Submission + - Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? (theguardian.com)
mspohr writes: But Amazon’s fee isn’t 10%. Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the “Amazon tax” on your behalf, it couldn’t. Merchants just don’t make 51% margins.
Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist.
Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a “service” in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.
Now Amazon is in the terminal stage. We’re all still stuck to the platform, but we get less and less value out of it. And because we’re all still there, buying Prime and starting (and ending) our purchase planning with Amazon’s enshittified search results, the merchants who rely on selling to us are stuck there, too, earning less and less from every sale.
The platform has turned into a pile of shit, and we’re at the bottom of it.
A rival – and frankly terrible – theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality. This is the consumer welfare standard theory and its premise is that when we find monopolies in the wild, they are almost certainly large and powerful thanks to the quality of their offerings. Any time you find that people all buy the same goods from the same store, you should assume that this is the very best store, selling the very best goods. It would be perverse (goes the theory) for the government to harass companies for being so excellent that everyone loves them.
Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don’t use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist.
Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a “service” in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon’s own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.
Now Amazon is in the terminal stage. We’re all still stuck to the platform, but we get less and less value out of it. And because we’re all still there, buying Prime and starting (and ending) our purchase planning with Amazon’s enshittified search results, the merchants who rely on selling to us are stuck there, too, earning less and less from every sale.
The platform has turned into a pile of shit, and we’re at the bottom of it.
A rival – and frankly terrible – theory of antitrust law says that the only time a government should intervene against a monopolist is when it is sure that the monopolist is using its scale to raise prices or lower quality. This is the consumer welfare standard theory and its premise is that when we find monopolies in the wild, they are almost certainly large and powerful thanks to the quality of their offerings. Any time you find that people all buy the same goods from the same store, you should assume that this is the very best store, selling the very best goods. It would be perverse (goes the theory) for the government to harass companies for being so excellent that everyone loves them.
Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? More Login
Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?
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