Personal View site logo
Amazon
  • 282 Replies sorted by
  • “As a result of customer feedback, from 22 November Amazon customers will be able to ship eligible items from amazon.com to Australian delivery addresses,”

    For now it is temporary thing, as end goal is to become No1 in Australia via their local warehouses and site.

    It is rumors that Amazon stand behind government decision to lower customs free imports by two times (to $500 AUD) and later further reduce this sum. Amazon use corruption and bribes to cut Chinese big competitors.

  • Nice Interview

    image

    As plenty of Amazon employees have attested, working in the company’s warehouses is grueling. Earlier this summer, a former Amazon fulfillment center manager from California reached out to me after I wrote about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sparring with Amazon over worker rights and pay rates. (The battle ended in Amazon raising the hourly rate to $15 an hour but cutting company stock grants and bonuses.) The former Amazon employee, a US Air Force veteran, requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.

    I talked with the former Amazon employee a few times over the past several months to learn what it’s like to work inside an Amazon warehouse. We recently discussed the Black Friday shift. They spoke about long and punishing hours, how morale plummets as the holiday season goes on, and why the holidays still make them feel guilty.

    https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/20/18103516/black-friday-cyber-monday-amazon-fulfillment-center

    sa5770.jpg
    776 x 516 - 152K
  • Employees at Amazon's logistics centers in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom are on strike today, the day of Black Friday - a commercial operation that weighs heavily in the turnover of the online retail giant - for challenge their working conditions. In Germany, about 620 people are involved in this protest movement, mainly in the warehouses of Bad Hersfeld and Rheinberg. Amazon's local representatives told reporters that most of the employees continue to work and that the strike would ultimately have very little impact on deliveries

  • MSP1 is a fairly new and heavily-roboticized factory, much like the facility on Staten Island, New York, where workers recently announced their intention to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). One worker at the Staten Island facility, in a protest outside New York’s City Hall last week, expressed concern over long shifts, non-functioning smoke detectors and sprinkler systems, and inhumane temperatures. "We have asked the company to provide air conditioning," she explained to the crowd, "but they told us that the robots inside can’t work in the cold weather."

  • For most sellers and a growing number of traditional businesses, Amazon is so big, so much the default place people go to shop, that they find ways to tolerate constant sabotage as just another cost of doing business. In a sense, the chaos of the platform fuels its own growth.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketplace-scams-seller-court-appeal-reinstatement

  • Amazon continues to invest in ways to provide fast, free delivery for customers. Today, the company announced an expansion of its partnership with Air Transport Services Group, Inc. (ATSG) by leasing an additional 10 aircraft to support Amazon’s growth. Amazon previously leased 40 Boeing 767 freighter aircraft in 2016, 20 of those with ATSG, all of which are now flying serving customers in the Amazon Air network. The 10 additional cargo planes will consist of Boeing 767-300 aircraft, will be operated on Amazon’s behalf by an ATSG airline, and will join the air cargo operation over the next two years.

    Slowly becoming all in one.

  • Amazon Scout

  • The company’s fourth-quarter earnings exceeded investor expectations with profit of just over $3 billion on sales of $72.4 billion, a 20 percent increase year-over-year revenue. For Amazon, 2018 was a year of immense growth, and the tech giant capped it off with huge sales from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and general holiday promotions that lasted through December.

    https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazoncom-announces-fourth-quarter-sales-20-724-billion

  • Amazon cancels HQ2 plans for New York City

    In a statement, Mayor Bill de Blasio took a more aggressive stance toward Amazon than he had in recent weeks, implying that the company wasn’t willing to stick with the process amid opposition.

    “You have to be tough to make it in New York City,” his statement reads. “We gave Amazon the opportunity to be a good neighbor and do business in the greatest city in the world. Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity. We have the best talent in the world, and every day we are growing a stronger and fairer economy for everyone. If Amazon can’t recognize what that’s worth, its competitors will.”

    But much of the criticism has focused on the subsidies that Amazon will recieve: as much as $3 billion, through a combination of tax incentive programs from the city and state. Critics of the deal include City Council member Jimmy Van Bramer and State Sen. Michael Gianaris, who represent Long Island City, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

    https://ny.curbed.com/2019/2/14/18224997/amazon-hq2-new-york-city-canceled

    ...there's one part of Amazon's HQ2 competition that is deeply disturbing -- pitting city against city in a wasteful and economically unproductive bidding war for tax and other incentives. As one of the world's most valuable companies, Amazon does not need -- and should not be going after -- taxpayer dollars that could be better used on schools, parks, transit, housing or other much needed public goods.

    https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/20/opinions/amazon-headquarters-competition-disturbing-richard-florida-opinion/index.html

  • As of the beginning of 2018, Amazon’s freight shipping arm has shipped over 5,300 shipping containers from China to the United States. Those containers mark Amazon’s push into the fragmented and convoluted ocean freight market, allowing it to offer companies manufacturing in China a soup-to-nuts service that eliminates almost all other middlemen on the way to the U.S. consumer.

