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Just change the SKU of the product so they are "different". Big box stores do it all the time to reduce the probability of price matching.



What I've commonly seen is that the manufacturer offers a store-wide 20% or 30% off coupon, as a temporary promo and/or for email signup.

So the item price matches Amazon's, but you pay less in the end, if you're even remotely paying attention.

At least for the $200-300 items I've seen (like dehumidifiers, fancy computer accessories).


The weekly sales flyers that stores offer was/is another way around this as well. Some of them have coupons to specific items that are not allowed to have sales prices lower than the MSRP. Very few people are as draconian about their prices as Apple, but others sure wannabe.


> Some of them have coupons to specific items that are not allowed to have sales prices lower than the MSRP.

That's actually kinda disappointing. I'd always assumed those flyers were pieces of trash (at best, something I'd need to put in a recycling bin) which I don't want but now I'll be more tempted to take them when offered on the chance that I otherwise accidentally avoid the sales price.

It's still good to know that such coupons are likely just attempts by the retailer to circumvent the manufacturer's... ahem suggested price.


Coupons are a longstanding price discrimination technique. If somebody doesn't want to pay full price, you might still get their custom with a voucher. You don't want to make the discount too easy to find though, as you will miss out on revenue from people who were willing to pay full price.


ProTip: at some stores, employees are allowed to give discounts as well. i have 2 anecdotes from HomeDepot:

Since none of their lumber should ever be in the same building as the word "straight", I made a joke to a nearby employee that we should get a discount at how warped the wood was. He very seriously told me to separate the warped wood on my cart, and he'd mark them down. Got to the register, and they were marked down 40%.

Second instance was after spending time chatting with an employee in the appliances department, he pulled out a pre-printed, handcut piece of paper from his apron pocket, wrote 10% on it with his sharpie, and i got 10% off at the register.

Oh, and of course the Guitar Center stories of "you're a cool dude, and since I like you, let me knock of X%" are infamous


Amazon is not a court of law and need not be bound by this technicality.


While it may not be as simple as changing a SKU, Amazon is chock full of products made in the same factory, many with identical product images, sold under different brands at different prices, and many of the "brands" are the output of name-generators.

That actually adds to the problem: If you put effort and money into brand recognition you need to provide best prices on amazon, but Amazon is easier to game if your brand is xyxxy12345.


More than that... there's probably no real recourse. For the same reason you mentioned.


The real solution is an open source Amazon. What happened to Magento? Does it have any traction?

Why sell on Amazon instead of your own site? Can’t competitors to FBA spring up that have great logistics? Are there any? Can anyone link me to them?


This is a classic programmer response. The problem is not Amazon's software, it's their marketing, distribution network, huge audience that searches for products exclusively via Amazon, "free" and very fast Prime deliveries, etc. That doesn't all happen via simply open sourcing some code.


[flagged]


It's trivial to create a website (frontend and backend) that offers similar functionality to Amazon. There's nothing special about their software platform.

You can't open-source marketing and the insane delivery network Amazon has. Those, among other things, are the reason they are successful. They could release all of their software completely open source and literally nothing would change.


You're talking about the infrastructure for a specific seller, which in itself is by no means trivial.

What you want here is an open source replacement for Amazon's product search that will find products from multiple independent sellers. The hard part is probably how to curate it; you want to allow legitimate small sellers without allowing the thing to be filled with scams. But Amazon hasn't done a very good job here either, so maybe it's not a high bar.

And then a payments system which is something in the nature of GNU Taler.

Amazon's logistics is an advantage, but is it an advantage that can overcome the need to pay them a vig instead of having the product shipped directly from the manufacturer? Lots of people willing to wait a week for shipping if the price is 10% lower.


The infrastructure of a large ecommerce website is extraordinarily complex as well, as well as issues that arise with warehousing tech.


You can’t open source it but the government could nationalize it and make it a benefit to small businesses everywhere without the anti competitive profit seeking motives of a private business controlling it.


The original commented suggested that an open source Amazon was the “real solution.” Open sourcing Amazon’s software and then nationalizing their distribution network is a very different suggestion!


Expropriation is the first step to destroying the thing. There no reason for unbelievably good customer service if you get paid by taxpayers regardless of outcome.


The employees at my local usps are pretty good at their jobs. But they are all Korean ladies.


