Well, it's something that is slowly backfiring. It's under the eyes of everyone, and not enforcing such policy will only make it even worse for Amazon itself that eventually will end up selling only non-branded products. Finally it will be only another e-commerce like "ebay" used to be, and something else will replace it. Just enjoy the ride until you can.
PS: speaking out of experience, I had one time a talk to a director from an important online shop (top 3 in the country in that specific field) and "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Imagine how deep it can go. And I totally support that.
PPS: I don't understand the downvote. Please, be specific on why you disagree instead of just clicking on random symbols.
Backfiring would imply things are changing or getting worse for them. And I'm certain that we're not at "peak Amazon."
Worse, Americans especially are becoming numb to top down abuses. Not only am I worrying that this is not backfiring, but I'm also worried about the precedent we're setting by being so tolerant to it.
If sellers want their sales information to be private, they should make a compelling retail experience they control. That is where they obtain real competitive advantage. Changing from Amazon to another online retailer - that retailer will still analyze third party sales data.
It still isn’t clear if it matters. You have little perspective or experience on selling easily cloned $10-100 items (Amazon Basics) anywhere. Most of the margin is made at the point of manufacturing, by taking $1 overseas labor and selling it for $5. AmazonBasics and the other product are both made by the same labor, the same process, so the economics of what’s really going on are still in equilibrium.
But I understand (though not really sympathize with) the aspiring middleman trying to buy that $5 product and sell on Amazon being mad about doing, essentially, product discovery for Amazon. On the other hand nobody is forcing them to be middlemen.
You don’t have to launder cheap overseas labor at all. If the EU commission focused on the economics that mattered - the labor arb - the impact will be as large as you’re anticipating. It’s my opinion that the injustice of the offshore labor system is of far greater importance than some bullshit Amazon versus Some Aspiring EU Tech Company battle.
If someone wants their mobile phone data and photos to be private, they should make a compelling mobile os they control.
If someone wants a water supply that is not polluted with toxic runoff they should start their own waterworks, lay their own pipes, and potentially buy their own lake because some pollution is unremovable.
If someone wants not to be discriminated against they should start their own country.
Meanwhile your reduction tactic can be used to claim entitlement to anything.
You have to give me whatever I want or modify your behavior in whatever ways I insist upon, because the only alternative for me to get my demands met is by creating the product from scratch and/or starting my own country, which is of course absurd.
The problem is that Amazon is now basically the market itself while at the same time a competitor or a potential competitor. Small businesses don't have much choice in the matter if they want the ability to reach an entire market. If they go their own way and build their own retail experience, there is a ceiling on the percentage of the market they can sell to.
Without any regulation to curtail this behavior, the end state seems like it will have to be Amazon owning the markets that have the best margins and the least risk. Competitors will die and Amazon will be able to increase prices to maximize their profits without needing to worry about being undercut. That sounds exactly like what anti monopoly legislation was written to protect against.
This still does not make it equal between Amazon and the sellers. Remember sellers have to pay a listing fee, referral fee etc which Amazon does not have to. So with everything else being equal, sellers are basically paying a validation fee for Amazon to learn about their products, then compete with them. No one should trust Amazon in whatever business they are in.
IMHO these websites should be disallowed to sell their own brands. (I wouldn't mind if physical retailers wouldn't be allowed to sell their own brands either.)
Mmmm. Nice logic there. Examine the following and see if you can detect where things get... off.
>Ya know what? I'm gonna make a thing that lets third party sellers sell their products and avail themselves of my burgeoning logistics network! It'll be so cash. I'll charge 'em pennies, they get to sell to a wide audience, I get use out of my logistics network, win-win.
Sounds like the start of some good ole fashion enterprise right?
>Hey, now that I got everyone on here, and since I'vegot all this seller data just lying around, we should do something with it. Charts, graphs, the whole shebang. Can charge extra or piecemeal to help people do more business, thereby enabling them to get more regular product flow, possibly even getting them to sign up and pay me for use of my logistics network to cache their stuff. I can turn around and offer supply reliability to end consumers, I can offer revenue stability and insight into invemtory profitability for my merchants, and I'm still making bank off my logistics network! Win-win-win for everyone around.
Still good, right?
