Sousveillance is one of the few acceptable use cases for these meta glasses that I can support.

Long time Amazon seller/brand here (and ex-academic/game theorist) -- it's a little more complicated if you think about the various parties' incentives, but yeah we have a half-assed market equilibrium that sucks for everyone.

Amazon as the marketplace facilitator has an interesting job to run:

1) It wants customers to get exactly what they want (as measured by the minimal amount of clicking/scrolling/time it takes for a customer to hit the landing page -> complete shopping). This is mostly customer-centric.

2) It wants to promote as much competition as it can between products and brands so that no seller dominates the market. This is... mildly customer-centric so big sellers can't rest on their laurels, and mostly self-serving (so no single seller/brand can gain enough power to threaten Amazon).

3) Amazon has to strike a balance of #1 and #2 so that there's some opportunity for new entrants to enter any product space. Back in the days they structured search so that some percentage of results would be new sellers and products, and new products would get some amount of sessions to prove they convert within a certain statistical distribution to land a certain rank (BSR). Note the rise of alphabet soup Amazon brands is partially because they allowed for disposable brands that could be black-hatted, and partially because for a few years these sellers were just generating tons of new brands to share new SKU real estate on search results (so when you searched for "small kitchen colander" or what not, you'd find the same product being sold by 10 sockpuppet sellers occupying 10 search spaces, taking result space away from the other sellers).

But what if they can get everyone to partially pay for #3? Enter ads, where basically new and old brands pay to play for eyeballs on Amazon.

So if you think about it, Amazon is a search problem where you wanna push results such that the expected value of the results pushed yield the highest expected value, something along the lines of: Expected Value (EV) of your product = [your sales price] x [your product's conversion rate in the past X days] x [some confidence level of said conversion rate] - [returns] + [whatever other Amz secret sauce] + [Amazon PPC]

Amazon can get people to pay for their eyeballs, swap some seller blackhat tactics for others, and more or less keep OK results. So that's Amazon's end.

As an established seller -- I know my product converts at X%, so as long as the math works out where I spend $Y/click, expect it to convert at X%, and my profit Z > Y * X it's what I do (and the tax I pay), and I move that up and down depending on my inventory situation. If possible, yes, I would pass some of that down to price raises as long as the market's willing to bear it, so I can make a minimum margin requirement off my Amazon channel (which is the lowest, compared to my D2C website or through offline B&M channels, but I do so because my biggest volume is on-Amazon).

As a customer... yeah the default search results are "good enough" for the 80-20 crowd; the convenience, ease-to-checkout, and 1-2 day shipping wins them over. As a "nerdy" customer who likes researching products to get the best one, I used to research via online reviews and reddit (most of which are gamified in their own ways)... but now I use AI (ChatGPT, *not* Amazon's Alexa Shopping because it's not great) and mostly call it a day.

Another PL seller here with a few brands and a couple hundred products:

"No brand name" flag is tricky because the Amazon catalog team actively does A/B tests to hide brand names as part of their goal of commodifying all the sellers to increase price competition, when they see you're selling a commodity item.

Same goes to wellknown brands that get caught in the crossfire because they're using their brand name from another language but don't make sense in English.

Agreed that it's an interesting idea, but execution has a LOT of false positives.

I run a remote-first ecom business with a dozen or so team members.

About a year ago, one of our account managers had a life issue, ghosted us, and she held a fairly critical role in the business and gate-kept a bunch of knowledge to some high value vendor accounts.

Because we ran our ops in Google Workspace, we essentially had off-the-shelf RAG and was able to get answers to a lot of things by asking Gemini to go through all her emails/docs/calendar/meetings, reverse engineer what she did, and create an onboarding doc for her successor.

This happened once more a few months later when one of our analysts broke his wrist on vacay, and we were again able to replicate what they did to cover for their absence, this time dabbling in AI agents ("gems") to do a bunch of the regular simple tasks and again it covered things without too many issues.

I def expect Amazon/shopify to at some point replace all of us brand owners with AI bots if they can, but we'll see how long the gravy train goes on.

If you're replacable by an llm, then you're doing something extermely poorly. They're terrible decision makers, have no taste and have little to no ability to infer nuance.

Your business should be fine for a long time (assuming an employee doesn't nuke your business's backend or something because it seems like you're doing something wrong on the HR side of things)

I love SMAC -- I wish they had a real sequel to this complete with storyline. Most Civ clones really don't nail the narrative feel of SMAC as you explore the planet and grow your settlements.

I see a buncha folks complaining about how the high end macbook laptops don't have color -- for what it's worth there's plenty of fun colors to be had from buying case covers and skins, but yeah they add bulk or interfere with heat dissipation...

(Have a MBP with fun case covers that I take off when I do a work presentation.)

I audibly LOLed mid-standup call, and now my entire team is playing with this and it looks like this is eating up what little productivity we have on Friday.

Thanks Endless Toil!

