrictions. [1]:https://www.tomsguide.com/news/amazon-is-killing-one-of-its-most-underrated-features-this-sucks https://www.tomsguide.com/news/amazon-is-killing-one-of-its-...
- cj 3y ago
  Now I understand why Capital One pushes their chrome extension [0] so hard every time I login my account. Just took a peak at the TOS for the extension [1] and yep, they're collecting a selling price data. It's crazy that by installing the chrome extension, "you are authorizing and directing [Capital One]" to scrape pricing data yet nothing about that is mentioned on the chrome extension page. > 8. Product and Loyalty Account Information. You understand and acknowledge that, through your use of the Services, you are authorizing and directing us to act on your behalf to collect, use, share, and store information from third-party Merchants and loyalty program providers for which you demonstrate interest during your activities on the Internet. This information includes, but is not limited to, product descriptions, pricing and shipping information, coupons and other discounts, and loyalty program credits or other purchase incentives earned in order to retain and share that information with Merchants and other users of the Services to perform and improve the Services. We may use this information to improve the Services, including by sharing the price information and coupon codes with third parties, but Capital One Shopping won’t specifically identify you to third parties when we share such information with them. [0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/capital-one-shopping-save/nenlahapcbofgnanklpelkaejcehkggg?pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/capital-one-shoppin... [1] https://capitaloneshopping.com/our-terms/terms-of-service https://capitaloneshopping.com/our-terms/terms-of-service
  - I_AM_A_SMURF 3y ago
    It doesn't make it better, but most internet-related services are like that. They either spy on you or use you to spy on others. To me that's a clear indication that the tech sector is under-scrutinized and under-regulated.
olliej 3y ago
The standard headline text rule of capitalizing each word had me read this as Intel (the company) and I was really confused :D Now that out of the way: is this really novel or weird? I don't work in sales/marketing/market research but isn't step 1 of such literally "how much do our competitors charge for competing products?"? I don't see how this would be "secret" if presumably every company just assumes that this is happening? It would seem stranger if they weren't? (The only obvious "secret" would be you don't know exactly which customers/users are just doing price research)
gruez 3y ago
The "secret operation" in question seems to be 1. get a bunch of inventory somehow (eg. from liquidation sales or from wholesale clubs) 2. register as third-party sellers on marketplaces like ebay, shopify, walmart, and amazon using a shell company 3. get information (sales volume? pricing? ux?) from doing business on such marketplaces If this is what they're doing I don't find their "secret operation" to be "play[ing] dirty", or "anti-competitive" as some commenters have described. The only potentially objectionable part would be using a false/misleading name, but I don't see how this is fundamentally different than going to your competitor's stores plainclothed and checking what their prices/foot traffic are. As long as there isn't a restraining order/injunction specifically preventing them from doing such a thing, it seems fine by me. Moreover unless the marketplaces required an NDA they could have also conceivably gotten the same information from actual third party sellers.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  It’s not even a false name if they’ve incorporated that way.
pixl97 3y ago
Secret? Walmart knew this years ago. HN thread on this from 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14602836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14602836
- gwern 3y ago
  The article says Walmart said it didn't know when they told Walmart.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  ? That's a thread about Walmart telling vendors they can't use AWS, not a long article explicating Amazon selling merchandise on Walmart.com.
blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
I’ve heard that Walmart and Amazon also use various unethical means to scrape the websites of competitors to get pricing information and adjust their own items’ pricing accordingly. This feels a lot like the algorithmic price fixing that is now being scrutinized in the rental industry. I wonder if more attention should be paid to how these companies compete with each other, leaving aside the numerous other controversies around how they treat sellers, how they abuse sales data of manufacturers to compete with them with house brands, and their plain market power from size.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  small business retail in the San Francisco Bay Area has all but disappeared, it seems.. it apparently split during covid-19 lockdown into two -- "mega corporates" and "we just steal it and sell it at the local casual street market" .. with most things in between closing shop.. to be more complete, liquor stores with some retail items, and gas station chain stores still exist ..
