Amazon is Poised To Unleash a Long-Feared Purge of Small Suppliers (bloomberg.com) 100
Two months ago, Amazon halted orders from thousands of suppliers with no explanation. Panic ensued -- until the orders quietly resumed weeks later, with Amazon suggesting the pause was part of a campaign to weed out counterfeit products. Suppliers breathed a sigh of relief. Now a larger, more permanent purge is coming that will upend the relationship between the world's largest online retailer and many of its long-time vendors, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. From the report: In the next few months, bulk orders will dry up for thousands of mostly smaller suppliers, according to three people familiar with the plan. Amazon's aim is to cut costs and focus wholesale purchasing on major brands like Procter & Gamble, Sony and Lego, the people said. That will ensure the company has adequate supplies of must-have merchandise and help it compete with the likes of Walmart, Target and Best Buy. The mom-and-pops that have long relied on Amazon for a steady stream of orders will have to learn a new way of doing business on the web store. Rather than selling in bulk directly to Amazon, they'll need to win sales one shopper at a time. It's one of the biggest shifts in Amazon's e-commerce strategy since it opened the site to independent sellers almost 20 years ago.
Monopoly! (Score:4, Insightful)
Also expect prices to rise along with Amazon's profits.
You will have less choice and pay more. That is your role as a consumer.
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Nah, I'll just go to eBay instead... Oh wait, I already do that.
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Funny story.
I went to order something from Amazon but I couldn't because it was prime only (I don't buy enough stuff to justify a prime membership) and I was OK with that because reviews were low due to incorrect product details. Essentially, the wrong item was being shipped. So...I'll just order it from eBay which was about a dollar more for the 8 dollar item compared to buying it from Amazon.
I get the item and it comes in an Amazon envelope. And it was the wrong item shipped. I talk to the eBay seller and
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Still go with eBay. eBay is getting a cut even if the order ends up going through Amazon. Chances are the seller is buying on Amazon though a discounted gift card or using an Amazon credit card with a larger % off. They're buying it cheaper from Amazon than you generally can unless you put a lot of time into it. The result is Amazon doesn't make as much and its competitor makes more than zero.
Another possibility is the seller is using Amazon to hold their inventory. Amazon sells its warehouse space to
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Chances are the seller is buying on Amazon though a discounted gift card or using an Amazon credit card with a larger % off.
Or cashing out a stolen card. That's a standard technique for cashing out stolen credit cards, it's called triangulation fraud. If that exact thing happened to me, I'd automatically suspect triangulation.
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That's interesting.
I've never come across a "Prime Only" item....I mean, I've seen items that get the 'free' two day ship with Prime, but I've never seen an item that was not offered for sale at any price to a non-Prime member.
Can you give example(s) of products like this?
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Don't forget that shoppers aren't Amazon's customers anymore, they're Amazon's product. And they're being sold not just to Proctor and Gamble but more importantly to the endless number of chinese scammers whose fake inventory will be deliberately mingled with genuine products.
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Or maybe, just possibly, this change by Amazon is a recognition that they're failing their customers and a mechanism they've identified to improve the provenance of their products.
Maybe.
Re: Monopoly! (Score:1)
I'm guessing this will backfire (Score:5, Funny)
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3 day? It's 1 day shipping with Prime, often 0 days because it arrives in a few hours.
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I doubt it will backfire. Amazon has to face it: they simply can't double dip. They can't be the trusted source for products and the flea market where anyone can sell their grey market garbage. Modded funny. Am I missing the joke?
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They can't be the trusted source for products and the flea market where anyone can sell their grey market garbage.
A good first step for them would be a clear separation between their own wares and 3rd party offers. Because elswhere, I've read reports that identical products just lend in one big bin, including Amazon's, and from which seller you get it is pretty random.
Which is fine in theory, but it requires that your sellers make at least some effort to sell only the correct items and discard broken and damaged stuff. If you mix items from a bunch of slobs and outright fraudsters with things you sell under your name,
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No, but Amazon might lose $150 billion in revenue if they banned third party sellers. It seems like they want to continue making money.
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I didn't notice any difference in selection or experience during "the purge"*, when I selected new/used, as I often do. Of course there's a difference between manufacturer, supplier and (re)seller. It'll be interesting to see if there is any difference in selection when the next purge occurs.
*That all sounds very dramatic
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They are already all on eBay. Usually the same stuff from the same seller on eBay is cheaper than on Amazon, because Amazon fees are much higher.