    “This makes them the only e-commerce company that is able to do the whole transaction from end-to-end. Amazon now has a closed ecosystem,” said Steve Ferreira, CEO of Ocean Audit...

    "That gives Chinese goods a seamless path from the factory floor all the way to the front steps of an American buyer’s porch,” said Cathy Roberson, founder of Logistics Trends & Insights in Atlanta.

    The program was initially available only to Chinese sellers and manufacturers. However, Amazon confirmed Friday to USA TODAY that the program opened to U.S. sellers beginning in the fourth quarter of 2018.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/18/amazon-pushing-hard-into-ocean-shipping-china-u-s/2589422002/?fbclid=IwAR1-Wj-OS8H9__7AYu9EKuJgviryF_dTCVdR-0cR437HM7Vx4UVsZSIOfBs

  • Amazon thinks AI will help solve its counterfeits problem

    Amazon (AMZN) — which has long struggled with counterfeit products on its site — will also automatically monitor for fake items. The project uses a type of AI called machine learning that constantly scans Amazon's stores and removes suspected fakes. Companies give Amazon their logos, trademarks and other important information about their brands, and Amazon scans product listings every day looking for bogus items before they are purchased.

    Previously, brands had to report counterfeit items to Amazon. Now, Amazon is offering a "self-service counterfeit removal tool" which lets brands take down these items themselves.

    Amazon's new product serialization service also offers a unique code for every item, which brands place on products during the manufacturing process. When products with these special serial numbers are ordered on Amazon, the e-commerce giant scans and verifies the authenticity of the purchase and can stop fake products from being bought.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/28/tech/amazon-counterfeits-project-zero/index.html

  • @jleo

    It is good, lot of brands start to ban look-alikes products and with trade war going forward we can see removal even similar one.

    For people it is time to understand that Facebook, Youtube and Amazon are so called "toxic work environment", they act only in their own interests and interests of few large players against interests of 95% participants.

  • Special for class theory deniers:

    image

    Amazon doubled its profits to $11.2 billion and paid $0 in federal taxes. In fact, the company somehow got a rebate of $129 million.

    Source: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis of SEC filings, 2019

    sa7305.jpg
    716 x 888 - 64K
  • Amazon will no longer require third-party sellers to price their products on Amazon lower than they price them anywhere else. It quietly eliminated a clause in its contracts today that critics have called anti-competitive.

    Price parity agreements, or most-favored nations clauses (MFNs), were formerly used by Amazon in contracts with third-party sellers to ensure that people selling products on the platform did not sell the same products for cheaper on any other platform like eBay or Alibaba.

    Free market, free market :-)

    Btw same Amazon also ensured that most third-party sellers do not pay any taxes in US.

    As without such agreements and with proper taxes (including taxes that Amazon by itself avoid completely) they are not competitive.

  • Another one bites the dust. in the US Trade War with China, the US is demanding 100% access to the Chinese market without using Chinese partners. But, even with partners, many have failed. The video shows why it happens.

    Amazon Closes in China

    "We are notifying sellers we will no longer operate a marketplace on Amazon.cn, and we will no longer be providing seller services on Amazon.cn effective July 18," the company said in a statement. Amazon's platform competes for Chinese sellers with Tmall, owned by the country's e-commerce leader Alibaba (BABA).

    Amazon first entered the Chinese market 15 years ago, when it acquired an online book retailer, but it has struggled amid fierce competition. Research suggests that the company's market share in China was miniscule compared to local rivals. China's online retail market is huge, notching up about $2 trillion in sales annually, according to research firmer eMarketer. The US market is worth just over one quarter of that. The Chinese market is dominated by Alibaba, which accounts for more than half of all transactions, and local rival JD.com (JD), eMarketer data shows.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/18/tech/amazon-closes-china/index.html

  • Yes

    Amazon is shutting down its Chinese domestic e-commerce business, it told sellers on Thursday. By July 18th, Amazon.cn will no longer be open to third-party sellers, meaning it won’t compete with the massive e-commerce giants of China, including Alibaba and JD.com.

    Actually it means that full scale trade war is near, otherwise it is very stupid move.

  • In Amazon’s earnings call their chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky revealed that Amazon is now spending heavily in order to make one-day shipping the norm for Prime subscribers.

  • Shareholders of major companies are more willing to invest in businesses that lose money or have in the past, with the expectation that they are growing and will make tremendous profits in the future, once they’ve expanded to a massive size.

    Once they will become monopoly - things change 180 degrees. Look at Adobe behavior. Amazon will be same thing.

  • Some of it get re-sold, if not most of it. My French isn't very good to understand what they were saying in the video above.

    image

    Screen Shot 2019-05-13 at 9.02.03 PM.jpg
    1062 x 813 - 119K
  • @CFreak

    This one is different. Customer returns are goods that belong to Amazon.

    Goods that they are destroying mostly belong to other sellers who use Amazon warehouses, if goods are not sold Amazon hike storage costs 20x and lot of sellers just abandon products.