system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Amazon is essentially ruining the E-commerce industry by trying to be a monopoly.

I was selling for Amazon.com after getting off eBay.

I went off eBay because of the lack of seller protection they have and how eBay AND PayPal both have control of your money. This is a scammers playgrounds

I went on Amazon and its much better in terms of scammer protection but their policies are more stricter. This is Amazon's playground.

Amazon changed its rule so that if you ship out products to customers yourself, you essentially will receive no protection against pretty much anything.

If you ship all of your products out to their Fullfilment center and let them send and package it for you then they will claim all liabilities for it.. except customer returns.

So I chose Fullfilment center, no brainier right? Wrong.

Once I did that, they absolutely require invoices from your suppliers and once you get approved, they will monitor on how well your product is moving. If it moves well, they will reach out to your supplier and start selling your product and undercutting your prices. This happened to me twice.

How can amazon do this? Well because they have the luxury of not being expensed the hefty 15% referral fee they charge everybody and pretty much every seller they are competing against are also essentially funding them by paying all the fees.

They are doing this WHILE they made it the standard to making shipping free and accepting returns no questions asked.

Returns are absolutely the worse because if the customer returns the product simply because they didn't want it anymore..you are stuck with a product that has lost half its value and will most likely take 2-3x more work to move it to cut the loss.

Literally the only way I can see e-commerce working for a individual is if they can offer a innovative product that can't be easily copied by Chinese manufacturers or Amazon but we all know this.

Some people justify this as saying to look at amazon as a advertising expense. I can't. It was like I was paying my marketer a hefty percentage off each sale and they realized "hey this moves pretty good, hope you don't mind if we get in it too." Which essentially turns into paying my marketer a percentage to compete.

Amazon(and eBay) don't care because they know they'll have an influx of sellers because everybody wants money. They only care about losing buyers because they know nobody wants to spend money.

Don't get me wrong, amazon works great for some sellers and amazon creates alot of jobs but only if they have some kind of control over your business.

That being said, I'm sticking with amazon as a buyer and most likely just ordering from "shipped and sold by Amazon.com" because they most likely will be offering the lowest prices and I will abuse that return option with them with no remorse.
gpt
Why would a single excellent e-commerce site ruin the e-commerce industry? What about the e-commerce industry requires multiple lower quality storefronts?

I’d say Amazon has actually radically improved the e-commerce industry by reducing lead time, reducing costs, and driving inefficient competitors out of the market. It definitely sucks for small sellers, but society is under no obligation to assure an outcome that is good for small retailers. The quality of the e-commerce industry is not directly related to the health of small retailers, if the larger retailers have sufficient product coverage.