>Hey, we got all this sales data laying around right? Why don't we aggregate it to see what's moving in the market overall so we can diversify into becoming a merchant competing in our own marketplace without any of the risk anyone else has to take because we have the ability to front-run commodity movement using info no one else has available to them at that level of abstraction oroverall visibility. Oh... Also, don't say 'Front-Run' because it'llmake the compliance and legal people upset, but it's totally what we're doing. Bonus point: with our scale, if we do find a winner, we can get in at rock bottom deals from the manufacturer, meaning we can ectract the value potential better than anyone else out there.. Sure, some of the merchants may lose out, but it's our platform, and their data is on our stuff right? Admin's priveleges. Besides, it isn't their sales data, we can just generate some anonymized non-vendor specifiic metadata to search using the web services we implement! Then it's our data not theirs!*
If you don't see where one of those three starts getting anti-competitive and abusive, you are waaaaaay too far down the slippery slope of the monopolist slip-n-slide.
The last one may be somewhat ham-fisted, but it's not far from some of the more... Fraught... conversations on the virtues and prickly points of business models with coworkers in the break room.
I assure you it does happen. Check out the GooglePay and ApplePay branding guides for similar examples of things that you read that make you go "Huh, is that why that's confidential? Because it tells you to do anti-competitiive things?"
Good luck finding a copy of course. You'll just need to find a poorly packed truck or something.
> I had one time a talk to a director from an important online shop (top 3 in the country in that specific field) and "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Imagine how deep it can go
> "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS.
Unless I've grossly misread these articles, Amazon were using third-party seller data from sales on the Amazon.* websites.
The data was on their (Amazon.com) sales database (who sold how much of what, for how much). They weren't accessing (hacking) data hosted on AWS (a database hosted for an online shop not related to AWS)
Those two things are very different.
EDIT: To put this into perspective. Any store (online and offline) that has its own branded products, probably looks at sales of the existing non shop branded products and makes an own branded version when it looks like it will be successful ("Panasonic SD cards are selling well, and look like they have good margins so let's bring out our own version"). What Amazon is being accused of is using sales data from 3rd party sellers on Amazon.*
AWS could easily collect metadata like how your traffic looks over time, where it's coming from etc., and use that to inform Amazon business decisions. That would go a bit further than what's in this article, but it isn't a huge stretch.
I dont have the source anymore, but ive heard of precisely this happening: Amazon employees snooping around the AWS setup of some other ecommerce competitors... so yea, its not just limited to the amazon seller account data
About 5 years ago I personally knew an SRE at AWS who did snoop around customer files (and Amazon corporate’s internal HR database...) for his own amusement - he proudly showed-off his phone’s browser to me which displayed some HR data for a mutual of ours. He doesn’t work at Amazon anymore and now has a criminal record (both for entirely unrelated reasons), I guess Amazon either never found-out or they didn’t care.
So yeah, I believe you.
(Amazon does have internal controls that do limit most users’ access, but he said was an SRE with “global” access, apparently - I’ve never worked for Bezos so I don’t know what Amazon’s access-security is really like).
Amazon != AWS. As someone who has access to customer data in AWS, I'm very limited in what information I can access (to the point where it actively makes my job in Premium Support harder than it would be otherwise). I also have to provide a legitimate business reason for access to data.
Not only is there an audit trail for what I do internally, but any calls I make to review customer data is published in the customer's CloudTrail trail. So the customer can audit when their information is accessed.
Samsung is a much looser conglomerate than Amazon. Furthermore, their fab division is much larger than their handset division. I imagine all parties have weighed the pros and cons.
Apple continues to actively steer away from Samsung, anyway.
Different leadership and largely different culture. Or are you just making assumptions?
Being on AWS works for Netflix, Disney+, and a lot of other streaming services I won't mention. ESPN and Fox Sports both use AWS. A lot of incredibly visible companies that offer cloud storage white-label S3. Tons of game studios use AWS.
A lot of successful companies are pretty stupid I guess. But I'm not going to spend my time trying to refute conspiracy theories about AWS. You do you boo-boo.
To me the only difference is that AWS biggest client base has the money and expertise to go after Amazon in protracted legal battles while simultaneously scrubbing AWS from their companies.
Most retailers, even big ones, don’t have the money or expertise to do this like that. Of the few who do (Apple for instance) Amazon is keen in making sure that those companies are heard and has direct relationships with them, but that’s few and far between.
I think there are enough retailers with at least some money, I think this is mostly an issue of business expectations.
If AWS were caught sharing your data, with anyone, for any reason, it would be a gigantic mess of a problem. Forget 'competing with Amazon on Amazon' - we're talking about sensitive data of all kinds in every single line of business. It would destroy them.
