Another PL seller here with a few brands and a couple hundred products:
"No brand name" flag is tricky because the Amazon catalog team actively does A/B tests to hide brand names as part of their goal of commodifying all the sellers to increase price competition, when they see you're selling a commodity item.
Same goes to wellknown brands that get caught in the crossfire because they're using their brand name from another language but don't make sense in English.
Agreed that it's an interesting idea, but execution has a LOT of false positives.
I run a remote-first ecom business with a dozen or so team members.
About a year ago, one of our account managers had a life issue, ghosted us, and she held a fairly critical role in the business and gate-kept a bunch of knowledge to some high value vendor accounts.
Because we ran our ops in Google Workspace, we essentially had off-the-shelf RAG and was able to get answers to a lot of things by asking Gemini to go through all her emails/docs/calendar/meetings, reverse engineer what she did, and create an onboarding doc for her successor.
This happened once more a few months later when one of our analysts broke his wrist on vacay, and we were again able to replicate what they did to cover for their absence, this time dabbling in AI agents ("gems") to do a bunch of the regular simple tasks and again it covered things without too many issues.
I def expect Amazon/shopify to at some point replace all of us brand owners with AI bots if they can, but we'll see how long the gravy train goes on.
I love SMAC -- I wish they had a real sequel to this complete with storyline. Most Civ clones really don't nail the narrative feel of SMAC as you explore the planet and grow your settlements.
I see a buncha folks complaining about how the high end macbook laptops don't have color -- for what it's worth there's plenty of fun colors to be had from buying case covers and skins, but yeah they add bulk or interfere with heat dissipation...
(Have a MBP with fun case covers that I take off when I do a work presentation.)
I audibly LOLed mid-standup call, and now my entire team is playing with this and it looks like this is eating up what little productivity we have on Friday.
-The old kindles are great products that last a long time
-I don't expect Amazon to support them forever, but kindasorta bricking them on their way out is a dick move
-Jailbreaking is straightforward but this probably hits older people who are not very tech-savvy the most. Like quite a few others here, I too have an elderly family member who I had to help resolve this
I feel there's gotta be some compromise between letting old electronics age gracefully so they don't occupy landfill and a company's need to support aging products over a long time... though I'm not sure what's a good model.
+1 to this. I was around for the 90s and early 2000s to see when MAP wasn't tightly controlled by the brands; the B&M stores got destroyed because they simply couldn't price-compete because their footprint was way more expensive.
I do think that by not having physical stores, it directly/indirectly promoted a decline of product quality as well as misrepresentation of product, with Wish and Temu kinda exemplifying that to an extreme. Price differentiation is way greater now which I guess is a net positive to the consumer.
As a brand owner of midtier kitchen products (cheaper versions of designer OXOish products, but more expensive than your baseline Walmart stuff), our products look visually similar enough to both ends of quality, but shines more when a person gets to interact with the items themselves, feel the product texture, press the lever action, etc. So I do value B&M for their place in the economy and want to make sure they can have some margin (even though I'm selling the same thing in my Amazon store and Shopify and can make more money there).
I mean, 1-2 day shipping is a huge part of their consumer-first policy, which is why every seller has got to do FBA -- for the longest time until COVID, the algorithm heavily penalized FBM fulfilled by merchant from ranking in the search results.
Once FBA started failing during COVID due to warehouse restrictions + sellers and 3PL third party logistics centers really stepped up did FBM even become a thing (and Amazon smartly gave access to Prime badges for FBM sellers who could deal with stringent shipping times).
IMHO the other big superpower Amazon has is to force sellers to eat returns and provide retroactive refunds when a product gets recalled.
So game-theoretically: if I know the price for an item is the same everywhere, I'll buy it at the place where I see it first (one of the big values of brick and mortar stores).
If I know I can go online and it'll be some % cheaper, I'll wait and order it online, defer my gratification for a few days, and end up with a cheaper product.
Not sure about Poland, but most B&M brick and mortar stores in the US are distributors/resellers of the brand, they buy for $4 and sell for $10, and their rent/labor/etc costs $3 and they profit $3. Another distributor let's say is an e-commerce website, they can setup a warehouse in a rural area with cheap labor so it costs them $1 and they profit $5... so they can afford to discount it to $7 and make $2... which the B&M store can't do because they won't profit at all.
Long-time Amazon seller/brand here, so here's the crux of the case:
1. Amazon is a search engine for product
2. It values being the cheapest destination for products (MFN most favored nation clause to sell on their website), and basically will suppress your listings from search if they can find you selling it cheaper elsewhere.
3. Amazon is def one of the more expensive ecom channels to sell, BUT they've got a huge audience as well due to decades of consumer-first policies, so sellers still go there because even if they have loyal customers with strong brand loyalty, you still end up with at least 30% of customers going to Amazon first after seeing your ads elsewhere + the lure of NTB new-to-brand customers you can acquire there.
So the crux of the case is dependent on whether they can do #2 with impunity -- which Amazon considers "consumer friendly" (but obviously it's win-win for them too).
Long-time seller/distributor here -- the main reason for this is mandated by brands, who want to make sure their MAP (minimum advertised price) is respected across all channels.
