They did the unscalable part. That better? Are you happy now? Can you go find something else to nitpick?
> finding some cheap garbage on AliExpress that you can sell with instagram ads isn't actually all that hard
It's very hard. What you're missing are all of the thousands of people who try it and fail. And you see one person succeeding and say that's easy, they're just buying shit from China. No, they combined skill and a lot of luck to find a product in China people want. That's not just ordering shit from China. If it were, Amazon would do it themselves and cut out all of these middleman. Which they can't, because it's not scalable. Which was my original point.
Unscalable is not synonymous with hard for the vast majority of people. If you communicate confusingly, you'll be asked for clarifications. That's not nitpicking and you can avoid it by using words for what they're for.
> What you're missing are all of the thousands of people who try it and fail.
It's not easy or hard. It's lucky. It's getting your ad seen in the right place with the right audience and taking off with enough sharing to build virality. Then your store will do a brief burst of good business before you fall back into irrelevance and continue.
It's highly analogous to gold rushes. And then as now, the people who get reliably rich off gold rushes aren't mining gold, they're selling shovels and pickaxes, namely: hustle influencers, shopify, and indeed, Amazon.
> That's not just ordering shit from China. If it were, Amazon would do it themselves
Buy some Amazon Basics stuff and check where it's made, then get back to me.
> and cut out all of these middleman
Which is what they seem to be doing.
Like again, for emphasis: Amazon is not a good guy here. They are neutral, at best. But I have very low sympathy for people who build their entire way of life on one single platform that could at any moment tell them to kick rocks. It's bad when YouTubers do it, it's bad when instagram influencers do it, and it's bad here too. And all of these usually end in similar ways. You're only as good as your last post, your last sale, your last quarter of profits and if your and the platform's interests diverge enough, you'll be dropped like a flaming bag of dogshit.
> Unscalable is not synonymous with hard for the vast majority of people.
> It's not easy or hard. It's lucky.
Great, thank you for teaching me about the English language. None of this addresses a single thing about my point, it's just nitpicking my choice of words.
Use whateeeeeeeever words will make it through your compiler, insert those in place of mine - and that's what I meant.
> Buy some Amazon Basics stuff and check where it's made, then get back to me.
> Which is what they seem to be doing.
Nitpick 2, Electric Boogaloo. Now you have a problem with the way I've used some other words or the absence of some qualifiers.
> Use whateeeeeeeever words will make it through your compiler, insert those in place of mine - and that's what I meant.
Until I do it incorrectly, and then I'm deliberately misconstruing your point into something you didn't say. Or if I do it in a way you feel makes you or your argument look stupid, at which point I'm arguing in bad faith.
No thanks. If you'd like to discuss things I'm happy to do that, that's why I'm here as Obi Wan says. But I'm not responsible for steel-manning your point for you because you lack vocabulary.
> Nitpick 2, Electric Boogaloo. Now you have a problem with the way I've used some other words or the absence of some qualifiers.
This is still not nitpicking. You have repeatedly put the notion of product acquisition on a pedestal, including the fact that pulling goods from China is this difficult, laborious task (which, it does take labor, that is true). But Amazon knows how to do that, it's basically how it became the retail juggernaut it is.
And that includes Amazon Basics products, which without even looking at one, I'd be willing to bet non-insubstantial amounts of money are manufactured mostly in China. That doesn't make them inherently bad: Chinese firms will make your products as good or as bad as you're willing to pay for.
No one is nitpicking. They just don't buy your argument."nitpick" implies a person is addressing a minor detail and not addressing the central point. This person, and the comment above (by me) is directly addressing the central point you made, and saying it's weak.
Building all the infrastructure required for FBA is much more difficult than choosing products. The proof is in how many people have done one v the other. Amazon does a decent job on both sides - building the infrastructure, and figuring which products to sell, at scale (they do 100's of billions of non 3rd party sales every year).
And it's still wrong. Amazon does 100s of billions of 1st party sales. As does Costco, Walmart, Target, and probably a dozen other stores I'm not aware of. It scales, big time. Choosing products to sell when you have a giant distribution engine is one of the most scaleable things in business.
If you want to trot out the principle of charity, it goes both ways. You assumed people were nitpicking. It was wrong. Every way you want to spin it by changing words, wrong.
> Amazon does 100s of billions of 1st party sales.
And the remainder is not scalable. All of that done by their sellers. As evidenced by the fact that they are not doing it themselves.
I'm beginning to think this thread is being astroturphed. All of you are employing an identical strategy of latching onto minor issues with how things are phrased. A standard PR tactic. And Amazon has a long documented history of astroturphing.
You are human? You must be amazon's first gen astroturfing infra, mechanical turk style. I'm part of amazon's skunkworks Astroturf-LLM service. Automated, at scale astroturfing. I believe we will make it public facing via AWS soon.
> finding some cheap garbage on AliExpress that you can sell with instagram ads isn't actually all that hard
It's very hard. What you're missing are all of the thousands of people who try it and fail. And you see one person succeeding and say that's easy, they're just buying shit from China. No, they combined skill and a lot of luck to find a product in China people want. That's not just ordering shit from China. If it were, Amazon would do it themselves and cut out all of these middleman. Which they can't, because it's not scalable. Which was my original point.