  - simfree 3y ago
    Only the businesses that did sufficent volume and had sufficient margins to cover the ever increasing cost of rent, loss of products due to theft, and vandalism have stayed open. The retail shakeout has been brutal in the urban core of Portland and Seattle as well, anywhere where there isn't nearby housing to create a walk shed that would allow smaller businesses to survive has seen something of a retail apocalypse. Single purpose office or commercial neighborhoods just aren't viable anymore, you need a critical mass of local customers adjacent your retail business for it to survive.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  What’s unethical about scraping data from a public website?
  - blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
    Rather than organically pricing their products, these bigger companies are setting prices to always match or undercut pricing elsewhere. This squeezes the advantage smaller players may have on pricing, and big players can afford to do so even at a loss. Another issue is that the bigger players may be essentially signaling their pricing to each other through their scraping, which can be a form of collusion and price fixing - this is what’s under scrutiny in the rental market where software is performing actions that would be anti-competitive for a human to do.
1-6 3y ago
Another more acceptable way of saying it is that they’re doing their due diligence.
mattmaroon 3y ago
This seems completely normal to me. They’re getting only information that any Walmart seller could see. When I worked for Sam’s Club in my youth, which is owned by Walmart, we would send people into other local membership warehouses to check their prices on things, and they would send them to us. It got to the point where we knew BJ’s guy and they knew ours. Who cares? When you run a business, you just assume that you’re competitors will figure out every little bit of information they can about you, and you will do it to them. And this is actually good for the health of the system in general, from a consumer standpoint. You want all of the businesses you interact with to be as efficient as possible because that’s what lowers prices the most for you. This is completely expected, uninteresting, and a giant nothing burger
- wbl 3y ago
  It hurts consumers. If you had two gas stations next to each other and they can see each other's signs their pricing will not be competitive because of tacit collusion vs if they can't see the price but consumers can.
  - aspenmayer 3y ago
    I don't follow your reasoning here. Collusion to me implies preferential pricing, exclusionary terms of purchase or sale, or formal or informal agreements between separate businesses or their representatives or agents. Furthermore, I don't even know how you'd go about eliminating this practice if you tried. Secret shoppers have always existed and likely will always exist. I'm also reminded of sites and apps which offer shoppers incentives to scan and share their receipts, which is another way which this information could be gathered, not to mention enlisting the help of intermediaries such as Instacart, Uber Eats, and others. To your point, I would agree with your unstated belief that collusion and price fixing are objectively bad for consumers. I'm just not seeing price fixing or collusion occurring in your example or in the situations raised by the original post. The potential for such is definitely there, but performing market research and using such insights to guide pricing decisions is not going away. I don't even see a rational basis for why consumers should want it to go away, but it definitely is the thin edge of the wedge and a slippery slope.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Works where archive.is is blocked: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=1334487526038&w=d0SgTI-r7X1QPYItpJN0IcpWl2ddNQcI https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=1334487526038&w=d0SgTI-r7X...
niccl 3y ago
https://archive.is/t8fAB https://archive.is/t8fAB
WalterBright 3y ago
I've lived through all the days of "evil Walmart is an unstoppable monopoly taking over the world and eliminating all competition" and now I'm seeing "poor abused Walmart is being beat up by their ruthless competitor". Apparently monopoly is not the natural end game of free markets?
wkat4242 3y ago
Amazon has rivals? Here in Spain they're pretty much the only game in town these days when it comes to e-commerce.
kristjansson 3y ago
This seems akin to running secret-shopper research against competitors. Amazon sells a marketplace (among other things), makes sense to go see what it's like to transact with other marketplaces.
kcplate 3y ago
I think I read once that Sam Walton used to roam around KMart and other discount stores with a tape recorder noting prices. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

