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Can you force Walmart to put your products on shelves? How is it OK for Hachette to force Amazon.com to put the physical books on shelves? One easy way to figh

• 001sky 12y ago
  Retailer's like wal-mart commonly extract rents for product placement. Comcast thinks this is a great business model. Paying such rents to comcast for "product placement" in the last mile? Not so clear cut for Amazon.
  • AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    This whole discussion turns on whether Amazon is a monopoly. That's the reason it's such a problem for Comcast to do it -- they have a hard monopoly on access to Comcast subscribers. You can't gain access to any Comcast subscribers by peering with Sonic, because the number of customers who simultaneously subscribe to multiple residential ISPs is effectively zero. Whereas you can sell your product to "Amazon customers" without selling through Amazon, because the percentage of customers who patronize more than one retailer is substantially all of them.
    • dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Whereas you can sell your product to "Amazon customers" without selling through Amazon, because the percentage of customers who patronize more than one retailer is substantially all of them. For online purchase of books? Not even close to "substantially all of them".
      • AnthonyMouse 12y ago
        Why is the market "online purchase of books"? Something is wrong with selling your book on the shelves at Walmart etc.? Even so, what barrier do customers have to purchasing at some other online retailer? Where's the insurmountable switching cost?
        • sedev 12y ago
          The market is that because the numbers say that's where the market is. What's wrong with selling your book at Wal-Mart is that the numbers say you will not sell enough to make a living. As for "what barrier," well, consider a website that is visible on Bing but not on Google. Go ahead and tell them "but visitors have no switching cost!" The cost of not being visible where customers are actually looking for you is very high indeed.
          • pooper 12y ago
            > The cost of not being visible where customers are actually looking for you is very high indeed. Does it constitute a monopoly though? I doubt the folks at Google love Amazon.com but if this became the sufficient to declare Amazon.com a monopoly, then the obvious next step is to immediately declare Google web search a monopoly. With over sixty percent of the eye balls (the last time I read any stats), Google would be in the cross hairs. I doubt that would be good for anyone.
          • AnthonyMouse 12y ago
            > As for "what barrier," well, consider a website that is visible on Bing but not on Google. Go ahead and tell them "but visitors have no switching cost!" The cost of not being visible where customers are actually looking for you is very high indeed. That isn't a cost to the customer, it's a loss to the supplier. The problem suppliers have is that customers have lots of competition to choose from. A customer might have equal preference for two books that each cost about the same amount and therefore choose the one which is easier to find. That choice makes all the difference in the world to the publisher but negligible difference to the customer. That's why the customer places such little value on searching for alternatives. Because there is negligible harm to the customer. If there would be customer harm, the customer could instead exercise the option to spend only the few seconds necessary to find the book at another retailer. Unfortunately for the supplier, there isn't, so the customer doesn't.