> VoIP dropped the price to practically nothing. Now we have videoconferencing all over the world.

Cool example you chose there. 99% of VoIP is actually closed source, proprietary solutions.

WhatsApp, Facetime, Skype, Telegram, Google Whatever, Slack, Teams, ...


No need to open source. Just to pick some examples to build something similar to Amazon's fulfillment part as it was like 6 years ago:

Shopify as the front end

CargoWise for transportation, warehousing and everything logistics

Which leaves some of the more sophistiticated stuff like demand ballancing across the network, but that is doable by either developing something in-house or throwing an ERP system into tue mix.

All available off the shelf as we speak. There are other reason why nobody manages to seriously challenge Amazon.


How do you get people to visit your site or use your app?


The basis of this entire case is that you can open your own shop and Amazon disallows you form competing with their monopoly. There are plenty of open source options to open a web shop. That part is almost laughably easy.


I vouched for this and un-flagged it.

I find most of your content here to not have any good follow-through.

Amazon isn't just some software on a few servers. It's a whole vertical enterprise. Suggesting that some front-end and back-end servers can take the place of warehouses, delivery people, fleets of machines (served by AWS no less), payment companies, 3rd party billing is just laughable, and shows the naivete of a sw engineer.

However, that last paragraph is terrible and absolutely true...

> Otherwise, at best, you are just reduced to begging Daddy Government to force these corporations to break up. How well did that work for Ma Bell? The pieces were still a cartel, still charged $3 a minute. What the government couldn't do in a decade, open source technology and open protocols did in a few short years ... VoIP dropped the price to practically nothing. Now we have videoconferencing all over the world. Because once we decoupled the software (AOL, MSN, etc.) from the infrastructure via open protocols, the infra providers became a dumb pipes competing in a free market.

I remember Ma Bell. Charged stupid prices for long distance, but was a good service. And then, the splitup happened. Did we get better services? Nope. We just got dozens of smaller monopolies all engaging in the EXACT SAME SCAMS that Ma Bell was broken up for.

It was when we started pushing data around and got away from POTS lines did we finally break the stranglehold of the baby bells. Even DSL has been basically thrown away, given how little the RBOCs dont want to advance and grow. Monopolies are like that.


Thanks for un-flagging. How does one become an admin on this site, anyway? I've been active since 2008 but still get dinged for stuff, not sure for what in advance.

Yep, I think we are in agreement. My point is that for many decades, the government was barely able to make the prices drop. And then open protocols like VoIP did it in a couple years.

I am a libertarian and believe that good open-source software and open protocols cause the centralized services to face a free market of incumbents. Much of the vertically integrated systems can be unbundled.

Another great example is how the Web (HTTP was the open protocol) disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe etc. Or how Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta. How Apache and NGiNX disrupted IIS. And so on.

Basically, we need standardized, open protocols. Maybe one day OpenStreetMap and Mastodon and BlueSky will disrupt their centralized alternatives. In any case, the first step is to have open source software and federation. I'm not saying it's the only thing that needs to happen, but FBA and many other services can be done "sharded" per-product. We can do the same for other marketplaces, like Uber, Fiverr, etc.


Thanks but I'm no admin. Anybody with some minimum amount of karma can "vouch" for a flagged post. You just click on a flagged post in the "$time ago", and a vouch should show up there.

Youve got 7k karma so you should also be able to vouch. Just make sure "showdead" is on in your settings.

As to the subject matter:

> Yep, I think we are in agreement. My point is that for many decades, the government was barely able to make the prices drop. And then open protocols like VoIP did it in a couple years.

Mostly, but probably not on the actual mechanisms. I do agree that government's breakup of Ma Bell really made everything worse. And how it was broken up went from 1 monopoly to 20+ monopolies. The end user really just saw stuff stay bad or worse. Now, myself being an anti-capitalist, would have looked at this situation, and go "Well, communication networks are an integral part of national security, and should be nationalized, since this company was abusing the people", and would have federalized it under a nonprofit charter.

As to claiming that VoIP helped supplant - nah. People got their taste with dialup of the internet, and at a whole 4.3KB/s , and wanted faster. A 3 minute (3MB) song was 11 minutes to download... and Napster. Dialup was stagnating, and the telcos were being slow about DSL. I saw DSL eventually, cable networks, and WISPs pop up like weeds everywhere, because more and more killer apps were showing up. And frankly, at the time, Piracy was the killer app. Bittorrent, Kazaa, Gnutella, Napster.

