Sean, I just added a few things to my note. I'll try to copy/paste 'em here, although I suspect my sleepy fingers will goof up:
I haven't really reviewed what I'm posting here - heck I can't spellcheck at 12:30 in the morning:
Amazon, through its "Brand Registry" allows anyone with an issued trademark to take over other brands, whether or not the brand is covered by the specific goods that the trademark was issued for.
Brand Name Hijacking takes advantage of several bugs in Amazon's seller business model:
1) Amazon Brand Name Registry allows the owner of a USPTO trademark to take over listings of non-trademarked brands.
2) Amazon Brand Name Registry does not prevent a registered Amazon brand from over-reaching beyond the regulated goods and services associated with that trademark.
3) Amazon combines reviews of different item variations and colors, even though they are from completely different listings and manufacturers.
4) Amazon debits inventory even when an order is cancelled, allowing a denial of service attack to exhaust inventory in a seller's listing, at no cost to the attacker.
Effects of Brand Hijacking:
1) Shoddy or unproven products receive five-star reviews, apparently from several years.
2) Consumers, relying on Amazon star ratings, are grossly misled by the summary reviews.
3) Disreputable sellers are rewarded (at the cost of honest sellers) by large volume sales caused by high ratings.
4) Unscrupulous sellers of reviews receive money from Amazon sellers in return for inflated reviews.
5) Independent sellers on Amazon -- specifically those who have delivered extremely high customer satisfaction -- are locked out of their listings and pushed out of their long term business.
You forgot one. Amazon uses seller data to target which products they will produce under their own Amazon brand. So creative entrepreneurs eventually find they are completing against Amazon directly.
This is why Amazon will eventually be replaced by a company that can do things better, faster, and cheaper.
Walmart was correlating credit card information in the 80's. My mind still boggles at how poorly they have handled the Internet. If there is a company that can best Amazon and provide unique experiences with their tens of thousands of local warehouses (their retail stores!) it should be them. It's utterly mystifying that instead of leveraging their strengths they ran off and created a less functional clone of Amazon. Yikes!
Does Walmart operate outside the US? Because Amazon is pretty much everywhere around the world. If Amazon were to die tomorrow, I'd have a real problem getting a lot of equipment for various projects, especially PC hardware, in a timely manner. As much as I hate how things have gone downhill lately, it doesn't seem to be as bad (yet) over here in Europe with getting fake items. The main issue I see here, is that there's been a huge influx of cheap Chinese items which flood out all the known brands that I usually buy from, making it hard to find actual quality items. Prime is also still 69€/year. And they offer delivery to their own containers which you can unlock with a barcode on your phone to get your package 24/7, avoiding house delivery altogether, which is a huge reason why I still use them as opposed to competition, since where I live in is a real pain to find and often delivery people just give up trying to find me and just send the items back, or drop it at some shop at the end of their shift, which is often at the opposite side of the city.
In fact it seems most of the issues I see people complaining about on HN are US-centric issues? Perhaps all this brand-hijacking is happening over there because of the market size and thus pay-off to do the "dirty" work?
The Walton family that owns Walmart has a higher net worth than Bezos, according to google ($235B Walton vs $196B Bezos), so the owners of Walmart are still more wealthy than the owners of Amazon. And whatever they are doing in brick and mortar is orthogonal to Amazon, Amazon can't do B&M at the same scale, and Walmart can't do online sales at the same scale.
I haven't really reviewed what I'm posting here - heck I can't spellcheck at 12:30 in the morning:
Amazon, through its "Brand Registry" allows anyone with an issued trademark to take over other brands, whether or not the brand is covered by the specific goods that the trademark was issued for.
Brand Name Hijacking takes advantage of several bugs in Amazon's seller business model:
1) Amazon Brand Name Registry allows the owner of a USPTO trademark to take over listings of non-trademarked brands.
2) Amazon Brand Name Registry does not prevent a registered Amazon brand from over-reaching beyond the regulated goods and services associated with that trademark.
3) Amazon combines reviews of different item variations and colors, even though they are from completely different listings and manufacturers.
4) Amazon debits inventory even when an order is cancelled, allowing a denial of service attack to exhaust inventory in a seller's listing, at no cost to the attacker.
Effects of Brand Hijacking:
1) Shoddy or unproven products receive five-star reviews, apparently from several years.
2) Consumers, relying on Amazon star ratings, are grossly misled by the summary reviews.
3) Disreputable sellers are rewarded (at the cost of honest sellers) by large volume sales caused by high ratings.
4) Unscrupulous sellers of reviews receive money from Amazon sellers in return for inflated reviews.
5) Independent sellers on Amazon -- specifically those who have delivered extremely high customer satisfaction -- are locked out of their listings and pushed out of their long term business.