How Amazon Steals Sellers’ Info to Gain Competitive Advantage & Control (Wall Street Journal)
How Amazon wins by steamrolling rivals and partners.
Amazon sellers, you have to read this article. Before I get into the vital information that’s in this article, I want you to know a little bit about the journalist. Dana Mattioli has written some of the best articles around when it comes to the issues that face each and every one of you.
Here’s one. Amazon Restricts How Rival Device Makers Buy Ads on Its Site, how they actually restrict sellers from competing against Amazon, who has such a huge portion of the marketplace. The sellers out there who got notified by the attorney generals about price gouging because Amazon gave them your information, here’s another awesome article by Dana. Big Tech Companies Reap Gains as COVID-19 Fuels Shift in Demand. This is all about how Amazon crushed it, and other big tech companies took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic while putting you at significant risk when you weren’t doing anything wrong.
This journalist is extraordinary. Read her articles. Specifically, we’re going to start talking about her latest article, How Amazon Wins by Steamrolling Rivals and Partners. Guess who those people are getting steamrolled? You, Amazon sellers, private label brands, and brand owners, large and small.
Dana’s article first talks about the insane growth that Amazon has achieved by its aggressive competition, both fair competition when it was growing, and what is seemingly extremely unfair competition as Amazon goes and takes your information from your plans of action, your invoices, your addressing inauthentic complaints, and then potentially uses your information against you to compete.
The good news is Amazon is getting pushback. It’s getting pushback from big websites and big retailers. Smaller companies are also fighting back. Amazon has been taken to court. There are lawsuits out there. There’s one in particular mentioned in this article where Amazon settled. Why do you think Amazon settled? Likely because it knew it was going to get devastated in that lawsuit.
Now Shopify seems to be a target of Amazon. So Shopify, we are here to help you.
Brands, we’re here to help you and assist in any way, shape, or form to make sure that Amazon sellers have a fair platform to compete on and don’t get their legs cut off simply by the power that Amazon has.
We also know that the state of California has been looking at Amazon for years. In fact, my partner, Anthony testified in Sacramento about how Amazon uses your information to then compete against you and make the playing field unlevel and unfair.
We know that the United States government has become involved. There’s the House Antitrust Subcommittee, the Justice Department’s investigation, Europe’s antitrust regulators have become involved. If you look at how India has treated Amazon, India has passed laws that prohibit the owner of a platform from selling on the platform. Why did they do that? Because it protects the businesses in India so that it can sell without being devastated by Amazon itself.
There’s not a seller nor a brand that wants to be the next diapers.com. And Dana discusses in her article what Amazon did to destroy diapers.com, where it was losing up to $7 per package, just to devastate the business and force diapers.com to sell out to it.
What are Amazon sellers looking for? What do I think would be good for you?
I think more laws that prohibit Amazon from using your information to compete against you would be a good thing. I think limiting what Amazon can or cannot do with the money it holds of yours would be a good thing. But I’m not in favor of Amazon getting broken up. I don’t think Amazon has reached a level of Ma Bell, at least not yet. I also think that if Amazon was broken up right now, it would harm seller’s interests.