We bought a Samsung TV some months ago, it’s the same model number as on Samsung’s website and all the features, etc. match up.
I haven’t seen that happen on Amazon; generally retailers use a different model number for items with different features. The only exception I have found is Best Buy (the bastards). See post #4 in this thread.
I think what you are questioning is VOLUME SELLING. Yes, Amazon sells cheaper including shipping in some cases. It is because they negotiate with the seller to be able to sell at a lower price. Same thing the medical providers like Amana, Senior Dimensions, etc. They negotiate with the doctors, hospitals etc. for a lower volume price. This is normal practice. I am a member of Amazon and pay the yearly fee for Prime conditions. The free shipping makes up for the fee up front if you use their services quite a lot as I do and the lower prices on some items help also.
What I know about Amazon specific products.
Amazon has it’s own line of Amazon Basics products. Batteries, cables, etc. No other branding is applied. Not really the topic of the OP. Ditto their tablets, Kindles, etc.
Amazon sells versions of “name brand” products under it’s own label. E.g., the Fire television sets are listed as made by Element (not exactly a big company). Getting closer.
There’s also “Amazon Prime Exclusive” phones. Some seem to be basically sold elsewhere under the same name, some seem to be Amazon alone. It would take some time to see if any are covered by the OP’s question.
Not altogether true.
A company I worked for a few decades ago wanted us to learn about “Japanese Quality Management” so we sat through quite a few quality control videos at the time, bombarded with magazine articles contrasting US and Japanese manufacturing methods, etc.
The problems with the USA were not so much expensive bad front line workers - it was management and engineering. The same transmission made by US and Japanese subcontractors - the US one failed far more frequently. A teardown revealed that while both were manufactured to spec, the Japanese one was much closer to design while the US one shoed a greater variation on range. This suggested to me that tolerances for parts specified by the (US) engineers were too lax - probably OK in the early days of automatic transmissions but now production machines were capable of much more. accumulated tolerance variations added up.
Japanese manufacturers treated their employees (back then) as lifetime employees, so took the time and expense to show them the business - an engineer would spend a few months in production, then in accounting, etc. before engineering anything. American companies had a social hierarchy that isolated the engineers from real world production, and where the Japanese valued feedback from the front-line workers, US car makers did not. Another note - while many older US factories and mills looked like a dirty mess, our bosses visited a steel mill in Japan so clean they said you could eat off the floor. And of course, the Japanese paid much more attention to quality control numbers and analysis to ensure they did not miss problems.
Another problem, more germane to the OP, was that US car makers (and other manufacturers) switch suppliers for the cost savings - so slightly different materials went into the process, resulting in wider variation with each batch. Japanese manufacturers “got into bed” with their suppliers and collaborated to ensure consistency, the key to reliable production. The downside, of course, which our bosses glossed over, is that the Japanese started what Wal-Mart today has perfected and many retailers copy; they would become a bigger and bigger part of the suppliers’ business, until the supplier could not afford to lose them; then they’d start squeezing on price.
While your Toyota from 30 years ago may have been assembled by happy(?) well-paid workers with a lifetime job, the dirty secret was that many of the smaller components, such as headlight assemblies, were made in tiny factories where the big buyer squeezed the company so hard it verged on sweatshop, with a gestapo-like enforcement of quality of the supplied product. To top it off, the big auto company would often twist arms to buy half the stock in the smaller company to cement the relationship and recoup some of the money.
:dubious:
A one-gallon jar of pickles is lucky to last 2 days at my house…
thanks for this insight. It agrees with what I have read over the last 20 years.
I talked to a former Gov’t employee who was sent to the far east 1999-2001 to study (among other things) Asian shipbuilding to see how the US could match their productivity and quality. It came down to what you talked about. The US ship construction just had lower quality standards and less well-maintained shipyards. If your equipment is older and looser, no worker is going to do as well as one in with newer well-maintained equipment. If your design isn’t well done up front, then each ship is built a little differently as problems arise and are fixed on the fly*. The result was/is stark: no US built ship meets the quality standards of a Korean or Japanese built ship.
I don’t know about how subcontractors are treated in the US, but I have read about how they are treated in Japan. 
*funny story. I personally knew someone who worked in a regional shipyard in the US who reported solely to the head of the shipyard. His sole (and unofficial) job was to be the valve guy. As you can imagine valves are a significant cost in any ship construction. They are very expensive and have long lead times and there are a LOT of them on any ship. This guy’s job was to go around the ships under construction and swap out valves whenever it would help the schedule or bottom line. Since he reported only to the boss, no one could stop him by pointing to the plans and saying that valve isn’t the correct one. This guy had decades of experience and mostly didn’t compromise performance, but he was able to take a cheaper valve from one ship (or stock) and use it on another ship and make it fit. It kept the schedule and cost on track. It must be hell on the maintenance people on the ship after the ship is delivered, but the ship owners got their schedule and cost and apparently were willing to put up with their engineer’s complaints. When the shipyard got a big military oder, this guy (and the boss) retired…
I bought a pair of Goodyear Viva 3 tires with a 60K mile warranty. after 20K miles they are worn out. Take them back and they say “sorry, your warranty isn’t valid because it specifically excludes rapid tread wear”??? I was told there was some play in the tie rods and that would invalidate the warranty. Pretty much, the warranty is self canceling. The warranty on the back of the invoice only says “rapid or uneven tread wear” the tread wear is even, just rapid. Told by a tire shop the Walmart tires are made specifically for them and they see a lot of tires that wear out before their time but Walmart won’t honor the warranty. I thought Goodyear was Goodyear, I guess not.
I work at an Amazon warehouse and most of what I process is FBA.
I tried to find the stats and some claim the majority are 3rd party. Here’s a link that says 53% as of now and that “In 2017, Amazon generated 31.88 billion U.S. dollars in third-party seller service revenues.” I believe those are just the fees paid to Amazon and not the total sales volume.
I found another source that places 3rd party sales at 47% in 2016. Either way, FBA is not a small portion in any way. It’s a huge driver of their success.
As far as OP, I know that in clothing and electronics Walmart and Target sell different models of the same stuff and also lower quality versions of big brands, but I’m not sure if that’s what is being asked or if we are talking about some kind of trickery involved. For example, Walmart sells Levi’s jeans for around 1/2 -1/3 of what “Levis” normally cost but it’s obvious it’s a different product line and not called or numbered the same way. Then you have things like Vizio TVs with a different letter or number at the end of the model number but are exactly the same in all specs and features.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now where most of the money is. Shopping is just where they got their start.
I clicked the link (6 months later!) and read that, once again, a pilot responded to stall warning by pulling on the yoke to raise the nose. 
My experience as a pilot is near-zero, but even I know that’s wrong; anyone with intuition about basic aerodynamics should know it’s wrong; and certainly any professional pilot should have the correct intuition locked in like reflexes. No? What gives?
Additional details (2017):
Non-AWS - North America - 100b net sales, 2.8b income (profit)
AWS - 17b net sales, 4.3b income (profit)
Right.
People keep thinking that until recently Amazon was “losing” money on it’s store since they kept reporting losses. Yeah, but …
Amazon is growing very rapidly and bringing in increasing larger amounts of money. Which was then turned around into building up infrastructure and all that. So the value of the company kept going up despite “losing” money on the store. As long as the growth continues, the net gain/loss matters little. At the end of the day the stock should be worth more since your shares represent a more valuable piece of the company.
So their store is still their core business. Better yet, the big computing infrastructure behind running it is also a lot like the infrastructure for AWS, so duplication of effort is reduced.