Saturday, November 25, 2017

The Ugly: Amazon

The Ticker has been on a tear regarding Amazon for quite some time.  After Amazon last reported earnings, Ticker showed that Bozos (friend of Obozo, why not?) is (effectively) losing about 20% on every product he sells. 

So long as the company can draw investment capital, losing money is NOT a big deal, and there's the advantage of putting your brick-and-mortar competitors out of business in the interim!!

But it gets worse!

Mike Molson Hart, who sells toys on Amazon.com Inc.’s marketplace, realized earlier this month something was amiss. His company’s popular disc-shaped plastic building set, called Brain Flakes, had dropped precipitously in the ranks of Amazon’s best-selling toys as the critical gift-giving season approached.

He visited the product page on Amazon.com and suspected he was the victim of "sniping," when one merchant sabotages another by hiring people to leave critical reviews of their goods and then voting those reviews as being helpful, making them the most prominent feedback seen by shoppers
.

(More at the link.)

Killing the competition, no matter the method, is one of the features of unfettered capitalism, by the way.  A variant of this technique is the "LIKES" scam of Facebook, and the "5-stars" ratings scams of other sites--but that's another story.

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