The difference is often 50%. I think part of it is that Amazon makes returns easier too and hands out refunds very quickly, where as eBay gives the seller more opportunity to put things right and avoid the return shipping cost.
Probably an inventory/counterfeiting problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
Random guess here but I've heard that consumers have ended up with counterfeit products even when the product is sold by Amazon.com. Apparently, Amazon would take products from third-party sellers, and commingle with their own stock in order to make the inventory-keeping easier. When third-party sellers sold counterfeits, then the fakes would make it to Amazon customers. So I don't know if that's why Amazon wants to get rid of the smaller players and just buy in bulk.
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Random guess here but I've heard that consumers have ended up with counterfeit products even when the product is sold by Amazon.com. Apparently, Amazon would take products from third-party sellers, and commingle with their own stock in order to make the inventory-keeping easier.
Yes commingling of bulk items is a huge problem, and the important part in this article is:
focus wholesale purchasing on major brands like Procter & Gamble, Sony and Lego
Meaning if you order P&G rash creme you can start expecting that it actually is instead of the crap shoot it is now. But for non-wholesale goods, Mom-n-Pop's holistic rash creme will still be in their own bin.
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I kind of doubt you'll get "prime" shipping on items not in Amazon's warehouse. I may be interpreting this incorrectly, but it sounds like Amazon won't be purchasing in bulk from small companies but those small companies are still allowed to sell their products via the Amazon market place.
It sounds like Amazon doesn't want to deal with the small firms inventory alongside their own. The small firm will now have to ship individual orders instead of just bulk shipping to just Amazon.
In short, it's not a good t
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You've got that backwards. Amazon's ditching all of the Mom-N-Pop sellers with products nobody is counterfeiting in favor of megacorps and the massive horde of chinese scammers selling counterfeits of those. You are not the customer, you are the product. Amazon is selling you to the two, particularly the latter.
Re: Probably an inventory/counterfeiting problem. (Score:2, Informative)
No.
Currently Amazon will buy from a small shop in bulk, then warehouse those items until they sell. Or eventually get dumped for a loss to free up inventory space.
What they're doing is halting the bulk orders on anything that doesn't have a major brand backing it, or doesn't regularly sell enough units to justify the cost of warehousing it for the producer.
Nobody is getting kicked out. The smaller shops will have to go back to the regular method of properly anticipating demand, and then producing enough to
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I'd prefer Amazon cull any duplicate items (same brand item, but allowing different brands of the same) from third parties that they also sell.
Then they'd be a shop, not a marketplace.
I'm happy that they allow multiple vendors (including themselves) to compete on price, delivery and reputation when offering the same underlying product. I just want to be sure that I'm getting the product from the vendor I chose, so that when I avoid 'suspiciously cheap dodgy vendor with low ratings' I don't get an item provided from them anyway.
Re: Probably an inventory/counterfeiting problem. (Score:1)
And rather than purchasing from a bunch of smaller resellers of rash cream, Amazon buys from the source. Should reduce their "item unavailable" problem.
Re:Probably an inventory/counterfeiting problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, Amazon would take products from third-party sellers, and commingle with their own stock in order to make the inventory-keeping easier.
No, that's kept distinct (I used to work for the fulfillment side of Amazon). However, stock from different third-party sellers can be mingled. People shopping sometimes don't understand the distinction between "shipped by Amazon/Prime" and "sold by Amazon", so you get a lot of confused stories - which is itself a flaw in Amazon's model.
Amazon should never have allowed items on the main store page that they weren't going to vet for quality, at least as far as blatant fraud. And they never should have mingled items from different third-party sellers in their distribution centers.
When you click over to the "Amazon marketplace" page with a list of sellers, prices, and ratings, it's very clear it's a flea market and you need to shop carefully, but the main page gives a false sense of security that IMO has betrayed user trust.
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I just went to the amazon.com home page and searched for "marketplace". The only result was a link for "Credit Card Marketplace". So what the heck are you talking about?
This is the main store page for an item: https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Ul... [amazon.com]
This is the marketplace page for the same item: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offe... [amazon.com]
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So I don't know if that's why Amazon wants to get rid of the smaller players and just buy in bulk.
It appears they're going to end the co-mingling, and stop buying those "fulfilled by Amazon" products in bulk. Not get rid of any sellers. But those sellers will have to do their own shipping. Which means they don't need a human to manage the relationship with that seller unless the seller is leasing warehouse space. Use of that will go up.
