[only_as_i_fall]

What's different is that Amazon is also an extremely dominant platform for other stores.

It'd be like if Walmart came to your small town and signed a deal with the local government that stores had to carry their brands in addition to their own or pay higher taxes.

The problem isn't the mere existence of store brands, but the use of anticompetitive practices to promote those brands.

[gruez]

>It'd be like if Walmart came to your small town and signed a deal with the local government that stores had to carry their brands in addition to their own or pay higher taxes.

Not really? You can get around amazon's "extremely dominant platform" by setting up a shopify store. I'm not sure how that can be compared to the government forcing you to amazon.

[only_as_i_fall]

And then you get far less traffic than you would if your product was listed on Amazon.

In the traditional brick and mortar situation you can open your own shop next to the Walmart or Target or whatever and have roughly the same visibility. In the online space though rolling your own shopify store is a massive handicap similar to if you weren't allowed to build within 5 miles of a large box store for fear of competition.

A huge number of people literally only shop on Amazon or at least look at Amazon before other locations because they believe it to be representative of the marketplace at large. Maybe that's their loss, but when you also consider Amazon's huge logistics network that nobody else is allowed to use.

[jaywalk]

How is setting up your own store "getting around" Amazon's dominant position? Obviously anybody can sell their own shit on their own website, but that doesn't change the fact that buying something online defaults to checking Amazon for a very large portion of the online public.