
Amazon Makes Good on Business-To-Business Threat - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-11/amazon-amzn-makes-good-on-business-to-business-threat
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freyr
If there B2B quality control is anything like what they offer to consumers,
I’m not worried. They cannot pull the blind eye to counterfeit garbage like
they do to their consumers.

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wastedhours
Am really intrigued by this line - I've never had any reason to suspect my
Amazon items in the UK have been counterfeit, whereas it seems like a common
refrain in the States. Greater reliance on the third-party market and
intermingling stock? Or radically different product base?

~~~
eloisant
Apparently, the problem is that for a given SKU they'll mix up (on purpose)
all marketplace vendors items, for items sold by third party but delivered
from Amazon.

Let's say you're selling Tickets to Ride on Marketplace (counterfeit products
are common for board games). You send 100 copies to Amazon, now customers can
buy those from you.

I also sell Ticket to Ride on Marketplace! But I'm a cheap bastard so I send
100 counterfeit copies from China, with lower quality (off-centered chips,
cheap prints, etc.)

Instead of sending your copies to your customers, and my copies to my
customers, they'll dump all of our copies all together and send a random copy
to each customer.

That means that any customer can receive counterfeit copies. You can't even
trust a given vendor, or Amazon, because all the copies are mixed up.

~~~
saiya-jin
That sounds like properly dumb approach to save a penny on an item -
understandable with some quick grab scam scheme, but not something to do when
building/maintaining long term business.

I guess some manager got his yearly bonus for lowering expenses to next
bottom, and who cares about the future because f*k 'ya all.

~~~
codyb
I imagine a lot of the reason they mix vendirs products together has to do
with logistics. If seller A sends 100 units of product X to the East Coast and
seller B 100 units of product X to the West Coast it has to be immeasurably
easier to lump them together (not physically but electronically) then
distribute this 200 units out to all their warehouses for faster shipping.

It makes a lot of sense if everyone's on the up and up. That way you ship 20
units from Vendor A to NJ to cover the NYC metropolitan region for both vendor
A and B.

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anonymous5133
Selling on amazon is like making a deal with the devil. You have to sell on
amazon to get access to amazon's customer base but at the end of the day if
you are selling a lucrative product with little moat then amazon will copy cat
it and sell it for less.

~~~
unicornmama
Amazon can copycat products not sold on its platform. No barrier to entry
businesses all share the same competitive vulnerability.

~~~
astura
But it doesn't know the sales numbers of items sold on other platforms and the
details of who is buying it and what else they bought, etc.

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tryptophan
Amazon didn't threaten anyone, in case you were wondering. They simple
expanded their bushiness-to-business selling operation to roughly 10B$ after
entering the market 3 years ago.

~~~
onetimemanytime
$10b here and $50b there and they'll own it all. Shipping is the sticking
point but they're working on their own FedEx /UPS ...

At some point you trust Amazon and don't care that Walmart might have a
certain item $3.70 cheaper...win some, lose some is the rationale but "Amazon
is cool"

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kart23
Amazon isnt cool though. They dont carry good brands, half the stuff is fake,
the other half is ads. We all hate Amazon, but use it because it's so darn
convenient.

~~~
pjc50
Is the fake stuff a problem in the EU, or is it an artefact of poor consumer
law?

~~~
CaptainZapp
Generally fakes are a no!no! within the EU. Obviously not all fakes are caught
and if they are the minimum consequence is confiscation.

In countries with strong brand manufacturing interests, notably Italy and
France, it can be very expensive if they catch you with that 50$ "Bolex" watch
from Bangkok, or with fake LV gear. Fines can go into the 1000s of Euros.

~~~
eXpl0it3r
Wearing one or selling one?

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CaptainZapp
Ownership is enough.

~~~
jolmg
That doesn't seem right, putting the burden on the consumer to know if
something is fake or not. Also, what if the consumer doesn't care if something
is fake? For example, if he needs a watch, just needs it to tick and tell the
time, then a Bolex is as good a brand as any other, I would think.