> I am a libertarian and believe that good open-source software and open protocols cause the centralized services to face a free market of incumbents. Much of the vertically integrated systems can be unbundled.

That's the problem with the unbundling. That's not a software or code issue. That's a money issue, primarily with folks who have piles of money can force things others dont want.

And with vertical industries, it's never been a user-level experience in unbundling. To really force the issue, it goes back to the government to force it. And the US doesnt have a good track history in doing that well. This problem is always been a coordination issue, where larger monoliths can do well from a dictatorial governance (companies).

> Another great example is how the Web (HTTP was the open protocol) disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe etc. Or how Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta. How Apache and NGiNX disrupted IIS. And so on.

It's disingenuous to lump all those together.

The "Web" was a group of academics and governments, that finally agreed to let capitalist and commercial groups in on 1993. And those groups also included corporate private networks like the ones you listed.

Wikipedia was the first real test of anonymous and user-level editing across a website, under newly created Wiki software. Sure, the 2 encyclopedias were killed by Wikipedia, but Wikipedia only hastened their death. Bulk books like encyclopedias were already declining. However, we learned a great deal about the ills of letting users edit webpages like encyclopedias realtime. And we're still fighting with those problems. (for example, you'd never see the "lists of Jews", aside a few high profile people in a proper encyclopedia, but here it is.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Jews )

You mention "disrupt IIS"... and I'm here on my work laptop with 2 IIS consoles open. Free is going to win out cost-wise, for things like startups and hobbists. But there's lots of industries who've developed and maintain in IIS. And in my industry, I'm not permitted to use NGiNX.

> Basically, we need standardized, open protocols. Maybe one day OpenStreetMap and Mastodon and BlueSky will disrupt their centralized alternatives. In any case, the first step is to have open source software and federation. I'm not saying it's the only thing that needs to happen, but FBA and many other services can be done "sharded" per-product. We can do the same for other marketplaces, like Uber, Fiverr, etc.

First, BlueSky is closed source proprietary spun off from Xwitter's former CEO.

I'm not seeing it. Well, a part I do. Having the software to start doing stuff your own direction is a good start. But much of this isn't a software problem. Its a logistics and integration problem, with a massive vertical integration across the whole thing.

Amazon's probably too big to break up. The individual pieces don't make that much sense individually. That's why I'm for taking control of said organization at the C level and BoD level, and start disassembling the illegal parts from the top down under full transparency and oversight. Maybe that'll be enough to scare other companies engaged in extreme monopolistic practices that thhink they are "too big to fail", will just be eminent domained.


You don’t just “spring” up to owning a nationwide network of distribution centers and 1M+ employees. It takes decades of work.


That's the thing people don't get about making competitors to Facebook, Twitter, and other centralized platforms as well.

You don't need to boil the ocean in order to serve a single community. For example, Facebook started in Harvard and its value to everyone in Harvard was based on how many people in Harvard used it, not how many people in the world used it.

Similarly, if a single product vendor and their customers form a community, then a free market of fulfillment companies can spring up to stock that specific product, and then partner with the delivery companies (who have their own networks) to deliver the package. You might say that the delivery infrastructure is a cartel, but they're open to everyone and Amazon has been relying on them until finally spinning out their own. Same goes for CPU chips that Apple relies on etc.

Look at IPFS for example, competing with AWS for storage. It is growing every year and now powers 1% of all storage worldwide! And there is a free market.

Whereas these platforms are all centrally controlled by some billionaire (Zuck, Musk, Bezos) and his crew. You don't need to have their scale because you don't need to serve ALL COMMUNITIES IN THE WORLD on day one. If you have an open source software like Wordpress or Magento, you can serve your customers with web hosting instead of Shopify or Amazon. Now the only question is, who would do fulfilment.


You are correct, but note that one very key edge that Amazon used to as a competitive edge is no longer available to new entrants in the business. For the first 15 to 20 years of Amazon, they were able to be cheaper than their competitors due to the fact that sales tax only had to be collected in states where they had a nexus.