Selling on Amazon, and then having sneaky Amazon PM's use your data against you is bad, but the quasi-same thing would exist in other retailers. Best Buy doesn't sell '3rd Party' so obviously all of their sales data is theirs, and I think that the expectations between '3rd Party' and not '3rd Party' Amazon may just be a little bit blurred.
I'm suspicious frankly about the distinction, because Amazon may very well believe that that data is theirs to look at anyhow.
But AWS has to be a different story, if not, it's going to hurt.
An interesting thing to note is also that AWS sells pre-rolled HIPAA compatible services in a lot of their offerings. If AWS accidentally peaked into one of these services in an unauthorized manner it'd be a huge legal event and, I suspect that part of them working out that their services are HIPAA compliant involved being extremely transparent on how a number of things around those services operate with some department in the government.
Those servers, at least, should be free from any of the snooping concerns folks have.
Let's put it in terms of business. What does Amazon gain reading the data of retailers in AWS that they don't already have? How much more money would this make them?
How much brand damage and lost of business to AWS (their most profitable organization) would they lose if this were to leak? The more prevalent their use of this AWS customer data, the higher the chance it gets leaked.
Why do you think Amazon, one of the most logical and data driven companies, would make such a bad business decision?
And we think they need to risk the lost of business of breaking into your data on AWS to get this information? They somehow have no other way to infer this? How much business is this thriving Amazon-made products line? It's a fraction of AWS's profits considering retail's overall profits.
That's actually the point. So what if they're using "anonymous" or other indirect data? If "Amazon.com" might be benefiting from AWS data of any kind then it needs to be investigated as potentially anti-competitive.
When I say infer I mean from analysis of retail trends, pricing, and supply data. They don’t need to raid your AWS account to know that USB cables are profitable.
People have done worse for less. It may not be a significant fraction of Amazon’s income but it could be a significant fraction of a sellers income or a significant fraction of sales manager’s sales.
It doesn't have 0 to do with AWS. AWS funds the amazon beast they compete against. As a retailer you would have to be absolutely insane to feed money to the Amazon mothership via AWS so they can continue to fund undercutting you in the retail space.
All of that is ignoring the fact that any customer of size WILL be sharing details about their go-to-market with their AWS account team. Just because a random guy in support can't login to their systems doesn't mean their assigned architect doesn't know what their process workflow looks like and didn't help them design it...
It does though. That money being paid towards AWS will certainly be used to subsidize Amazon's undercutting. A retailer paying for AWS is funding their own demise.
AWS and Amazon Retail are two different entities altogether. Even their infrastructure are at least logically siloed and my educated guess is even physically siloed in some places.
AWS is certified to comply with a bunch of cloud/data standards/regulations such as HIPPA, PCI DSS and so on. Even if a single evidence is found that AWS is breaching them the consequences will be severe.
Also for Amazon as a whole it makes very little business sense to lose a AWS customer paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year just to gain some marginal advantage in retail space. Note that Amazon retail already is operating at the limit when it comes to having accurate sales information about its competitors. It has crawlers to scrape online data and employs hundreds of analysts to build multiple models. And it’s been on this for close to three decades. So trawling AWS customer data is net negative for Amazon. It doesn’t take much for competitors to move away to Azure of GCP.
So it’s in AWS’s best interest to be absolutely fool proof about not going anywhere near customer data. Dealing with business data is a whole lot different ball game compared to collecting tracking customer data like Google does. Businesses will be unforgiving.
The article says someone used data from Amazon(the online store), not AWS. You should absolutely use Azure(or GCP) if it makes more economic sense for you but migrating from AWS to Azure because of this may be an overreaction.
It's standard practice for any retailer to not use AWS.
Part of it is why would you want to give any competitive knowledge to Amazon with your data or even metadata assuming you encrypt data with your own keys (eg. # of users derivable from # of distinct home/mobile IP address connections to your servers, # of transactions from connections your servers make to payment processors etc).
The other part of it is why add to Amazon's profit margin when it's well known AWS likely subsidizes retail to a large extent.
I'm curious what kind of access Amazon would have to your data as a retailer running on AWS.
Not in a technical sense, I'm a software engineer, I understand what data _is_ there, but more to the extent of, do they go out of their way to identify you, an AWS customer as a retail business and use that _retail_ data in ways such as described by the original complaint here?