Then the warehouse space they save they're going to use to carry more stuff big-brand, mainstream items that they sell directly. So the total amount of bulk orders they'r
Really bad plan (Score:5, Interesting)
A big reason of why I shop on Amazon is to be able to look at a wide selection of stuff from various suppliers.
If the only results I get mirror those of Walmart and aren't as comprehensive as some place like NewEgg, why would I continue to shop at Amazon?
Amazon does have an issue with counterfeit items, maybe this is the only way to fix that problem. But it sure does not sound like that is the primary reason behind this change.
May well cancel Prime coverage if I start finding search results there weak. Could not happen at a worse time for Amazon as Disney Plus spins up and people may start to decide that they don't need to be paying for Prime for video alone, when they can have Netflix and Disney...
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I might buy something 'fulfilled by Amazon' but otherwise, nope, Ebay.
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The 3rd party sellers honestly get in the way and the whole site is a mess because of it.
Amazon Marketplace was and is a significant contributing factor to the success of Amazon. I doubt they want to get rid of it. They'd lose like 60% of their revenue.
Chipped brake pads (Score:2)
I think wasn't from Amazon but from an auto parts supplier selling through Amazon.
First time I did this it worked out OK. A year or two later I needed to change brake pads on another car, and the parts arrived with chipped ceramic material in the pads. Sent them back got another set, also blemished, asked for a refund that I cheerfully received and paid more for them without such damage at the local auto-parts store.
Now maybe this is only cosmetic because the missing pieces are only over a small frac
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I wouldn't install chipped ceramic pads either. It's fine for composite or metallic pads, though.
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I think it is more like this:
X brand Y product is sold on Z page on Amazon.
3rd party seller puts item on Z page. It's not X brand, either blatantly or is a counterfeit, or faulty some other similar reason. Z page gets angry reviews of fake/crap products, and Amazon loses money and confidence. So to keep confidence on Y product, they want to figure out who is counterfeiting and why, does test for a few popular Y products on Z page before a bigger rollout and ban.
And now we're at why the article exists.
This
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You're close to how it works. You search for Y brand of Z product. After scrolling through thousands of counterfeit listings by chinese scammers you finally find X page. You buy Brand-product YZ from page X. Amazon's warehouse has mingled inventory from a billion chinese scammers P1-P100000000. They ship you chinese knockoff PZ without ever telling you.
This is not an accident, it's deliberate. Chinese scammers P1-10000000 are amazon's customers. They're the ones paying Amazon for Amazon's principle product:
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For certain items, NewEgg's product selector engine is worlds better than Amazon's, so I reward them with my business.
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Is there a cock you won't suck?
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The claim is not that they are going to necessarily* offer fewer SKUs, but that for specifically the big name brands they are going to only order wholesale and not through third-parties. For the more obscure SKUs they will still buy third-party.
*: I could see a second-order effect where a third-party sold a mix of big name brands and obscure SKUs where without the brand name sales they don't do enough sales volume to stay open even if their gross margins are positive.
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This made me laugh. We should all be so mad to cut our dicks off at least once in our life.
As long as he's not doing it to spite his balls.
Get rid of the crap (Score:3)
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they could also fix their reviews policy.
I bought a thing, sold from a company but fulfilled by Amazon, no reviews but I took a risk because the description and pictures were exactly what I needed. The thing was the wrong thing in the package.
They returned it, but they wouldn't let me leave a review that described it as the wrong thing in the package. I suspect that the product has zero reviews because they're blocking reviews for those that ended up with the wrong thing, so customers keep buying it and k
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The $200 book thing is because there is some downside to the seller withdrawing an item that is out of stock. I can't remember exactly, some fee or limit on per day listings or something. So they just set the price to some silly amount no-one will ever pay instead.
CamelCamelCamel is a good way to handle that. That site will send you an alert when the item drops below a certain price.
Re: Get rid of the crap (Score:2)
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Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Sell your soul to the Devil, he'll eventually come to claim it.
ebay is back (Score:2)
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Check out:
https://www.thriftbooks.com/ [thriftbooks.com]
Mostly $4-5 USD, at least for paperbacks.
And I've also been eBaying a lot (I can't believe how much Paypa, listing fees, l and shipping cut into things for convenience, but it is just that).
alibaba says thank you (Score:2)
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I was going to make a comment about this being a great reason to spawn a "Mom and Pop Amazon". I think you're right, though. It's much more likely Amazon just sent Alibaba an engraved invitation to come and eat its lunch.
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Seriously, this will be quick pick up for allibaba.
... or Ebay.
Live by Amazon... (Score:2)
Something something eggs something something one basket...