I’m very glad to hear someone else is laughing at this as much as me <3

As someone affected by this:

-The old kindles are great products that last a long time -I don't expect Amazon to support them forever, but kindasorta bricking them on their way out is a dick move -Jailbreaking is straightforward but this probably hits older people who are not very tech-savvy the most. Like quite a few others here, I too have an elderly family member who I had to help resolve this

I feel there's gotta be some compromise between letting old electronics age gracefully so they don't occupy landfill and a company's need to support aging products over a long time... though I'm not sure what's a good model.

Long-time Amazon seller/brand here, so here's the crux of the case:

1. Amazon is a search engine for product

2. It values being the cheapest destination for products (MFN most favored nation clause to sell on their website), and basically will suppress your listings from search if they can find you selling it cheaper elsewhere.

3. Amazon is def one of the more expensive ecom channels to sell, BUT they've got a huge audience as well due to decades of consumer-first policies, so sellers still go there because even if they have loyal customers with strong brand loyalty, you still end up with at least 30% of customers going to Amazon first after seeing your ads elsewhere + the lure of NTB new-to-brand customers you can acquire there.

So the crux of the case is dependent on whether they can do #2 with impunity -- which Amazon considers "consumer friendly" (but obviously it's win-win for them too).

I order from Amazon because of their logistics. For some reason Amazon can ship for free at the same price as the producer's Shopify page that wants to charge me insane shipping because I live in a remote location.

Yes, I understand the price fixing is why they aren't selling for less on their own site, but Amazon's superpower is logistics, not years of goodwill and brand loyalty.

Along that line: I know that Lowe's, Home Depot, Chewy etc ship to me with speed matching or beating Amazon's (at least above a minimum purchase), so if what I'm buying is sold by those companies, Amazon does not get that sale.

Amazon is hugely anti-competitive, but their moat can be surprisingly shallow in some areas.

What Amazon has shown the rest of the industry is that shipping matters. Others are learning, at their own pace.

I mean, 1-2 day shipping is a huge part of their consumer-first policy, which is why every seller has got to do FBA -- for the longest time until COVID, the algorithm heavily penalized FBM fulfilled by merchant from ranking in the search results.

Once FBA started failing during COVID due to warehouse restrictions + sellers and 3PL third party logistics centers really stepped up did FBM even become a thing (and Amazon smartly gave access to Prime badges for FBM sellers who could deal with stringent shipping times).

IMHO the other big superpower Amazon has is to force sellers to eat returns and provide retroactive refunds when a product gets recalled.

It can be 1 or 2 day shipping. That's normally what I get at my house in Ohio. But it can also be a lot faster.

I took a trip to Tampa not so long ago for a few days to hang out with an old friend who I don't see very often, and also to help him with a long list of technical stuff around his house. I flew down in cattle class with no luggage, which meant that I didn't get to bring anything in terms of tools or materials. That left me a bit out-of-sorts -- I'm used to having a work truck with me that is full of the tools and stuff that I find useful.

And we got into all kinds of projects. We got a lot actually-finished, and we had a great time doing that stuff together.

But there was a recurring theme: We'd need to buy some widget or other to move forward. So I'd fire up my pocket supercomputer and start looking to see if Home Depot or Best Buy or Wal-Mart or whoever had it locally, and then start to figure out some ideal factor of best price and travel time.

Because that's just what I know how to do. In my life, when I want to get things done today and doing that requires more widgets, then I have to get in the car and drive to the store to get them -- ideally, with a good plan in place first.

And he wasn't having any of that. Over and over again, he'd shut me down and say "No, look. Just order it on Amazon. They'll probably bring it over today."

And over and over again, I'd look on Amazon and: Sure enough. They brought it over today. Sometimes, with 3 different deliveries in a single day as projects progressed and our need for widgets changed shape. Sometimes, late at night.

I don't think we drove anywhere at all while I was down there except to tool around the neighborhood to find some yard sales one morning, and another trip to pick up more liquor and some Chilean sea bass from Costco.

exactly, and as a result you ended up paying 2-3x more for all those tools than if other businesses were allowed to compete normally

Eh?

I didn't address that specifically, but the prices were OK. They were within a sensible range of what local shops were charging for the same/similar widgets.

Sometimes Amazon was a bit more expensive (and they brought it over today). Sometimes, it was even a bit cheaper (and they still brought it over today).

The price was fine. It certainly wasn't 2x or 3x. It was always an OK price.

(Remember: Over and over again, I kept checking local stores. I didn't make that part of the story up. I didn't make any other part up, either.)

correct, amazon's policies made it impossible for local stores to offer a deal, making sure you pay the 2-3x inflated sum no matter where you go, instead of what the real cost would be if fair competition were allowed

I'm not sure if your point is that Amazon's price is too high (as you previously stated), or if your point is that Amazon's price is too low (as you've now stated).

But I am sure that I cannot accept both of these things being true at the same time.

What are you on about?

