Amazon is making a mistake by throwing out its low-profit areas. Amazon no longer allows me to buy used books from 3rd-party used-book sellers in the States, so now I have to use newly-found online-sellers like 'Abe Books' or 'Alibris'.<p>But both of these online sellers don't just sell used books, they also sell new books and other items which I probably would have bought from Amazon previously.<p>Amazon has lost me as a customer, and no doubt many others as well with their new restrictive sales terms. When 'important' companies start slavishly following profits instead of customer service, they have peaked and are now on their long slow decline to irrelevance.<p>(It was one of those 'aha!' moments, when I was looking at an earnings graph one day, that I noticed that a company's decline always begins when they are at their peak. It's self-evident from a graph of course, but not an intuitive piece of knowledge for most people.)
Sounds like a great way for Shopify to take advantage of how small retailers (and direct-to-consumer brands) distrust Amazon because of the conflict of interest. They know that if they sell a lot through amazon, amazon will take the sales data and use it to undercut those same retailers / D2C brands. With Shopify there is no conflict of interest because they are a platform, and not a retailer.<p>This sounds like a really smart move but it will be hard to pull off.