
Is Shopify Making a Big Mistake by Competing Against Amazon? - t23
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/08/21/is-shopify-making-a-big-mistake-by-competing-again.aspx
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jjohansson
Sounds like a great way for Shopify to take advantage of how small retailers
(and direct-to-consumer brands) distrust Amazon because of the conflict of
interest. They know that if they sell a lot through amazon, amazon will take
the sales data and use it to undercut those same retailers / D2C brands. With
Shopify there is no conflict of interest because they are a platform, and not
a retailer.

This sounds like a really smart move but it will be hard to pull off.

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simonblack
Amazon is making a mistake by throwing out its low-profit areas. Amazon no
longer allows me to buy used books from 3rd-party used-book sellers in the
States, so now I have to use newly-found online-sellers like 'Abe Books' or
'Alibris'.

But both of these online sellers don't just sell used books, they also sell
new books and other items which I probably would have bought from Amazon
previously.

Amazon has lost me as a customer, and no doubt many others as well with their
new restrictive sales terms. When 'important' companies start slavishly
following profits instead of customer service, they have peaked and are now on
their long slow decline to irrelevance.

(It was one of those 'aha!' moments, when I was looking at an earnings graph
one day, that I noticed that a company's decline always begins when they are
at their peak. It's self-evident from a graph of course, but not an intuitive
piece of knowledge for most people.)

