Amazon “supporting” small businesses

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image showing Amazon “supporting” small businesses

digitalcoppersmith on December 23rd, 2020 at 05:25 UTC »

I think it’s from this recent wsj editorial

Honestly, when I heard bezos had covid I smirked a little (Edit: this appears to be false. Heard it from a friend whose brother works for Amazon and took it at face value. Thanks to u/Noxium51 for letting me know better. There’s nothing in the news that verifies it. The smirk part, however, is true and tbh I’m “mildly” disappointed with the truth)

Edit: if you can’t get past the paywall here’s the key para...

At its height about a decade ago, Pi­rate Trad­ing LLC was sell­ing more than $3.5 mil­lion a year of its Rav­elli-brand cam­era tripods—one of its best­selling prod­ucts—on Ama­zon, said owner Dalen Thomas.

In 2011, Ama­zon be­gan launch­ing its own ver­sions of six of Pi­rate Trad­ing’s top-sell­ing tripods un­der its Ama­zon­Ba­sics la­bel, he said. Mr. Thomas or­dered one of the Ama­zon tripods and found it had the same com­po­nents and shared Pi­rate Trad­ing’s de­sign. For its Ama­zon­Ba­sics prod­ucts, Ama­zon used the same man­u­fac­turer that Pi­rate Trad­ing had used.

Ama­zon priced one of its clone tripods be­low what Mr. Thomas paid his man­u­fac­turer to have Pi­rate Trad­ing’s ver­sion made, he said. He de­ter­mined it would be cheaper to buy Ama­zon’s ver­sions, repack­age and re­sell them than to buy and sell them on the terms he had been get­ting; he de­cided not to do that.

Ama­zon sus­pended Pi­rate Trad­ing cam­era tri­pod mod­els that com­peted with the Ama­zon­Ba­sics ver­sions re­peat­edly, Mr. Thomas said, al­leg­ing his tripods had au­then­tic­ity is­sues. Ama­zon rarely sus­pended the tri­pod mod­els that didn’t com­pete with Ama­zon­Ba­sics ver­sions, he said. In 2015, Ama­zon sus­pended all Rav­elli prod­ucts, he said, and even though the sus­pen­sion ended, his com­pa­ny’s tri­pod busi­ness is now a frac­tion of the size it was. Mr. Thomas said he found be­ing a seller on Ama­zon too risky and has largely piv­oted to real-es­tate in­vest­ing.

desexmachina on December 23rd, 2020 at 06:46 UTC »

Amazon does the exact same thing to its employees. The turnover in product managers is breathtaking

jgacks on December 23rd, 2020 at 07:58 UTC »

He did this to diapers.com at one point THE cheapest place to buy diapers. Amazon price matched every sku on diapers.com and under bid them. They did this for years until diapers.com went out of business. Within a month diapers prices shot up. It's how they operate. They are a terrible business that everyone, myself included loves to use. We need to regulate them!