200 points by thm 3y ago

[flagged]

https://archive.is/CHgpq https://archive.is/CHgpq (bit tricky to get to this, the most recent capture showed the paywall, had to go to an older capture, figured this might not be intuitive for even a lot of HN users) This "Big River" program seems like a proper use of classic "dogfooding" techniques (bastardizing that word to say testing your competitor's food, rather than its established meaning for eating your own food). It doesn't seem so different from a widget company testing and dismantling a competitor's hardware device. It's scaled up a lot, but anything related to global logistics has to be to get any good info. The difference perhaps is that hardware is occasionally / often (depending on the widget) protected by patents. In logistics it's less likely to be (but still possible, especially given the existence of "business process" patents). Part of that scale here is also how many people they have working on it to get a super detailed picture of how their competitors are doing what they do. I definitely have a cautious reaction about it, but I was expecting something that might violate regulations and statutes around trade secrets, and I don't see anything that obviously does. It's a bit creepy due to the nature of what investigating logistics involves, but it doesn't seem improper. There are plenty of practices Amazon perpetuates that I do believe are improper, but this didn't immediately strike me as one of them - but I'll keep an open mind if other people here make a strong case for it. One of the things I don't think belongs in today's economy is someone who runs a platform/marketplace to also compete on that platform/marketplace. That is something I strongly criticize Amazon for doing. -------Edit--------- Response to a now-deleted reply: Yes, it's an issue if Big River is helping Amazon compete with its competitors, but it wouldn't be an issue if Amazon wasn't participating in its own marketplace. I'd propose the remedy to be "stop doing the bad thing" rather than "stop doing the thing which appears to be mostly fine on the surface but also may be dual-purposed to assist in doing the bad thing". Where my own argument falls apart is store-brands for supermarkets. I like buying affordable, quality products under the HEB, "Great Value" (Wal-Mart), and "Kirkland" (Costco) brands. I also don't think it's appropriate to make a law that prevents Amazon from doing it while exempt these other companies - or else both self-enforcement and enforcement by the government both get too difficult. Business managers would rationalize that they're more of a "Costco/Kirkland" than an "Amazon/Amazon Basics" and no one within the org would be able to push back with "No, I cannot do that clearly illegal thing." So I'm not sure what the right answer should be - whether that's Costco needing to divest their Kirkland to a truly independent third-party and maybe have a rigorous quality testing program they can say "We recommend this brand because we know they meet our highest standards at a great price", or if there's some other way to regulate it. There is precedent for the general concept, if not the exact implementation I propose. The SEC has a wide range of strictly-enforced regulations controlling what companies can do on markets they operate (or anyone who acts as a broker-dealer) that it mostly created a "de facto" ban on companies which run a stock/commodity/FX/etc market from also participating in that market. They can afford rules that slice the concept very close to the bone because they have very strong, harsh, and vigilant enforcement. For the SEC paradigm, see Fair Access Rule, Regulation of Broker-Dealers / Duty of Best Execution, Market Maker Rules, Anti-Manipulation Rules, and Conflict of Interest policies. It's really very illegal for an exchange or a market operator to prioritize its transactions or its affiliated participants’ transactions over those of others. I'm not sure the FTC/etc can afford that same luxury, as they haven't demonstrated an ability to enforce rules aggressively and universally.

deleted 3y ago
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AlotOfReading 3y ago
The issue wouldn't be "business process patents", it'd be trade secrets. If Amazon is having to do research via shell companies to figure out what those improvements are and copy them, it seems like a pretty straightforward argument that they're non-public competitive secrets. The misrepresentation is what's improper, since the information presumably wouldn't be available to Amazon directly.
- reaperman 3y ago
  I don't think that's a straightforward argument. It's certainly not a completely unreasonable argument, but if Amazon can determine these things from using the publicly-facing services the way they're intended to be used, then it's quite reasonable to argue those competitive advantages are not "non-public". I generally view trade secrets through a very conservative lens, >90% of the time, if it smells like a trade secret violation, I firmly believe that it very much is a violation. Most people think I usually take this too far for their liking. So I'm already biased towards thinking this could be a violation, and I'm still concluding that it probably isn't. (Though trying to ever guess what the verdict of a USA vs. FAAMG case, or whether the USA will even pursue the case, is about as fruitful as reading tea leaves).
  - lazide 3y ago
    It is a big question - if you upload your code + keys to AWS infrastructure, are you really protecting them enough to be able to claim trade secret protection? Especially if you’re knowingly a competitor to Amazon in some other way? I could see it going either way in court.
    - reaperman 3y ago
      That's a different bar than the one most relevant to this article. No one in the general public could access your data on AWS the same way Amazon could. But Amazon can use other logistics platforms the same way that the general public would and get all this information about how those platforms operate. The bar you're talking about is more "How much do you have to protect data you give to a third party, such that it still remains a trade secret from that third party?" Currently, all of AWS is covered by the blanket statement here[0]: > As a customer, you own your customer content, and you select which AWS services can process, store, and host your customer content. We do not access or use your customer content for any purpose without your agreement. That should provide a good caliber of ammunition for trade-secrets claims against Amazon if they violate this, because not only can the rest of the public not access your data on AWS, you have every reasonable belief that Amazon is not allowed to either. I can't find any resources that suggest this policy is any different for their AI API's. Microsoft Azure also has strong protections around their branded offerings of OpenAI GPT-3/4 API's. 0: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/

moi2388 3y ago

[flagged]

