I have been thinking about why Amazon is pissing in its own soup, with counterfeit and other "problematic" goods.
1. Scale - it's just too hard to curate all those products. Meh - Amazon has hired like a billion people, it can hire product line owners.
2. Do you remember in the mid-90s Amazon had some big push for sellers to add their SKUs abs descriptions of goods (ie instead of Amazon holding a database of goods, and you saying "i am selling one of these" you the seller added it to amazon marketplace. This was
a move to collect all the data about all the goods ever.
The current allowance of poor quality goods is I think the same game. Most dodgy goods sold are not "dangerous counterfeit" - as in selling medicinal drugs made from floor sweepings. Most dodgy goods are the things you find in Poundland and market stalls. A plastic knock off of "Mike-y Mouse" or running tops made from cotton not the high tech wick, or often the same goods as branded made on same machines, just not branded.
This set of goods is what the next billion consumers will buy for two decades. You cannot afford H&M prices but you can afford the knock offs pouring out of Chinese and Philipino factories - and yet how do you get the catalog for those factories?
1. Scale - it's just too hard to curate all those products. Meh - Amazon has hired like a billion people, it can hire product line owners.
2. Do you remember in the mid-90s Amazon had some big push for sellers to add their SKUs abs descriptions of goods (ie instead of Amazon holding a database of goods, and you saying "i am selling one of these" you the seller added it to amazon marketplace. This was a move to collect all the data about all the goods ever.
The current allowance of poor quality goods is I think the same game. Most dodgy goods sold are not "dangerous counterfeit" - as in selling medicinal drugs made from floor sweepings. Most dodgy goods are the things you find in Poundland and market stalls. A plastic knock off of "Mike-y Mouse" or running tops made from cotton not the high tech wick, or often the same goods as branded made on same machines, just not branded.
This set of goods is what the next billion consumers will buy for two decades. You cannot afford H&M prices but you can afford the knock offs pouring out of Chinese and Philipino factories - and yet how do you get the catalog for those factories?
The same way Amazon did in the 90s.
Anyway ..