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Amazon Is Kicking All Unauthorized Apple Refurbishers Off the Site (vice.com)
In a new agreement between tech giants Amazon and Apple, shoppers will soon see a selection of the latest Apple products on Amazon.com. This is not good news for everyone. Motherboard: John Bumstead is a computer refurbisher who, every year, saves thousands of laptops from the shredder. He buys MacBooks en masse from electronics recyclers, fixes them, then sells them on Amazon Marketplace or wholesales them to vendors who do the same. Friday morning, Bumstead got an email from Amazon informing him that he'd no longer be allowed to sell Apple computers on the platform, thanks to a new agreement between Apple and Amazon that will only allow "authorized resellers" to sell Apple products.
"As part of a new agreement with Apple, we are working with a select group of authorized resellers to offer an expanded selection of Apple and Beats products, including new releases, in Amazon's stores," the email says. "You are receiving this message because you are currently selling, or have previously sold, Apple or Beats products. Your existing offers for those products will soon be removed from Amazon's online store in the United States. Please contact Apple if you would like to apply to become an authorized reseller on Amazon." As the email notes, this is part of a new agreement between two of the largest companies in the world that will allow Amazon to sell new Apple products around the world; in exchange, Amazon agreed to let Apple pick-and-choose who is allowed to sell Apple products on the site.
"As part of a new agreement with Apple, we are working with a select group of authorized resellers to offer an expanded selection of Apple and Beats products, including new releases, in Amazon's stores," the email says. "You are receiving this message because you are currently selling, or have previously sold, Apple or Beats products. Your existing offers for those products will soon be removed from Amazon's online store in the United States. Please contact Apple if you would like to apply to become an authorized reseller on Amazon." As the email notes, this is part of a new agreement between two of the largest companies in the world that will allow Amazon to sell new Apple products around the world; in exchange, Amazon agreed to let Apple pick-and-choose who is allowed to sell Apple products on the site.
This is why we hate monopolies.
In the internet sales business, Amazon has effectively become a monopoly.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
These refurbished are free to set up their own storefront and sell their product. No one is owed the traffic that Amazon provides.
This is tantamount to a craft brewer complaining he can't put his beer in Walmart's aisle coolers.
Not quite. Amazon has been pushing their platform for years as a safer alternative to eBay.
To use your example, this is tantamount to a craft brewer complaining he suddenly can't put his beer in Walmart's aisle coolers after Walmart encouraged him to put them there for years.
Yes, a person can set up their own storefront, there will always be ways for dedicated customers to find a supplier. However, as a supplier who, I don't know, wants to make a living, this kind of power to cut you off 99% of the market is really devastating to people for whom it isn't a hobby.
Not quite... this is tantamount to a craft brewer complaining he suddenly can't put his beer in Walmart's aisle coolers after Walmart encouraged him to put them there for years.
We're talking about the market for secondhand Apple computers. I suspect the market for secondhand beer is substantially smaller.
there is no problem here, plenty of other places that guy can sell his things to those who like that stuff.
Except there's not. Show me another online platform where a seller can ship a bulk load of good to a huge warehouse and have that platform take care of shipment and delivery. Amazon has a massive logistics infrastructure that sellers can take advantage of.
I saw this kind of thing coming for years, on their platform. A long time ago, I used to do a lot of selling via the original "Amazon Auctions" service. It was more or less a direct eBay competitor, where any individual or business could start listing whatever used or new products they wanted to sell, with auction bidding.
Then, that disappeared and all of us were herded to Amazon Marketplace instead -- a service that demanded you list your items for sale at fixed prices, but did help you determine the optimal sale price at least. (It would tell you if identical products were currently listed by other sellers, and if your price was below all of theirs or not. If you were willing to sell at the lowest price on the site, they'd promote your listing to people as such.)
Then, I kept seeing Amazon revising the Marketplace, catering more and more towards big businesses and large volume sellers. You started having to create listings in kind of an inventory grid, that looked totally out of place for an individual selling a few items at a time as a side gig to make some extra cash.....
Finally, they added so many rules and restrictions on sellers, it became unreasonable for the "little guy" to even bother with it. (Essentially, you got kicked off Amazon as a seller if you didn't agree to give any buyer a full refund for just about ANY reason. They could buy your product, switch it out with a defective/worn out and dirty version of the same one, and ship it back for a full refund claiming "Product was not as advertised." They could claim your perfectly good product was non-functional and get irate with you as soon as you tried to email them back to help them troubleshoot it. Again, you had to give them the refund and eat your original shipping costs to mail it to them. And if this nonsense went on a few times within a couple month period? Your percentage of satisfaction dropped to below their acceptable levels, even if you happily handed out all those refunds and lost money trying to sell your stuff. And you'd risk suspension for not keeping up your metrics.)
Since then, they've been pedaling Chinese counterfeit versions of everything from shoes to iPhone chargers -- and only apologizing when someone like Apple catches them in the act, red-handed. Then, Amazon claims "We fixed the problem!" as they move on to the next high volume seller who wants to give it a try. So of COURSE they're gonna cater to Apple on this one. They don't want to get branded the bad guy....
what am i talking about?
The fact you can buy tons of counterfeit goods from amazon
https://www.forbes.com/sites/w...
but now not legitimately refurbished apple products.
And still do. Lots of people use Amazon Logistics. You can be someone to ship via Amazon but not sell anything via Amazon. You just ship your product to Amazon, and Amazon warehouses it and ships it. All you have to do is tell Amazon where to ship your item to.
I've bought tons of stuff from eBay that were drop-shipped by Amazon in the end (complete with smile boxes). They didn't have Amazon on the label,
The only thing happening here is that Amazon isn't letting refurbishers sell on Amazon. They're still free to use their logistics services.
And yes, Amazon offers a full suite of services, including customs clearance for product. If it's new product, it needs to be palletized and labelled in a special way before Amazon will break it down into individual units.
called a cartel.
The word you were looking for was "strategic partnership."
A cartel is a horizontal partnership designed to fix prices or prevent access horizontally. Amazon is not a cell phone manufacturer, and this relationship doesn't change the prices of cell phones. It also doesn't prevent access by other cell phone manufacturers. So it isn't close to a cartel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A strategic partnership can be horizontal or vertical. Here, it is vertical; it is between the supplier of a good, and a retailer. While horizontal partnerships have to tread carefully around anti-trust law, vertical partnerships have very little exposure to that; they only have exposure when a monopoly is used to force some action that harms consumers by raising prices. Amazon is not a monopoly of any market, they're only a market leader; and here they're not using their position to force Apple to do anything. It is the opposite; Apple is such a big presence in the cell phone market that they finally were able to get Amazon to do what they wanted!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As long as the cell phone carriers are all selling phones directly to customers, and most cell phones are being sold that way, claiming some sort of "monopoly" by a retailer would get laughed out of court.