Walmart paid for the products on their shelves. Amazon does not pay for most of the products you can buy on Amazon.
The difference, in case it's not clear: Walmart is the manufacturers' primary customer, so it's irrelevant from their point of view what products Walmart chooses to sell in its stores.
The third-party sellers are the manufacturer's customers. The manufacturers still get paid either way. But we're not concerned about the manufacturers; the antitrust issue is with the third party sellers. Since Amazon uses their data to come up with competing products that are sold in the same marketplace, it matters a great deal that Amazon competes with them, and how.
Walmart pays for some products on their shelves. Companies pay for product placement: Sometimes, it is a mix - deeply reduced prices for a holiday display, for example. Soft drinks are often serviced by the local distributor, and they pay only for what is sold: If wal-mart is anything like the pharmacy I worked at, magazines and greeting cards are similar (only pay for what is sold, credited for the rest, and a rep probably takes care of stocking things).
Walmart uses their data to figure out which Walmart brand products they are going to sell. Instead of using search terms, they use product placement, making sure to place their brand near the product it is imitating. Dandruff shampoo next to name brand dandruff shampoo: Mac 'n' cheese next to mac 'n' cheese.
In fact, it is quite amazing how much brick-and-mortar stores can figure out about people simply by analyzing receipts - in some cases, figuring out folks were pregnant before they knew. [1]
No, Walmart pays for nearly all the products on their shelves, except for new products which might be sold on a consignment basis.
Companies paying for product placement does not change the simple truth that Walmart has paid for the product (in the legal and financial sense, even if they haven't actually forked over the cash in the actual/economic sense), and the supplier is paying for product placement through discounts or other non-cash consideration.
If wal-mart is anything like the pharmacy I worked at, magazines and greeting cards are similar (only pay for what is sold, credited for the rest, and a rep probably takes care of stocking things).
No, Walmart and Target are not like the pharmacy you worked for. Target and RiteAid were former clients, I know exactly how they paid for their inventory.
Moreover, the market for books, magazines, newspapers, and other printed material is different from other products. With print material, publishers provide discounts or credits for unsold copies against newer books/issues because the value of the unsold periodicals rapidly drops to zero after the period passes, and book stores that get burned with unsaleable books generally refuse to stock new books from that publisher if they are not provided incentives (by the publisher) to do so. Note that publishers will usually not credit book stores for best sellers like Harry Potter, etc., because the threat to not carry future best sellers is more likely to backfire on the bookstore than it is on the publisher.
I'm so very, very sick of the target pregnancy story. Like, we have absolutely no idea how many people the model thought were pregnant, vs the number that actually were.
Based on my knowledge of market-basket analysis, this might work, but we really don't know anything except a just-so story about target and someone's daughter.
This is really, really not a good example of analysing receipts leading to better things.
And a portion of the products that can be purchased from "Amazon.com" (the seller) are JIT orders that Amazon places with the supplier. This is why some products on Amazon are perpetually never "in stock" until a future date on the store listing page; Amazon has made the decision based on sales data to only order those products on demand. In such cases, the supplier will usually ship to Amazon for transshipment to the customer, but depending on the cost of logistics, Amazon may have them ship directly to the customer.
I don't think this distinction actually justifies treating Amazon in a dramatically different way than Walmart. I agree that Amazon and Walmart have different strategies for managing inventory, in house branding and product placement. Walmart also operates an in house clone of Amazon in the form of their online store.
The difference, in case it's not clear: Walmart is the manufacturers' primary customer, so it's irrelevant from their point of view what products Walmart chooses to sell in its stores.
The third-party sellers are the manufacturer's customers. The manufacturers still get paid either way. But we're not concerned about the manufacturers; the antitrust issue is with the third party sellers. Since Amazon uses their data to come up with competing products that are sold in the same marketplace, it matters a great deal that Amazon competes with them, and how.