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aeden wrote: Tue May 09, 2023 10:01 am https://www.revolver.news/2023/05/photo ... as-fallen/

The old retail business looks out of place in the current platforms-and-services-focused Amazon because the marketplace is more profitable, carries no inventory risk, and takes fewer employees to manage. “The marketplace generated twice the operating profit margin of the retail business—10 percent versus 5 percent, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances. In annual sales meetings, a team of 15 people overseeing a retail category would see their growth outperformed by one person from the marketplace team, the people say,” wrote Spencer Soper for Bloomberg in 2018.

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue May 09, 2023 8:58 pm It's hard to know what the profit margin is of Amazon's core retail business because the company doesn't break it out specifically. This is the best estimate I've been able to find.

The old retail business looks out of place in the current platforms-and-services-focused Amazon because the marketplace is more profitable, carries no inventory risk, and takes fewer employees to manage. “The marketplace generated twice the operating profit margin of the retail business—10 percent versus 5 percent, according to a person familiar with the company’s finances. In annual sales meetings, a team of 15 people overseeing a retail category would see their growth outperformed by one person from the marketplace team, the people say,” wrote Spencer Soper for Bloomberg in 2018.

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articl ... arketplace

Amazon likely has a significant organized retail crime problem also but they haven't admitted it so far as I know.

Not this:

https://abc7news.com/sf-organized-retai ... /12054678/

But this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuesti ... r_package/

Amazon continues to move away from 1P sales to 3P sellers - sellers will comprise 60% of overall units sold by the end of the year. But the shift is gradual.

In 2016 the number of products sold through the marketplace exceeded those sold by the retail team. Since then, the marketplace’s share has been growing steadily, albeit with fluctuations in some quarters, often caused by sales events or holidays when Amazon’s retail operation typically plays a more significant role.

Over the past eight years - since the marketplace overtook retail sales - sellers have been gaining 150 basis points in market share every year.

Seller_CyGI7lF1437gx

In reply to: Seller_qa3jEvxx9StPs's post

updated 4 months ago
I would eat the costs of the returns fee and chalk up for cost of doing business.

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Kirsten Hacker
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PhD in Accelerator Physics, University of Hamburg (Graduated 2010)Updated 3y

In terms of our knowledge and our ability to pass that knowledge on to the next generation, I think that we are living in a new dark age.

“Ridiculous!”

Most people would say.

“We’ve never known more than we’ve known today.”

Perhaps these people have not considered that there is more knowledge floating around today than ever before but filtering that knowledge out of the cloud has never been more difficult. If we are not careful, the next generation will forget the most important knowledge because they have spent their lives mired in a fog of noise and misinformation.

Traditionally, we filter knowledge through experts - old people with loads of experience. But today, young people are bypassing those experts and deciding what they believe is true based on what they “like”.

Consider this guy, Frolly. He has an excellent overview of geological science because he has been studying it for his whole life. When he sees what the young people in media are telling everyone about how the planet works, he is appalled.

He certainly takes his time to make his points, and what is sad is that most young people today do not have the patience to follow his arguments. Their attention spans have been permanently damaged by their entertainment devices. Whereas previous generations were conditioned to see slow, calm exposition as evidence of careful, trustworthy thinking, people of today are more likely to give credence to someone with a manic, energetic, and confident presentation style.

I look around and see young men with access to simulation tools on supercomputers telling old men that their old ways of knowing things by studying data are obsolete - we should all just trust what the supercomputer tells us, even though it has never demonstrated predictive power. When I see this breakdown of the scientific method, I know that we are in a very dark age in which the signal of knowledge is getting buried in all of the noise made by young people on the internet.

When the internet flattened the hierarchies we’ve used to determine what is true and what is false, groupthink began to determine the truth of matters. Whereas Orwell imagined groupthink enforcement by the thought police (moderators), today we know that groupthink is enforced by each individual’s fear of being seen as out of step with what is popular.

For example, at the moment, it is positively criminal to criticize what “climate scientists all agree about” and it isn’t necessary for thought police to enforce uniformity of belief because we enforce it ourselves through our virtue signaling posts on the internet. With these fear-driven, virtue signaling posts, we create so much noise that debate is quickly extinguished.

“How can you not be afraid that the world is coming to an end because of how evil we all are with our carbon producing ways!?”

“Are we really smart enough to understand and control our impact? What if carbon isn’t the thing we should be worrying about. What if, by focusing on it, we are ignoring something more important?”

“I’m too busy to think about the details, but I think you are probably stupid for not believing what everyone else believes.”

For me, becoming an adult has been a process of realizing how rare truly smart people are in the world. I believe that each individual has the capacity to be smart, but smart people are rare because we are all conditioned to be so busy that we never have any time to do any real thinking. Constant distractions and striving to survive or to reach the next level of the video game are making thought impossible.

I saw a video yesterday of a group of people on a subway train singing along with a Boys2Men song from the 1990s - The End of the Road. Everyone was smiling and enjoying the sense of community the group singing produced. The song had a really simple melody, but every single voice I heard was so tone-deaf that the result was noise. I couldn’t believe it. Something has happened to our culture and our minds that is damaging on a scale that I can scarcely fathom. It is not normal for so many people to be tone-deaf. Have they been poisoned by a physical substance or by television or smartphones? This is the mystery of our dark age and until we unravel it, I think things will get darker.

I’ve been thinking about how the noise of our dark age can be explained through the evolution of music. It is a sort of zooming in process, starting back at the dawn of the enlightenment when music was about everything. It was epic and depicted the world as a whole. Then the romantic era began and the music sang the songs of the individual soul. The joy, the despair, the currents of mood flowed in sweeping melodies. Then the world wars started and the music became focused even further with syncopated klinks of the keys depicting the zips and zaps of the currents scientists told us flowed within our minds. The meaning could not be deciphered, but it depicted an aspect of our selves. After the world wars, the music got louder. If you take the words away, you have the banging and booming sounds, the rock and the roll of abstraction which has evolved into the pulsing heartbeat of electronica and a cacophony of white noise. This is the song of our dark age, but there are hints of a new enlightenment dawning. We will eventually emerge from an intellectual bottleneck that selects new, epic songs to describe the world as a whole.

-Kirsten Hacker

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