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Small business owners say Amazon is selling their products without permission
(www.newschannel5.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2026
311 points (98.4% liked)
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I have been trying to break my Amzon Addiction for years. This did it. Walmart is lesser evil now.
workers pissing in bottles wasn't enough for you?
Are we talking about Amazon or Walmart?
That high horse you live on is going to buck you off onto your face one day and I will enjoy it.
Try eBay. You're much more likely to find a small business selling whatever widget you need.
Ebay is owned by paypal and do the same shenanigans. I highly recommend to avoid ebay as well. Use these places so you can go direct to the artist or product provider if you can.
Ebay is a tricky one for me. I'm an electrician that services a lot of very old equipment, and sometimes eBay is the only place I can find oddball parts for a piece of switchgear that's 100 years old.
Yeah, sometimes it can't be helped. I should have said avoid as much as possible.
eBay owned PayPal at one point, but both companies today are independent and separate from one another.
It looks like you're right, they're both public companies now. Still, both are completely evil and use the same practices.
Yeah, eBay as a seller is just terrible. They have totally capitulated towards the large volume Chinese crapola sellers and require that you pay them for permission to list on their site or else they'll bury your listing.
It makes it very difficult to buy from another human being instead of some company that's using eBay as a storefront.
And because they are using AI to, okay, not LLM AI, but machine learning AI, to tell the sellers what the prices of their products should be listed at, they are inflating the cost of every single item you can find on eBay.
They are doing this on the one hand so the sellers get more money, but on the other hand so that they get more money for their listing fees and percentage of the final sales price.
They're basically realpage, but for person-to-person sales.
Most of that stuff is just drop shipped from alibaba anyways. Etsy is lousy with it too.
Incorrect. They have a new "ai feature" that scrapes the internet for independent stores and copies their products, pastes them on Amazon and then sells them to Amazon customers. Their AI then goes and places the order with the original store. Read the article and the news - it's widely reported in the last couple weeks. It seems like a "good thing for sellers and consumers" There are dozens of problems with this which are well covered elsewhere.
Nope, Amazon announced the feature, Shop Direct, that is exactly what the article is talking about. They now list things from other sites and complete the order from the other site for the customer, without the other site knowing at all.
This is 100% Amazon data grift to try to justify their AI expenditure