Wait, do you not believe Amazon is selling that type of real time, customer collected data to competitors based on the information they comb from Clients?


They are. Their defense is that is 'generalized' and not specific so its ok.

And that is why I say new legislation is needed to deal with it as this is NOT something that happened prior in the Retail sector. There was not this real time algorithmic info that could be reacted to instantaneously by AI. Companies prior had to make 'guesses' based on past data about what might trend or happen TOMORROW. A very imprecise science that had a cost to those making wrong guesses.

The SCIENCE now is such that these REAL TIME, BIG DATA moves are not guesses. They are SCIENCE and absolute.

You company may spend a ton of marketing dollars trying to build interest in certain markets in a certain geographies. These are risk dollars you are spending and in some cases you lose (get no ROI) and in others you win (get ROI).

That cost of marketing and sales is averaged out in to your Cost of Goods sold or Customer acquisition cost.

It impacts your pricing of your good, as you need to recoup the 'losers' within the winners thus requiring a higher Margin.

Amazon sits back, has its platform watch 'search activity' in those regions you went after, and 'purchasing trends' and with none of the costs of developing that market, if they see a buying trend emerging, they can flood that market and your identified customers with goods priced cheaper than your and featured more prominently on their sites search and thus easier to find.

Amazon does not have losing marketing campaigns to cost average in. They just utilized yours (their Clients) data to target you.


That is not right. That is not equitable.

I have time and again defined what I see as the important distinguishing difference and you time and again ignore it stuffing strawmen.

The distinguishing and differing, DEFINING, factor here is the REAL TIME, application of BIG DATA and AI.

Historical entrepreneurship, and Sales Campaigns assumed a level of risk and reward. That risk and reward, for lack of a better term, kept companies more honest. Kept competition more FAIR.


If you owned your own Grocery Channel with multi stores and you decided to launch your own private label products to compete with your clients, you had to take a ton of time examining historical data (past sales) and spend a ton of money launching and promoting your own competitive brands. You would have to decide region by region understanding that past data, while predictive of future behavior is not determinant of it.

Meaning you might have a lot of losers. You may have many failed Private Label launches.

Amazons access of REAL TIME, big data, as I mention above is a C Change in that model.

Perhaps to you, that C change difference does not matter. To me it so significant that it cannot be ignored.

I will not repeat it as my example is just above. You can comment why you think it would be 'fair practice' for Amazon to do that if you care to.

Wal-Mart:

Kroger:

Albertsons:

Winn-Dixie:

Yes this Big Data thing is not solely limited to Amazon. I never said it was.

I was comparing how prior practices are not as invasive and problematic as this new Big Data one is.

it is problematic across the board. And it is a relatively NEW problem that needs to be addressed.

And there are levels to Big Data.

Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple are the Kings of this mountain by far but even the first 3 there probably outpace Apple by quite a bit since Apple is still largely a proprietary ecosphere company.

Even Walmart with its retail girth pales in that area but they are determined to catch up and have the resources to do so.

No, they're not selling that sort of data to competitors. Nor are they giving/selling it to their own private label division. I'm absolutely certain they have policies and procedures in place to strictly and specifically prohibit doing either.

You are wrong.

Not only does Amazon sell that info directly to a company I am involved with, and any other who wants to buy it. They use it extensively for their own benefit.

The company I am involved with pays for notices when ever there is a CURRENT surge in buying in any of a few key areas they watch and sell in amongst other data they get.

Any company can do that if they know how to interpret the public information amazon provides with sales rankings and price changes. Companies don't actually do that because there are tools like Keepa that track those changes on a hourly basis and will even notify a company of changes in their segment or competitors' sales. But there's a world of difference between that and amazon's sales dept notifying a company of their competitor's sales spikes or whatnot based on private, (real) real-time sales data.

I am not sure we are discussing the same thing here.

You can ABSOLUTELY pay for alerts from Amazon for all sorts of granular real time data including search activity and sales activity by region generated by their client companies.

This is absolutely combed from Amazon client companies real time info such how much searches for them or their products (a forward indicator) go up and how much sales activity is going up (a current indicator).

Amazon can and does use this same info for their white label products in competition versus those same Client companies thus using their data against them.


What Amazon does not do is provide the SPECIFIC data about client companies. No competitor will get a notice that XYZ company sales are spiking. They will get generalized, no name industry info, in Real Time that contains the info I have indicated.

From personal experience, stop talking about this....you could be jeopardizing your job, as I'm sure you have an NDA. I'm not trying to tell you what to do, but these companies don't play when and if they find out this type of information about their business is being shared.

This is not secret stuff despite you being unaware of it going on.

I'm more aware than you (100% guaranteed), but cool, you do you. I was actually trying to be helpful.

Just a misunderstanding. When you said:
I thought you meant the SPECIFIC data:

Haha, obvious by your comments that is not even remotely true.

You still do not understand the nature of and impact of new Big Data and this has been a new area of learning for you all through this thread. You started first saying nothing was different and this always went on until i showed you Big Data was a relatively new phenomena so that was impossible.

You then tried to equate normal retailers utilizing some big data to Amazon showing again you have no comprehension of the state of things.

Anyway I am glad you now have learned from me to the point you think this is very serious and you need to give me an ominous warning about it.

I've brought you a long way.

Understood.

So ok then, when you thought the Data Amazon was utilizing and selling had the specific company data on it (these company in these regions [named])]} are having search surges and sales boosts in the following regions in which they spent money to build that surge and generate that interest, you thought that would be highly wrong and illegal and Amazon would never do it.


Now you accept (or knew) that Amazon is instead just genericizing the same data (there is a surge of searches and sales in these regions), and it has the same impact on the companies (named or not) who spent the money to build up that surge and interest, as competitors (including Amazon) use the data to jump in and compete and grab up those sales, do you not see it as still a problematic and anti-competitive practice?

Easy there dude, don't you know who you're talking to? He worked in Executive Escalations!

It's not ideal. But in terms of the overall good of the market, preventing it and thereby removing the incentive to develop the tech that makes it possible would be worse.

ya but that is a false binary.

The technology is very valuable. Creating a market place and amassing and selling that data is very valuable as Facebook, Expedia and others show.

Yes Amazon sees one more layer of 'low lying fruit' in the profit line that is entering in and competing against Client companies they determine are vulnerable by using their data against them. And as such they create companies or white label products to do so, but there is no reason to believe that the Market place and Big Data sales would not be created otherwise.

Especially when Amazon created the MarketPlace and collected the big data before white labeling competitive products.

Even if Amazon was forced to spin out, as a wholly separate company, the White Label Products companies, there is no reason to believe either entity would not be able to compete and be successful.

And if they cannot compete and be successful than that is the biggest reason to break them up as they can only compete due to this parasitic advantage.

So you chase the lion off and the hyenas get the hapless entrepreneur. Like they say, if you don't want to get sheared don't be a sheep. Or, in gentler marketing speak: Find a market large enough to be profitable but small enough to defend.