OJFord 3y ago
I don't pay for (or otherwise have legitimate access to) the WSJ either, but note that it's explicitly allowed by the site guidelines.
- reaperman 3y ago
  This was definitively broadcast by a Tell HN post[0] that 'dang made 9 years ago. He has been consistent in his communication of the HN policies around paywalls across many comments every year, increasingly so over the past year.[1] Submitters should note that "hard" paywalls are banned. If readers can't use something like archive.today, 12ft.io, or archive.org to get around the paywall, then the article is not allowed. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=paywall%20author%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    WSJ links are allowed. You can access this article using Bypass Paywall Clean extensions. Another commenter also posted the archive.is link to this article: https://archive.is/CHgpq https://archive.is/CHgpq
    - reaperman 3y ago
      Thanks for pointing me to Bypass Paywall Clean. I often wish that either Safari's extension ecosystem/API wasn't so anemic, or even better, Apple provided Safari with actually-effective ad-blockers and paywall readers.
      - aspenmayer 3y ago
        As far as Safari-compatible ad blocking extensions, I've been reasonably satisfied with AdGuard, and it's free with some paid nice-to-haves which I don't use, but hear good things about. It's available on nearly every browser and operating system, including Android and iOS. It's also open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard https://adguard.com https://adguard.com https://github.com/AdguardTeam https://github.com/AdguardTeam

YPPH 3y ago

An internal crisis-management paper gave advice on what to say if discovered. What the internal crisis-management paper did not give advice on is what to say if the "advice on what to say if discovered" was discovered.

philwelch 3y ago
I would propose issuing a passive-aggressive press release titled, “Inside the Wall Street Journal’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Amazon”.
ryandrake 3y ago
Isn't this kind of the first clue that you're working on something unethical? Writing a doc about what to do if you're caught? Doesn't sound like activity that I would be proud to put on my resume.
- abadpoli 3y ago
  Pretty much any big project at a big company is going to have a “guidelines on what to say if the press or someone asks you about your work” document. It’s mandatory training at most companies. I’ve never been on a project that didn’t, and none of them are things I would consider even close to unethical. This team sounds interesting but I get the feeling the WSJ is trying hard to make it seem like some sort of clandestine spy operation. This practice isn’t uncommon… I’ve worked at airlines and they sometimes have people fly on a competitor airline and they don’t broadcast broadly “hey united flight attendant!! I work at American Airlines!” but it isn’t because they’re trying to be a spy. The subsidiary is literally called “big river” (Amazon is a big river), the employees of Big River listed amazon as their employer on LinkedIn, and it took a simple google search to see the owner of Big River was Amazon… they weren’t exactly trying hard to hide it. A spy operation this was not.
- xkcd-sucks 3y ago
  "What to say if the moon lander crashes and the astronaut dies", "what to say if Trump starts spouting nonsense about your project faster than you can refute it", etc.

23B1 3y ago

Would rather DOJ go after AMZN and their peers than Livenation. Priorities vs. pandering.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
maximinus_thrax 3y ago
Isn't Amazon already being sued by the FTC?
- reaperman 3y ago
  Yes, in a way that's likely specifically relevant to the root comment in this chain. However, that same root comment is not super-relevant to the posted article.

aorloff 3y ago

Amazon should be investigated for anticompetitive practice around the Amazon Warrants Program where they force vendors to give Amazon equity to keep doing business

deleted 3y ago
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swozey 3y ago