If the answer is anything other than "they definitely don't", I'm concerned.
Nobody can know for sure. Whether or not they were secretly mining data from AWS servers, they would say they don't and nobody on the outside would be able to tell. Even if it's unlikely, many people are simply choosing not to risk it.
This is at the level of a conspiracy theory right now, and one that doesn't even make any sense.
If it were true that Amazon were taking sneaky peeks at data inside AWS related to retailers, and this became public, AWS as a business would be done.
The loud banging you'd be hearing would be the door closing as the last customer exited, followed by all the engineering staff who work on AWS as they see the writing on the wall.
Why would Amazon look to achieve some marginal advantage in its retail businesses at the risk of a total loss to one of its marquee businesses, AWS? It's an idiotic risk.
The metadata that is _required_ to produce your monthly AWS bill reveals a ton of information about the success of your business and what is doing very well for you.
Doing analytics on customer billing is something that Amazon has every reason to be doing, and what Amazon does with that information can be anticompetitive or not.
At a certain level of aggregation, metadata is AWS need-to-know for capacity planning etc or for account execs to understand the needs of their covered clients.
There's definitely room for discussion over when what level of granularity is necessary and whether metadata at different levels of granularity should be shared with product vs. customer facing teams.
That didn't seem to be what the GP comment was about though - 'mining data from AWS servers' sounded to me like a much more invasive approach to client data.
> Why would Amazon look to achieve some marginal advantage in its retail businesses at the risk of a total loss to one of its marquee businesses, AWS? It's an idiotic risk.
There's a pretty obvious way to achieve this risk mitigation which is by spinning off AWS into a completely separate company with separate management accountable to a separate board with separately traded shares and not sharing any offices, employees or infrastructure with Amazon retail.
> If it were true... and this became public, AWS as a business would be done.
Why on earth would you think that? They did worse on their storefront, which has a much smaller migration burden than AWS, and while a few big brands made a stink and pulled out, it didn't even noticeably slow growth.
... because it's a colossal breach of trust. AWS has an entire staff of people whose job it is to convince clients that they can be trusted to be a safe custodian of data that includes heavily regulated types of data.
Doing this would blow a huge hole in that.
Do you really think banks are going to stay in AWS if this happens? Do you really think Salesforce is going to be OK with it? Do you think they'd ever do any US Govt business again?
Yes, yes (to the extent of maintaining their business relationship), and yes. I think you vastly underestimate the power of apathy. 99% of their customers won't even think about it, 90% of the customers who do think about it won't weigh its importance strongly enough to even potentially impact their decision, and 90% of the remaining customers will be satisfied with some minor deflection, platitudes, and hand-waving.
Don't get me wrong, I wish you were right, I just don't think you are.
> This is at the level of a conspiracy theory right now, and one that doesn't even make any sense.
It's a conspiracy theory to believe that a company whose policy it is to not access data that is on their own platform, who was caught accessing said data, would violate such a policy?
Yes, of course they do. There was a post on here about a year ago from someone in the "Amazon profitability team" that involved digging through customers AWS instances to see what they could learn or duplicate for Amazon.
I can't find the most recent set of posts about peering into customer's AWS instances to research what they could copy but consider that govcloud exists.
Thank you for the effort of posting those. Unfortunately they don't really indicate any data being taken from AWS specifically, all of the copying behaviour appears to be Amazon storefront copy-cat tactics.
As for govcloud, it exists because regulatory requirements for running things for gov are more strict than your average user/business requires and such cloud offerings require certain levels of hardening and software security and assurances. I happen to work in the space so I understand the need for an alternative offering for government requirements. There's really nothing nefarious going on there and its more about govs not wanting to run alongside regular users. I see nothing concrete I could take to my superiors.
I had the same thought a while ago. I remember when Amazon mostly acted as a retailer, and not as a marketplace. Nowadays I don't see why I shouldn't buy on ebay or somewhere else, as the marketplace approach negates what I liked about it: everything from one company, a single parcel, easy refunds. If I receive each item from a different retailer anyways, I don't see why I should feed the beast.
PS: speaking out of experience, I had one time a talk to a director from an important online shop (top 3 in the country in that specific field) and "this sort of things" was exactly the reason why they chose to use MS Azure instead of AWS. Imagine how deep it can go. And I totally support that.
PPS: I don't understand the downvote. Please, be specific on why you disagree instead of just clicking on random symbols.