Quote:
Originally Posted by John21
I'm sure amazon would make a lot of money doing so... until the gov't took it all back and sent both parties to prison for engaging in corporate espionage. Plus, amazon supplying that sort of granular, time-sensitive sales data would allow two competitors to effectively collude on price fixing or market division/customer allocation. So no prudent company would buy that data even if amazon offered it.
Like I've said, I get what you're saying and why you're saying it, but the only avenue I can see towards that end is getting the courts to rule in a fairly broad way that retailers can't go into competition with their vendors and doing that will require a substantial deviation - basically a paradigm shift - from precedent.
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.