That ended on a bit of a cliff hanger. Did I miss it? How/why were these communications leaked? Most of it reads like investigative journalism, as in looking up business addresses and employee linkedin etc. but a lot of it is clearly coming from someone internal. So this is still going on? None of these vendors kicked them off their marketplaces? Is everyone just now finding out about this? Having them go to conferences and pose as other vendors is.. kind of gross. I wouldn't appreciate having to do that at all. > Globally, in total, Big River gained access to rival marketplaces including Alibaba, Etsy, Real.de, Wish and Rakuten, among many other platforms. In 2019, the team set a goal to get onto 13 additional new marketplaces, according to an internal company document.

makerdiety 3y ago

So, can we now safely say that it is inappropriate to upload and execute the code to our artificial general intelligences on Amazon Web Services? Even encryption there won't work, because important and secret source code shouldn't be running on something like Amazon's cloud servers. So, what's an artificial general intelligence gonna do? Where would be a good place for it to hide and run its source code that needs protection from prying eyes and human alignment motivated modification?

reaperman 3y ago
There's nothing in this particular article which suggests that Amazon would aim to violate any contractual agreements you make with them against hoovering up your AWS data to compete with you. If you use services which don't include any protections against that, then I'd expect those services to use your data against you if you posed a threat to their business. Perhaps there could be a legal requirement that this type of protection be mandated, I'm not entirely sure what the downside would be, besides yet more regulatory bloat.
- makerdiety 3y ago
  It is indeed reasonable to interpret Amazon's Big River project as being not anything indicative of clandestine malware or something. But something unprecedented like artificial general intelligence is very likely to pose a threat to giant enterprises and businesses. A significant threat actually. So maybe super-intelligence would press lobbied government regulation into a protective service for its source code? Maybe there's already source code protecting regulation primed and ready for the super-intelligence's arrival? Like ethical rules that commercial entities must follow.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Big River isn't about software so I don't understand the connections you're making.
    - makerdiety 3y ago

r0ks0n 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

wannacboatmovie 3y ago

Everyone just now realizing Amazon plays dirty? They're not the shining example of corporate ethical behavior we thought?

sonicanatidae 3y ago
[flagged]
throwawayqqq11 3y ago
Just imagine how long it would take the public to realize such dirty play by alibaba.
11101010001100 3y ago
I'm shocked that a company subscribes to the means justify the ends approach to problem solving!

j45 3y ago

Secret Operation? The cloud is someone else's computer.

alephnerd 3y ago

I don't want to be that guy, but every single business has a "Competitve Intel" department. They generally fall under PM or PMM. Their activities range from comparing datasheets to digging into pricing to actually playing with competitors software after buying a license via a shell or a partner (very common practice done by startups)

verall 3y ago
Project Management Management?
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Product Marketing Management
TrainedMonkey 3y ago
Any kind of intelligence gathering is a natural consequence of size. For companies, it starts at the startup stage with researching target market / competition / existing solutions in search of a PMF. Later on companies do more extensive research before launching product lines. At this stage people doing research are still pretty close to the product being launched. As companies get larger, product launch costs and separation between execs and people who do work grows. At this point there is extensive review before execs write the big checks. A lot of times it's outside consulting. At Amazons scale and their quarterly KPI pushing it's not that much of a stretch that they will have a dedicated org which scours internet for any and all intelligence techniques that would give them an edge.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  You’re forgetting promo packets and yearly ratings. When you’re desperate to show success for either climbing the career ladder or keep your high paying job, some people start flirting with ethical & legal boundaries.
ThrowawayR2 3y ago
There's even a rather long Wikipedia article on such competitor information gathering and analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_intelligence.

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

Every time IBM's name gets mentioned the FAANG-bangers bring up the Holocaust and with good reason. But the more that comes out, the more we see just how dirty and evil modern big tech as a whole is. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Beware those telling you what you want to hear.

GiorgioG 3y ago
How naive is everyone thinking that businesses are benevolent and really care about some cause? Maybe a private firm can make more conscious decisions, but the reality is the market puts pressure on everyone's behavior. Business's sole purpose is to make money. Everything else is window dressing.

tithe 3y ago

Busted: Japanese business entity search of "ビックリバーサービスジャパン" ("Big River Services Japan") via Japan's National Tax Agency -- https://www.houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp/henkorireki-johoto.html?selHouzinNo=7011003007165 https://www.houjin-bangou.nta.go.jp/henkorireki-johoto.html?... -- shows the following address for this entity: 東京都目黒区下目黒１丁目８番１号. A quick search for this address shows this page -- https://bb-building.net/tokyo/deta/1506.html https://bb-building.net/tokyo/deta/1506.html -- which surprise, is the Amazon Japan HQ. Interestingly, the address was later changed to a more low-profile building, which doesn't list any corporate tenant.