>IMHO the other big superpower Amazon has is to force sellers to eat returns and provide retroactive refunds when a product gets recalled.

I value free and easy returns above lowest price, especially in this day and age of rampant mis and disinformation. Which basically means I almost always buy from the big box stores (including Amazon).

Long-time seller/distributor here -- the main reason for this is mandated by brands, who want to make sure their MAP (minimum advertised price) is respected across all channels.

Basically different distribution channels (speciality shops, big box marketplaces, and ecom stores) have very different levels of overhead, so if each channel was allowed to set their own price, you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low).

This pretty much happened in the early 2000s-2010s so over time brands became VERY particular about enforcing MAP.

> you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low)

This is what I see happen in Poland with clothes and electronics stores, but I don't exactly understand what MAP is supposed to be solving here, given that the brick&mortar and on-line stores are literally the same entity/brand, and in case of clothing, they're also the manufacturer brand?

From my short experience with this - manufacturers want to ensure this internationally too. So then same product would cost around the same in Germany and in Poland. Otherwise Germans will check fit of shoes in German B&M store, then go buy it online from some Polish store for X% cheaper.

Manufacturer does not want that, because then it will lose most of it's distributors in Germany.

NB: Though I am not debating if it's right, fair or best for consumer. Just mentioning, what I've experienced.

So game-theoretically: if I know the price for an item is the same everywhere, I'll buy it at the place where I see it first (one of the big values of brick and mortar stores).

If I know I can go online and it'll be some % cheaper, I'll wait and order it online, defer my gratification for a few days, and end up with a cheaper product.

Not sure about Poland, but most B&M brick and mortar stores in the US are distributors/resellers of the brand, they buy for $4 and sell for $10, and their rent/labor/etc costs $3 and they profit $3. Another distributor let's say is an e-commerce website, they can setup a warehouse in a rural area with cheap labor so it costs them $1 and they profit $5... so they can afford to discount it to $7 and make $2... which the B&M store can't do because they won't profit at all.

And how does "click-to-reveal-price" help?

I believe that it prevents the price from being indexed (by dumb crawlers).

I remember hearing our marketing folks talking about enforcing MAP, at the company I used to work for. That company didn’t have the clout of Amazon, but we did sell premium kit.

For us, it wasn’t about money, as much as we didn’t want to ever be forced to reduce Quality; which included the shopping experience. We were concerned that outlets selling lower-priced kit, also had a worse shopping (and support) experience, which we believed (probably correctly) would reflect on us, and our most favored retailers.

Premium brands are often driven by factors other than just money. Brand reinforcement is a really big deal.

I literally don't get it.

You're interested in Quality above all else, fine.

You're upset that you have competitors who don't care about Quality, fine.

So you make your website harder to use, so that... what?

Don't ask me. I'm not in Marketing.

I was just sharing my experience.

But it's not the manufacturers that do that. It's the cheap-slingers. It's their Web site that has the "click to reveal price" button.

Oh! I see, that makes much more sense.

> if each channel was allowed to set their own price, you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low).

Um... and? That's quite literally "the market working as intended" and while I am not a free-market apologist by any stretch, that seems to be a rather benign effect.

What makes MAP especially suspicious in my eyes is that it's the manufacturers that seem to be overly concerned over well-being of one specific kind of their downstream buyers/distributors/resellers, not those distributors/resellers themselves. I understand that if B&M stores would try to impose that, then the FTC would (hopefully) smack it down pretty quickly but apparently when a manufacturer mandates the price to the resellers, it's perfectly fine? Somehow? Isn't there collusion somewhere in there, probably?

The problem with "the market working as intended" is you get unfortunate second-order effects. The brick-and-mortar is providing a valuable service by letting you browse, try things on for fit and style, feel the material, and hypothetically by curating products and trying to engender trust in their curation, only selling things of at least passable quality (some more than others).

Historically, you only paid for that service when you bought something, since most stores can't convince you to pay an entrance fee. When you go to the store to select products and then buy online, you're leeching on that service and putting the entire business model at risk. If everyone did that, brick-and-mortars would go out of business and you wouldn't have access to that service, which sucks for everyone.

+1 to this. I was around for the 90s and early 2000s to see when MAP wasn't tightly controlled by the brands; the B&M stores got destroyed because they simply couldn't price-compete because their footprint was way more expensive.

I do think that by not having physical stores, it directly/indirectly promoted a decline of product quality as well as misrepresentation of product, with Wish and Temu kinda exemplifying that to an extreme. Price differentiation is way greater now which I guess is a net positive to the consumer.

As a brand owner of midtier kitchen products (cheaper versions of designer OXOish products, but more expensive than your baseline Walmart stuff), our products look visually similar enough to both ends of quality, but shines more when a person gets to interact with the items themselves, feel the product texture, press the lever action, etc. So I do value B&M for their place in the economy and want to make sure they can have some margin (even though I'm selling the same thing in my Amazon store and Shopify and can make more money there).