WATCHOUT Amazon is Comming for your Private Label Product
Watchout Amazon Sellers, Amazon is comming for your Private Label Products
Read an interesting article on Bloomberg today, I'll link to it below...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
It tells the story of a company with a Private Label product, in this case a laptop stand. They had been selling it on Amazon for over a decade, had reviews into the thousands.
Recently Amazon pretty much copied their design and started selling their own Amazon brand laptop stand at less than half the price. Obviously this has taken a cut out of the Private Label companies sales.
This is becomming even more common as Amazon grows it's own private label brands.
Now Amazon is a great place to buy and it's also a great place to sell. Many people's businesses are built entirely on Amazon. At the end of the day it boils down to if you don't like it don't sell on Amazon.
It does kind of rub me the wrong way however. Sure people like you and me scour the Amazon best seller list and use programs like Terapeak and Jungle Scout to find popular private label products and create our own.
It's a little different with Amazon however. We pay Amazon a generous fee for sales on their platform and AMazon has access not only to our sales stats, but obviously also to the backend of our listings which include who makes our product, the dimensions, materials, colors, weights, etc.
If Amazon sees someone selling a product that's selling well Amazon not only knows exactly what products to copy and sell themselves, but has the entire product specs and keywords and all that rich background data at their disposal to hit the ground running and undercut us on our own products.
It's interesting I read this today as just recently I was contacted by the Amazon Vendor program, a program where AMazon buys direct from you wholesale. They wanted to sell a product of mine and wanted me to be their wholesale supplier essentially which is how the program works. I was thinking about not doing it as I didn't want Amazon directly competing with me on my own products, although now I'm thinking maybe it's better to supply Amazon as opposed to not supply them and them to just make their own version of my product, undercut me on price and start taking all my sales.
What do you think? Is this fair of AMazon to do?
Amazon is so interesting to me from so many angles. It is like investors have granted them almost unlimited money to try anything. It kind of makes sense for them to take people's well performing products and self label them. It is like you have said before. Amazon and eBay aren't your friends.....they aren't your business partners.....etc. P.S. I'm glad to see you are getting consistent votes now from a couple powerful accounts. I was surprised that you weren't getting put on whale voting lists before. Hopefully it keeps building and you are able to get a very solid amount each post.
Hey buddy thanks I was starting to get a little down that things weren't progressing further and then out of the blue most posts seem to be doing pretty well consistantly. Also finally got around to setting up SteemVoter so I can make sure I'm always supporting people even if I take a day off here and there, I have to figure out how to get premium so I can do over 25 rules. Very happy with how things are going lately and nice to see Steem price is up as well although I wouldn't mind a dip back down closer to a buck as I may load up my account a bit more.
Yeah, the computer I was running some other bots off of is off right now because of some work i'm doing around here but I need to adjust a lot of things because I was doing a lot of manual curation with the trailing bots following me.
My plan is to take a pretty solid position in STEEM Power in the next several months and I'm going to put myself in a position to be able to really focus in on content creation both on YouTube and on Steemit.
It makes a ton of sense to me at this point to be honest. The only downside is that right now it appears that around 50,000 SP is worth about a $7 vote which doesn't sound like that good of a return but to be honest with you the more Steem Power you have on here the more attention a person attracts.
I guess that is the way it is with everything. When a person is successful opportunities and more success follow suit.
Amazon doesn't care about anyone other than their bottom line. They see everyone that sells through them, brings them traffic, or products as expendable. Everyone thought Walmart was a bad company for years but they got nothing on Amazon. And it's only going to get worse. I still try to make money through them and with them but I'm not naive enough to think I matter to them.
Hey @bodyinbeta I totally agree with you. Personally I find it to be a bit unethical that Amazon charges sellers very high fees for selling and then turns around and uses our sales data to find hot selling products and then steal our business.
I would liken it to me offering people coaching, and then stealing my clients ideas and starting those businesses for myself.
I personally try to continue to support local retail. I was at a brewing store the other day with a friend. The guy at the store was super nice, spent almost an hour with us walking through the brewing process, explaining equipment, letting us try the beer he's brewed, etc.
At the end of our visit my buddy whispers to me "I can probably get this stuff cheaper on Amazon". While this may be true in a scenario like this I would gladly pay a bit more to support a local business and because I appreciate the gentlement taking the time to help me and educate me. Your not going to get that from Amazon.
Amazon's business structure aims at slowly monopolizing every sector of their market. They will come for you sooner or later