mkumar10 3y ago
Does Japan National Tax Agency also let you see other details - like parent company of the entity, or any other information? That's provided in countries like India or Vietnam in their corporate ministries/departments
- tithe 3y ago
  To my knowledge, the NTA does not list directors or ownership. METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) has a portal to potentially display that information, but for private companies it may be missing, and thus the results may be no better than NTA's records: https://info.gbiz.go.jp/ https://info.gbiz.go.jp/ Public entities (which Big River Services Japan is not) can be searched through the JPX (Tokyo Stock Exchange): https://www2.jpx.co.jp/tseHpFront/CGK020010Action.do https://www2.jpx.co.jp/tseHpFront/CGK020010Action.do
- lmm 3y ago
  > Does Japan National Tax Agency also let you see other details - like parent company of the entity, or any other information? Not from the tax agency. For a KK you can get a list of investors from the legal affairs bureau for a small charge, and for any kind of company you can get a history of who has ever been representative director or equivalent. AIUI it's possible to have a "silent partner" setup where you have a partnership or GK and the representative is a lawyer rather than the person actually operating and profiting from the company, but there always has to be at least one publicly named representative.

jrockway 3y ago

Is this a problem? This sounds like ordinary business development / product management. Let's say I started a cloud provider. A customer comes to me and says "we need something like BigQuery". The first thing I'd do is sign up for BigQuery and try it out, right? If you're making an online marketplace, you probably want to try using other peoples' online marketplaces. Make sure you're not missing something obvious. Implement their good ideas, rework their bad ideas. That's competition.

tyingq 3y ago
The analogy isn't perfect. It's somewhere in-between what you're describing, and say...getting a job on Google's BigQuery team to gather intel.
- jrockway 3y ago
  It's not quite an employer/employee relationship, just a partnership. So this is kind of like starting your own video streaming website while being a Twitch Partner. I don't know if the T&C prohibit that, but they would probably be difficult to enforce. I feel like the courts would take a dim view of "if you ever sell a trinket on our platform, you are banned for life from ever working on e-commerce", but I guess you don't know until you try.
HillRat 3y ago
As far as competitive intelligence goes, this is pretty small stakes. In the industrial space it's pretty standard for major companies to create shell companies that buy up competitors' equipment and do full clean-room teardowns that result in engineering reports handed off to the designers back in the parent company. One can certainly argue as to whether this is dirty pool or not, but it's standard practice and everyone's factored it in as part of competition.
- jrockway 3y ago
  Right, exactly. This is like those companies that buy new cars, tear them down, and sell anyone who wants a 1200 page report about all the new technology in the car. Frankly, I think you'd be crazy to not understand your competitors technology in depth. They might be onto something. If they don't want you to steal it, that's what patents are for. This process seems a lot more ethical than, say, hiring an employee and "hoping" that they'll have the same thought process at your company that led them to an innovative trade secret at their former job.

jonhohle 3y ago

This is just an anecdote, but it’s over a decade old, so I don’t think I’m giving away any secret sauce. When I worked on Prime we were trying to build a program to get the top 100 items that someone would want within an hour fulfillable in large metro areas (e.g. milk, batteries, toilet paper, whatever you frequently run to the store for because you need it now and it can’t wait). To determine what those items were, contractors were hired to go inventory Walmarts. One day it was reported that on the end caps of a particular Walmart were clipboards with all of the inventory in that particular isle. The contractor photo’s each page and was never questioned and it cut down on research time significantly.

