Amazon has illegally monster-ed its way to online retail dominance.
Amazon’s No-Profit Model: Bleed Competitors to Death – Then Do Exactly What They Did:
“A key component of Amazon’s murderous business model – was operating for a quarter century making…almost no money whatsoever. And for many quarters at a time – actually losing coin.”
How has Amazon managed to become the world’s dominant seller of…everything — operating at a three-decade net loss? By cheating….
Amazon’s Secret Weapon: Cloud Subsidizes Retail:
“For the first time ever Amazon separated retail revenue from cloud services during a quarterly briefing last week and guess what? Amazon is a lousy retailer. It reported a loss of $57 million on $22.7 billion in revenue….
“Retailers have always suspected this, but now they have the facts. Amazon is subsidizing its retail division from profits made from cloud services.”
In general, I am not a huge fan of antitrust law:
“Laws to protect trade and commerce from…unfair business practices.”
I certainly don’t think we need any of the new, awful antitrust expansion bills currently being considered by Congress.
We need only existing law to deal with Amazon’s egregious antitrust violations. In fact, we should have imposed existing antitrust law on them decades ago.
What Amazon does is decidedly unfair to every retailer on the planet that doesn’t have a multi-billion-dollar-per-annum side hustle to subsidize its retail business. Which is…every retailer on the planet not named Amazon.
And since Amazon sells everything, they are cheating every other retailer on the planet.
Amazon’s multi-billion-dollar-per-annum subsidies of its retail allow them to artificially undercut the actual market prices of everything they sell. Which is inconceivably unfair to everyone else:
“Black Friday in brick-and-mortar retail circles – is the day after Thanksgiving, and marks the start of the Christmas shopping season. It is called Black Friday because most retailers operate in the red (i.e. at a loss) – all year until then. It is that day they break through into the black. So obviously, Christmas for them is life-saving crucial.
“Amazon knows this. So what do they do?:
“‘Amazon is cutting prices ferociously on its products as Christmas shopping picks up, to levels that are break-even or below.’
“They cut prices to sell at a loss – right in the heart of retailers’ most important time of the year.
“Lather-rinse-repeat for a quarter century – and Amazon…(becomes) the biggest of behemoths – crowding out more and more and more competitors.”
All of the above is a quintessential example of “unfair business practices.” So, too, is the following. Only the following is exponentially worse than just that….
Amazon Copied Products from Its Sellers to Offer Them Cheaper and Position Its Own Brands
Amazon engages in mass Intellectual Property (IP) theft. Then Amazon engages in mass unfair business practices to favor the sale of the stuff it stole from you — over your stuff:
“Documents revealed by the Reuters agency show that Amazon has used private data of its sellers in India to copy its most popular products and offer them at lower prices, in order to position its own brands on the platform.”
Amazon demands LOTS of data from its victims — oops, I mean sellers. Which they then use to better steal their victims’ stuff:
“The internal documents also show that Amazon employees studied proprietary data about other brands on Amazon.in, including detailed information about customer returns.
“The aim: to identify and target goods – described as ‘reference’ or ‘benchmark’ products – and ‘replicate’ them….
“The 2016 document further shows that Amazon employees working on the company’s own products, known as private brands or private labels, planned to partner with the manufacturers of the products targeted for copying.
“That’s because they learned that these manufacturers employ ‘unique processes which impact the end quality of the product.’
“The document, entitled ‘India Private Brands Program,’ states: ‘It is difficult to develop this expertise across products and hence, to ensure that we are able to fully match quality with our reference product, we decided to only partner with the manufacturers of our reference product.’ It termed such manufacturer expertise ‘Tribal Knowledge.’”
Does Amazon limit its mass IP steal-and-sell to just India? Heavens no:
“As part of that effort, the 2016 internal report laid out Amazon’s strategy for a brand the company originally created for the Indian market called ‘Solimo.’
“The Solimo strategy, it said, was simple: ‘use information from Amazon.in to develop products and then leverage the Amazon.in platform to market these products to our customers.’
“The Solimo project in India has had international impact: Scores of Solimo-branded health and household products are now offered for sale on Amazon’s U.S. website, Amazon.com.”
The stuff Amazon stole from India isn’t just for sale in India. Do you think Amazon has limited this industrial, institutional, systemic IP theft to just India?
Do you think they devised an IP theft plan this deep, detailed, and intricate, and then only used it in one country? Puh-leeze.
Amazon Accused of Cloning Vendor Products and Undercutting Them – 2019
Small Businesses Say Amazon Has a Huge Counterfeiting Problem – 2019
Is Amazon Unfairly Copying Products? EU Quizzes Merchants – 2018
Amazon Uses Data from Third-Party Sellers to Develop Its Own Products – 2020
Got a Hot Seller on Amazon? Prepare for E-Tailer to Make One Too – 2016
Stolen Designs? Copycats On Merch By Amazon – 2017
Allbirds Tells Amazon It Forgot to Steal the Most Important Part of Its Shoe – 2019
Oh: And Amazon pretends to be a Venture Capital (VC) company – to be an even evil-er stealing company.
Amazon Accused of Stealing the Ideas of Startups That Pitched Them:
“Startups who met with Amazon for potential investment say Amazon soon launched competing products.”
Amazon has now cheated and stolen its way into being a MONSTER (Market Cap: $1.74 trillion).
So imagine this:
Say you spend your life savings – working on, developing, and finally, successfully creating a product.
And then you offer your product for sale on Monster Amazon’s website. Which you pretty much have to do. Because Monster Amazon is now basically the only game in town — because Monster Amazon has spent the last three decades murdering nigh every other retailer on the planet.
And then you watch Monster Amazon steal your product — and then rig their searches to favor their product and bury yours.
Oh: And Monster Amazon can charge a lower price for your product than you can because it cost Monster Amazon nothing to steal it from you.
What about it are you and your empty wallet going to do to Amazon and its FAT wallet and armadas of attorneys?
Everyone knows the answer is nothing.
You know it.
And Amazon knows it.
So going forward, no one will invent anything ever again.
Because why would they if they know Amazon will then simply steal it?
So we all get poorer and our lives worse.
Because Amazon is murdering IP creators — just as it has murdered retailers.
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