Well it took a bit of time! Now what are they going to do to fix this mess!
The FTC is looking into the Amazon and Apple deal that crushed small resellers
FTC Looking Into Impact of Apple's Sales Agreement With Amazon on Independent Resellers
Apple-Amazon deal may be illegal, is being investigated by the FTC
Absolutely fantastic. John @rdklinc is doing a really great job driving this forward.
6 Comments:
Thanks Kyle! It's been an interesting day, to say the least. Much more media stuff coming. :-)
by rdklinc
@danj thanks! Honestly, I think the big companies need to be broken up. These activities are what happen when you have monopolies, and I don't think it's reasonable to "manage the monopoly". Our constitution is pretty clear that government is supposed to be the referee in the game of capitalism -- to look out for the little guy and break up monopolies when it's in the public interest. Just because our government has been negligent and allowed the disease to spread across the whole organism doesn't mean that the obvious fix isn't still the solution. If government had been doing its job all along it wouldn't have gotten this bad and the necessary solution wouldn't be so dramatic.
by rdklinc
@rdklinc I wouldn't say break them up, but we need to tell them not so kindly to pound sand with garbage like the AmazonxApple deal.
We just need to set some clear boundaries. Just because some idiot poorly refurbished a MacBook from 2011/12 you probably don't want to support doesn't mean that deal was ever okay. I haven't shopped at Amazon unless I absolutely have to since - and I doubt I'll change my ways once the FTC kills that deal out of principle. I'd sooner go anywhere else even if it requires planning.
by Nick
@nick This has nothing to do with a poorly-refurbished 2012 MacBook -- those are still for sale right now by Renewed sellers, and those sellers are receiving poor feedback as we speak. The deal occurred because Amazon was willing to dump the marketplace in exchange for Apple allowing it to sell new products directly on the website. It's a financial decision that both sides agreed would make more money -- that's it.
It is not tenable that we allow monopolies to be maintained, i.e. we cannot "manage the monopolies". It is a laughable idea that monopolies will learn anything by receiving a slap on the wrist, or a $5B fine. They own the world and by their very nature will continue perpetuating this kind of activity. To allow monopolies to be maintained because we are too cowardly to do anything about it is unconstitutional and I would say fundamentally un-American.
by rdklinc
So basically, in order for a small business to sell anything through the Amazon Renewed program, they have to move roughly $10 million in inventory per year. I’m no expert in business, but if you ask me, $10 million in inventory doesn’t really coincide with “small business” practices, especially when there are tens of thousands of e-commerce businesses. Hopefully we can get a good outcome from this after the FTC finishes their investigations!
3 Comments:
$10M, plus the inventory has to be purchased from approved vendors. So yeah, it's a very small club at this point, and I think the vast majority of marketplace sellers were dumped.
by rdklinc
@jogihara - Yes, its a don't bother me approach!
Some of this has to do with reselling of stolen gear, some is the related to sources of the parts and their quality.
I suspect what riled Apple was the backdoor selling of parts and reselling systems that where fixed but fixed poorly so the person goes to an Apple Store and gets the news the system is not repairable. So Apple gets a black eye.
I've had good and bad luck across all of the markets I've bought equipment and parts from. I don't have an answer but killing it was not what I had envisioned.
Some of the ways eBay works should have been looked at. Maybe for larger small sellers would have been some sort of bond held in trust. But how to manage the site is the bigger nut.
by Dan
@danj honestly, people speculate that these types of things are the reason for the Apple-Amazon deal, but I don't think they have anything to do with it. I've been tracking dozens of "Renewed" sellers, and most of them have crap feedback ratings, and feedback which indicates Amazon is suffering from the same old problems. I had 100% perfect feedback, and my account was perfect by every metric, so if it was about quality of product and quality of service, they would have kept me onboard. But it's clear it has nothing to do with quality. In fact, most of the dozens of Amazon employees I've talked to are so completely clueless that they don't even know about the Amazon-Apple agreement, and I have to inform them of it. It was a high-level agreement made between people who aren't even aware of the issues you speak of, and I think it's really over-thinking the issue to speculate it has anything to do with quality or common sense problems that people on the ground doing actual work would experience.
by rdklinc
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