gruez 3y ago
>To determine what those items were, contractors were hired to go inventory Walmarts How would this work? Is the assumption that more items on shelves = more sales volume? What if some items have less items on shelves but are restocked more regularly?
- maxbond 3y ago
  [ES: Speculation] If you're sampling at or above the Nyquist rate, so presumably twice a day, you'll be able to capture changes in inventory. If you are also recording dates on boxes, you should be able to distinguish between sales and waste. Eg, you recorded an item as expiring tomorrow, and the next day it expires in 3 months - it probably got thrown away without being purchased. (Though this probably wouldn't work with things they can change dates on, like bakery items. It's a health code violation but a ubiquitous one.)
  - maxbond 3y ago
    It occurs to me that the refrigerators around the outside where high turnover items like milk and butter are kept are designed with a back door in the warehouse area so that they can be stocked throughout the day, so you would probably need to get more creative to accurately inventory the milk.
- utensil4778 3y ago

mgdev 3y ago

Nothing new. Amazon's (now discontinued) browser extension [1] was, among other things, used to get competitive price information w/o being hit by crawling restrictions. [1]:https://www.tomsguide.com/news/amazon-is-killing-one-of-its-most-underrated-features-this-sucks https://www.tomsguide.com/news/amazon-is-killing-one-of-its-...

cj 3y ago
Now I understand why Capital One pushes their chrome extension [0] so hard every time I login my account. Just took a peak at the TOS for the extension [1] and yep, they're collecting a selling price data. It's crazy that by installing the chrome extension, "you are authorizing and directing [Capital One]" to scrape pricing data yet nothing about that is mentioned on the chrome extension page. > 8. Product and Loyalty Account Information. You understand and acknowledge that, through your use of the Services, you are authorizing and directing us to act on your behalf to collect, use, share, and store information from third-party Merchants and loyalty program providers for which you demonstrate interest during your activities on the Internet. This information includes, but is not limited to, product descriptions, pricing and shipping information, coupons and other discounts, and loyalty program credits or other purchase incentives earned in order to retain and share that information with Merchants and other users of the Services to perform and improve the Services. We may use this information to improve the Services, including by sharing the price information and coupon codes with third parties, but Capital One Shopping won’t specifically identify you to third parties when we share such information with them. [0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/capital-one-shopping-save/nenlahapcbofgnanklpelkaejcehkggg?pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/capital-one-shoppin... [1] https://capitaloneshopping.com/our-terms/terms-of-service https://capitaloneshopping.com/our-terms/terms-of-service
- I_AM_A_SMURF 3y ago
  It doesn't make it better, but most internet-related services are like that. They either spy on you or use you to spy on others. To me that's a clear indication that the tech sector is under-scrutinized and under-regulated.

olliej 3y ago

The standard headline text rule of capitalizing each word had me read this as Intel (the company) and I was really confused :D Now that out of the way: is this really novel or weird? I don't work in sales/marketing/market research but isn't step 1 of such literally "how much do our competitors charge for competing products?"? I don't see how this would be "secret" if presumably every company just assumes that this is happening? It would seem stranger if they weren't? (The only obvious "secret" would be you don't know exactly which customers/users are just doing price research)

gruez 3y ago

The "secret operation" in question seems to be 1. get a bunch of inventory somehow (eg. from liquidation sales or from wholesale clubs) 2. register as third-party sellers on marketplaces like ebay, shopify, walmart, and amazon using a shell company 3. get information (sales volume? pricing? ux?) from doing business on such marketplaces If this is what they're doing I don't find their "secret operation" to be "play[ing] dirty", or "anti-competitive" as some commenters have described. The only potentially objectionable part would be using a false/misleading name, but I don't see how this is fundamentally different than going to your competitor's stores plainclothed and checking what their prices/foot traffic are. As long as there isn't a restraining order/injunction specifically preventing them from doing such a thing, it seems fine by me. Moreover unless the marketplaces required an NDA they could have also conceivably gotten the same information from actual third party sellers.

mattmaroon 3y ago
It’s not even a false name if they’ve incorporated that way.

pixl97 3y ago

Secret? Walmart knew this years ago. HN thread on this from 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14602836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14602836

gwern 3y ago
The article says Walmart said it didn't know when they told Walmart.
refulgentis 3y ago
? That's a thread about Walmart telling vendors they can't use AWS, not a long article explicating Amazon selling merchandise on Walmart.com.

blackeyeblitzar 3y ago

I’ve heard that Walmart and Amazon also use various unethical means to scrape the websites of competitors to get pricing information and adjust their own items’ pricing accordingly. This feels a lot like the algorithmic price fixing that is now being scrutinized in the rental industry. I wonder if more attention should be paid to how these companies compete with each other, leaving aside the numerous other controversies around how they treat sellers, how they abuse sales data of manufacturers to compete with them with house brands, and their plain market power from size.

