This article looks at data without understanding the reason behind it.
Many educated Indians choose to buy from these 33 Amazon owned / equity linked sellers because of the experience they offer - odds of receiving wrong/damaged product is low, and in case where that happens the return / replacement process is hassle free.
Amazon has brought price discovery to many product categories in India. For expensive products I check Amazon's ClouldTail / Appario seller's price before making a purchase from even local vendors, keep that as a reference and negotiate.
Eg: Every computer component, laptop has a ridicules MRP (Maximum Retail Price) in India. A RAM module sold at INR 5500 has an MRP of INR 20,500.
The sad part is even companies like AMD collude with distributors in cheating end customers.
Instead of fixing problems which makes citizens flock to few sellers at Amazon every Indian government irrespective of political party chooses to appease the voting block of traders union - who are nothing but middle men making prices expensive to the end consumer.
A country grows when builders and innovators contribute to the economy, not leeches who don't even understand what they are selling. Everyday I lose a little hope of India ever becoming a developed country, we have our priorities backwards.
Yet more evidence to be used in the eventual US anti-trust case demonstrating a pattern of anti-competitive behavior. Prefering big sellers and lying about it is not "customer centric" in any market. Actions like this are going to eventually crush the stock value. When that happens senior employees will cash out and retail will be sold off to the highest bidding hedge fund. AWS is the money maker anyway and that will be protected at all costs.
It disturbs me that with each day, it seems like the Great Chinese Firewall was a good solution.
You keep out the foreign competition letting internal competition foster and you stop a capital drain.
Imagine if the EU had it’s own Alibaba, Baidu or WeChat... That is a lot of taxpaying money...
Every corporation seeks, ultimately, to dodge regulations, dominate the government and establish a monopoly.
And we let these beasts run around willy-nilly.
Amazon being shady with government what's new. It's a monopoly and only care about itself.
Anyone who has purchased an electronic or smaller household appliance on Amazon.in would know Cloudtail made up a significant portion of over all sales.
The Govt didn’t needed a multi year report to know it wasn’t small sellers making most sales. Some in position of power benefited.
Side note, Even with Walmart’s purchase of Flipkart a couple years ago, Amazon.in always seems to be cheaper. Also there is huge gap in reviews and review quality between the sites. Walmart still playing catch up 3 years later
Amazon's initial business advantage was avoiding state/local sales taxes.
Most of tech valuation advances are about avoiding/bypassing regulations and taxation. They simply call it innovation and efficiency.
Ooh this is going to ruffle some feathers in the Indian Traders lobby. Although more regulation here is almost certainly going to be bad for consumers.
I'm starting to think the reason why tech companies are so well-valued is purely due to regulatory evasion skills and a dash of political engineering. Effectively, every tech company has been given a pass on something. Facebook doesn't have to worry about defamation lawsuits. Google doesn't have to worry (as much) about copyright. Amazon built it's business on evading sales tax. Uber broke the back of your local city's taxi medallion scheme. And so on and so forth. All of those are things their legacy competitors have had to spend millions of dollars on compliance for, but tech companies don't.
Here's the thing: the market really does not give two shits about "smarts". You can engineer the best mousetrap in the world and get it into everyone's homes, but the market won't care about the company that makes them... as much as they will care about a company that's found a way to break the rules. That's what they really want. People in tech are being paid massively not because they're postdocs with good credentials and amazing skills, but because they know how to bend governments to their will.