Basically different distribution channels (speciality shops, big box marketplaces, and ecom stores) have very different levels of overhead, so if each channel was allowed to set their own price, you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low).
This pretty much happened in the early 2000s-2010s so over time brands became VERY particular about enforcing MAP.
Love tango as a dance form... but the scene is limited and not very accessible, which limits its popularity.
As an ex-organizer of the salsa scene, IMHO a scene is defined by its ecosystem of newbies converting into regulars, the regulars improving the dance quality over time, and the oldies aging out due to life, family, and what not. The best enduring dance scenes have good feeder intro classes, a dance that doesn't get stale, and a way to handle dancer attrition. IMHO tango just doesn't quite have the feeders into the regular scene, which may be a lack of intro instructors or a lack of accessibility for new learners of the dance.
(For people picking up dance in 2026, even Salsa's not that accessible now... Bachata and Country Swing are the new gateway dances, though I have plenty of reservations for both which is its own nerdy conversation.)
Part of what settled me into salsa vs other dances where I preferred the connection OR the musicality more was that it had critical mass in terms of dancers of all levels and ages -- which meant that it had dancers I hang out with socially for non-dancing things.
Social dancer here -- without hyperbole this was a lifechanging hobby for the better, and while I haven't been able to "meaningfully contribute to" as a criteria, I am a much better person for it.
I'm primarily a salsa dancer (~18 years), but spent a few years doing a buncha other dances to get an understanding of the music and movement so I'm pretty much beginner-intermediate in a buncha other dances (equiv of 1-2 year level dancer) -- Bachata, West Coast Swing, Fusion, and a splash of a ton of other dances.
The best I can explain to most people is that dance is a conversation to a topic (music) through the language of motion instead of sound, and that just like rewarding conversations we can have through verbal language and text, some of the most resonant conversations can be had through connection and touch.
For the subset of folks who happen to be gamers here, this is a massively multiplayer co-op music game with a very high skill curve.
I started dancing due to taking a popular social dance series at college by Richard Powers, and that was the gateway for my lifelong dance practice. It allowed me to indulge in another side of collaborative music, gave me a good relationship with interpersonal connection and physical touch, and provided me with a fairly active and healthy hobby for my life.
Can't say enough good things about it, just that the skill curve for beginners is high -- the first year is known as beginner's hell, but once you establish a basic vocabulary in the dance it becomes so much more artistic and creative.
Out of curiosity, have you compared the relative effectiveness of ChatGPT and Claude vs Copilot? Given your existing enterprise contract, does copilot have a monopoly on your AI usage due to its superior compliance?
My loose understanding as someone adjacent to the AI model space is that you have good models that are costly and cheap models that are decent, so a lot of the publicly visible fights where Claude and ChatGPT leapfrog each other is the companies doing cost-benefit of how much optimization to do on the models before your userbase revolts because the agent "used to be great and now kinda sucks".
As a small business owner whose team is entirely in Google Workspace (Drive, Gmail, Chat -- so inbuilt RAG right there), I wonder if Gemini will be the darkhorse. As a user Gemini's a distinct third in "AI smarts", but most business owners aren't power users who are gonna setup Codex or Code to slurp up their work emails and internal docs/SOPs.
The article feels a touch clickbait-y since people love a good fight between the top players and OAI's lost a buncha public goodwill over the past year.
So if I understand this correctly, Medvi is basically a frontend to white label telehealth services, with wildly successful targeting on an exact niche (GLP-1 served online).
So the 1.8B is effectively sales on a lead-generation opportunity where he gets to capture 20% of the sale (assuming that since his net profits are 16%), and then the backend guys do all the work and probably profit the remaining bit, assuming this line of business has ~50% margins, to these companies doing the actual work they're basically spending 20% on sales and marketing to Medvi. Because this is subscription-based, most of the costs are acquisition, and preventing churn (which is why he hired 7 contractors).
As another poster mentioned - basically this guy is dropshipping GLP1 with no moat, and my guess is that he was keeping quiet and making money till the market got saturated and now he gets to use his success as a puff piece to parlay into a bunch of other verticals like supplements, mealprep, and all that.
This guy's success is basically predicated upon him managing the branding and experience -- so good for him, but this is a middleman opportunity that is likely already going away due to me-toos (and that's why he's milking it one last time on NYT).
It's prob the other way around -- for almost a decade, Amazon's made it incredibly accessible for any Chinese factory, trading company, and middleman to spin up new brands on Amazon to reduce American brands and resellers' pricing powers. So the guys on Temu are selling their stuff rebranded on Amazon because it's fairly easy to spin up new stores and brands, while making it difficult for US sellers to do likewise.
Even worse (this actually happened to us a couple years back), Chinese companies outright steal our images/assets and then put them on other channels like Temu or Aliexpress, selling their knockoffs there pretending to be us. We were only made aware of this when we noticed products asking to be RMA'd from our support email, but with order receipts coming in from Aliexpress.
I digress, but the beatings will continue until morale improves...
For advice, caffeine, and what not, drop me a ping! Minimum effort & bot filter -- ROT13: [email protected]