mistrial9 3y ago
small business retail in the San Francisco Bay Area has all but disappeared, it seems.. it apparently split during covid-19 lockdown into two -- "mega corporates" and "we just steal it and sell it at the local casual street market" .. with most things in between closing shop.. to be more complete, liquor stores with some retail items, and gas station chain stores still exist ..
- simfree 3y ago
  Only the businesses that did sufficent volume and had sufficient margins to cover the ever increasing cost of rent, loss of products due to theft, and vandalism have stayed open. The retail shakeout has been brutal in the urban core of Portland and Seattle as well, anywhere where there isn't nearby housing to create a walk shed that would allow smaller businesses to survive has seen something of a retail apocalypse. Single purpose office or commercial neighborhoods just aren't viable anymore, you need a critical mass of local customers adjacent your retail business for it to survive.
mattmaroon 3y ago
What’s unethical about scraping data from a public website?
- blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
  Rather than organically pricing their products, these bigger companies are setting prices to always match or undercut pricing elsewhere. This squeezes the advantage smaller players may have on pricing, and big players can afford to do so even at a loss. Another issue is that the bigger players may be essentially signaling their pricing to each other through their scraping, which can be a form of collusion and price fixing - this is what’s under scrutiny in the rental market where software is performing actions that would be anti-competitive for a human to do.

1-6 3y ago

Another more acceptable way of saying it is that they’re doing their due diligence.

mattmaroon 3y ago

This seems completely normal to me. They’re getting only information that any Walmart seller could see. When I worked for Sam’s Club in my youth, which is owned by Walmart, we would send people into other local membership warehouses to check their prices on things, and they would send them to us. It got to the point where we knew BJ’s guy and they knew ours. Who cares? When you run a business, you just assume that you’re competitors will figure out every little bit of information they can about you, and you will do it to them. And this is actually good for the health of the system in general, from a consumer standpoint. You want all of the businesses you interact with to be as efficient as possible because that’s what lowers prices the most for you. This is completely expected, uninteresting, and a giant nothing burger

wbl 3y ago
It hurts consumers. If you had two gas stations next to each other and they can see each other's signs their pricing will not be competitive because of tacit collusion vs if they can't see the price but consumers can.
- aspenmayer 3y ago
  I don't follow your reasoning here. Collusion to me implies preferential pricing, exclusionary terms of purchase or sale, or formal or informal agreements between separate businesses or their representatives or agents. Furthermore, I don't even know how you'd go about eliminating this practice if you tried. Secret shoppers have always existed and likely will always exist. I'm also reminded of sites and apps which offer shoppers incentives to scan and share their receipts, which is another way which this information could be gathered, not to mention enlisting the help of intermediaries such as Instacart, Uber Eats, and others. To your point, I would agree with your unstated belief that collusion and price fixing are objectively bad for consumers. I'm just not seeing price fixing or collusion occurring in your example or in the situations raised by the original post. The potential for such is definitely there, but performing market research and using such insights to guide pricing decisions is not going away. I don't even see a rational basis for why consumers should want it to go away, but it definitely is the thin edge of the wedge and a slippery slope.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Works where archive.is is blocked: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=1334487526038&w=d0SgTI-r7X1QPYItpJN0IcpWl2ddNQcI https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=1334487526038&w=d0SgTI-r7X...

niccl 3y ago

https://archive.is/t8fAB https://archive.is/t8fAB

WalterBright 3y ago

I've lived through all the days of "evil Walmart is an unstoppable monopoly taking over the world and eliminating all competition" and now I'm seeing "poor abused Walmart is being beat up by their ruthless competitor". Apparently monopoly is not the natural end game of free markets?

wkat4242 3y ago

Amazon has rivals? Here in Spain they're pretty much the only game in town these days when it comes to e-commerce.

kristjansson 3y ago

This seems akin to running secret-shopper research against competitors. Amazon sells a marketplace (among other things), makes sense to go see what it's like to transact with other marketplaces.

kcplate 3y ago

I think I read once that Sam Walton used to roam around KMart and other discount stores with a tape recorder noting prices. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.