Paying for the picnic was not enough; get ready to share your lunch too. They are selling but also learning your product: Predatory marketing and imitation strategies in the Amazon marketplace

Abstract

Multisided platforms, as pointed by Rietveld et al. usually start with a single-use just as Amazon was a place to buy/sell used/new books until it scaled into selling close to a million unique brands. Platforms started for a singular purpose later; scaling into multi-purposes calls for certain governance limitations. The capability and appetite to enter new markets/industries seem insatiable once the platform garnishes the resources to meet the initial goals set by the stakeholders. Amazon bid to buy a prepaid cellular brand; it also wants to expand into the pharmacy. The question here is, what are the industries that Amazon cannot scale into using its platform? Probably renewable energy, but didn't amazon backed an electric vehicle manufacturer lucid. So, the industries that present a promise which its digital platform cannot scale into are brought into the fold by funding. This paper aims at adding a new perspective to digital platforms research by introducing how the third-party sellers on an e-commerce platform such as amazon perceive the platform and how that perception gets affected when the platform starts competing with the third-party sellers by creating digital storefronts. This paper investigates how the Platform-supported products receive an extra push; the platform mediates the selling of its product over the third-party sellers and how the loyal third-party sellers prepare themselves to compete with the platform.