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ncr100
Although it may not legally be one it feels like Amazon is Monopoly.

~~~
repsilat
Amazon is nothing like a monopoly.

If you want to sell something online you can do it in any number of places,
and you can do it yourself (and fairly painlessly). If you want to buy
something online, you can go to any number of retailers. You can get an Echo
from Best Buy if you want, and you can get towels delivered from Walmart etc
etc.

Ditto cloud computing, of course -- it's an incredibly competitive market.

Amazon does have large market impact and can (in a practical sense) exert
market pressure. That's obviously a dangerous position for everyone to be in,
but it's far from monopoly and it's also (afaik) well within the bounds of
(American) law. As I understand things, US antitrust laws are all about
_abuse_ of market position, not just the existence of a dominant position.

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homero
Amazon keeps saying there's discounts on the b2b site but when I joined I
don't see any difference.

~~~
paulirwin
I'm pretty sure the "millions" of customers number is artificially inflated
with people that just want those discounts. I bought some tools on Amazon for
regular household use, and then recently I got prompted to create an Amazon
Business account simply because I bought tools. Promising vague discounts by
signing up for a free account is a good way to get more "customers". I wonder
if all purchases from then on count as "business sales"?

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HenryTheHorse
* "B2B" is a catch-all term. There's indirect/MRO procurement and there's direct procurement. It's very hard to break into direct procurement without also owning the product/manufacturing. So yes, that does mean Amazon is going to go after the bigger MRO market. (This is a space they excel in already.)

* Amazon is operating in the marketplace model, not just in the conventional e-commerce model. This means their inventory can be MUCH BIGGER than anyone else's with FAR LOWER operating risks. This is what is worrying Grainger and others.

* Also worth noting that Amazon has more or less given up on product quality and instead, chosen to focus on Fulfillment and Supply Chain quality. With a marketplace model, that could lead to major headaches (while still giving the B2B buyer perfect delivery and a great price!).

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LeifCarrotson
This is just the latest push of their "AmazonSupply" and "Amazon Business"
systems dating back to their 2005 "Smallparts.com" acquisition.

Like Grainger, they used to be well-curated sub-sites where you could do your
parametric sorting and filtering to drill down to "the" O-ring or other part
you needed. But also like Grainger, they've fallen behind on their curatorial
efforts and now it's more difficult to locate the right part among all the
noise.

To supply a B2B part like an O-ring, you need to categorize it. You need to
ask every. single. distributor. the same set of questions - composition,
diameter, thickness, firmness, temperature rating, oil resistance, etc. Then
allow your users to parametrically search and sort to drill down to the
part(s) they need.

Digikey has this internalized - If you're building a web store, go to Digikey
and pretend you're an electrical engineer. Find, say, a 22k surface-mount
resistor in an 0603 package, 0.1W or greater, cut tape form factor, in stock,
5% tolerance. Boom, done. Now find that on Amazon. Allow a customer to come to
your site with a list of requirements who wants to find a product on your site
and try to make it as easy as it is on Digikey.

Ebay does not have parametric search internalized, nor does Craigslist - but
they're much more seller-focused than Amazon. Grainger does not, and they're
loosing business because of it. McMaster Carr curates their offering down to
one distributor, which makes it really easy for me, but is a rather hamfisted
way to solve the problem. Still, I'll always start my search for McMaster-
supplied stuff on McMaster. Alibaba does not. Newegg used to, but they're
losing the curation battle as they follow Amazon's model of 3rd-party
distributors listing whatever they want whereever they want. Amazon does not
have this internalized.

Amazon has been trying to have their cake and eat it too: They want to provide
a curated section of their site that's easy for customers, and want to make it
easy for sellers to sign up and list products. If you require each part to go
through an onboarding process and fit somewhere in the hierarchy, you increase
the friction massively for sellers. As a customer, I really wish that they
would do so everywhere. If they want to just do this for the subset of
customers that aren't willing to sort through the mess, but still allow
vendors to come in droves with poor-quality categorization, it will still be
hard to use and people will choose specialized distributors that are willing
to do the work.

[1] [https://www.digikey.com/products/en/resistors/chip-
resistor-...](https://www.digikey.com/products/en/resistors/chip-resistor-
surface-
mount/52?FV=1c0002%2C400005%2Cii2%7C1127%2C1f140000%2Cmu2.2+kOhms%7C2085%2Cffe00034%2C80002%2C80003%2C80026%2C80004%2C8022c%2Cc0002&quantity=100&ColumnSort=1000011&page=1&stock=1&nstock=1&datasheet=1&photo=1&pageSize=25)