This gave them a pricing advantage which drove more customers to them which they intelligently plowed back into the business in building out their own network, no small feat of course.

A newer competitor would no longer have access to that simple sales tax advantage, and so would have to find something else to compel customers with. Barring that, Amazon/Walmart/Costco/Target/Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy are tough to compete with because they already offer rock bottom pricing and they don’t have to invest in a ton of new infrastructure for logistics.


Not to mention the advantage of having investors willing to burn billions for a decade+ until you got into a dominant market position to finally become profitable. Not always easy to get access to that.


When Facebook was founded there was no Facebook. Now there is a Facebook.

When there's a better alternative customers are less likely to try out your new, less good idea.

Can you give an example of someone serious using IPFS instead of S3? I don't really get what "all storage worldwide" means.


Except there was a Facebook and it was called MySpace. Facebook won because people enjoyed using it better.


yes, but the bar for better was much lower back then. if you released the original Facebook today it would be so obviously so much worse than the competitors it wouldn't get any traction.


When FB was founded there were:

  MySpace

  Friendster

  Whimit - Russians online (LOL)
and many other small examples. There was still AOL, MSN, etc. There was a time when they ruled.

The only reason that FB, Google and yes Amazon were even able to launch, is because the open permissionless web disrupted AOL, MSN etc. Imagine them allowing Amazon to launch on top of them. They’d cannibalize them just like Amazon cannibalizes sellers.


All of those had 10% of Facebook's current users, at best, and probably 1% of their spare cash.

Scale matters. You seem to be a programmer, you should know that.

Quantity has a quality all its own.


> Similarly, if a single product vendor and their customers form a community, then a free market of fulfillment companies can spring up to stock that specific product, and then partner with the delivery companies (who have their own networks) to deliver the package.

One thing that gets overlooked in this is returns.

One of the big draws of Amazon is easy returns.

Whenever you have decentralized fulfillment centers, returns become a huge pain, because the fulfillment center that is happy to take your money and ship you the product, doesn't want the liability of dealing with returns.


Amazon has also optimized returns (for itself) by making its sellers eat the cost of those returns, one way or another. That's not all that controversial, but when you consider what Amazon recommends people buy, it becomes obvious that they have no problem recommending garbage because they don't care if it gets returned. They won't eat that cost. They get the profit from the sale, then let everyone else work it out.


Magento was badly designed- infinite levels of directories. Good luck on upgrade. There’s plenty of self hosted online stores. That’s hardly the problem.


I did a single contract for a Magento site and decided never again.

It was like a group of Java developers decided to write PHP code and it was horrific. I would estimate 80% of the classes in that codebase didn't have any implementing code in them.

Literally the only thing I liked about Magento was it's ability to outline everything that was being rendered to make it easier for you to identify the changes to templates you needed to make.


What does "open source Amazon" even mean?


Every Prime member gets commit access...


Sellers want Amazon’s audience


That's the same trap that TikTok influencers and others fall into.

You are sold "the dream" by showing top sellers / influencers / etc. and told you can be like them. Kevin O'Leary became a meme for promoting this bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuqemytQ5QA

In fact, even the top influencers can be deplatformed in an instant, and their speech is controlled. And same with Amazon. But the thing is that the people you never hear about, the "middle class", are far more controlled and the "long tail" produces all that free content that basically gets almost new views / buys but all that free sharecropper content is then used to train AI models or provide proof of large available inventory / product / content BY THE PLATFORM that pits them all against each other in a zero-sum game.

https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/117oh1m/the_upper_c...


> Kevin O'Leary became a meme for promoting this bullshit:

The women is Amanda Lang,[1] and the two were a 'duo' for many years with a business/finance reporting show. I'm not sure how she managed to put up with him for so long. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Lang


which is easy to compete with for a government platform.

in a lot of countries it would save a lot of money if the tax office had direct access to the product and purchase database. Thousands of people could move to more useful jobs.


Courts also are not bound by technicalities like this typically!


Ought to be bound by an actual court, though.


Big box stores have a lot more leverage than a small seller on Amazon, who'll just get the "that violates our policies, we're nuking your business, no appeals" treatment.


Amazon are notorious among writers for nuking the accounts of Kindle Unlimited authors who have had their book pirated.

Apparently this violates the content monopoly KU is supposed to have.


And also increase the shrinkflation.




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