Bookmarking this thread. I really appreciate when merchants come on here and explain things directly....plus I need some lightseals for my Pentax ME....
Jon Goodman's ebay business down the drain
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Perhaps you should raise your prices, too. You left enough margin on the table for another person to add a little labor to you product and sell it at a profit.
Jon's business is his business but as we are discussing it here I frankly state I don't see where would the problem be.
If I sell oranges and orange juice, and somebody else buys my oranges to make his own orange juice to sell, that's fine for me.
If Ikea sells "mount it yourself" furniture kits, and somebody buys them and mounts them for the final client, so be it. The fact that the Ikea instructions are handed over to the final client is not relevant. The Goodman mark might actually have been removed for fear of infringing on some trade norm.
In any case the other agent performed an intermediate step for the client, as directed by Jon's instructions, and handed the resulting good to the final client, with Jon's instruction. Doctoring the author of the instruction is the only debatable part, but a case could be made that correctly the other person omitted Jon Goodman trade mark for fear of being accusing of stealing its name*.
I see, on the contrary, as an unfair business practice to restrict sale to a client who is going to perform a productive step from semifinished good to finished good. We should ask how would we feel if Ikea didn't sell furniture to us only because we mount it instead of the final client. And as a final client I ask if it is legal that the sale of a semifinished product is negated to a competitor because the seller of the semifinished product also sells the finished product. Can the seller select his buyers? (in many jurisdictions he cannot. Don't know about the US. But if we talk ethics, well, in my ethic jurisdiction nobody can negate business to anybody who agrees to his terms).
Jon was in two businesses of this "cottage model" industry: the business of selling a certain semifinished product, and the business of selling a certain finished product.
If really his goal in business life were to squeeze out somebody who buys his semifinished product, his business answer would have been to raise the price of the unfinished product and lower the price of the finished product. He might have discovered that his unwanted client would have gone somewhere else and that he lost business for no reason.
From a strictly business point of view I think Jon has no sound complaint here.
Selling only the finished product, and selling through his own site, are decisions that he could have made regardless of any other consideration, and which might turn out to be very valid ones, but if I am prepared to sell a semifinished product to a client (giving up on the added value of the cutting work, which I don't perform), what's the problem for me if somebody else, instead of the final client, makes the cutting work for a fee?
Fabrizio
PS Sorry for late replies, I'm leaving tomorrow for a week.
* The objection "he could have written his own instruction himself" doesn't hold in my opinion as the intermediate performer performs, so to speak on behalf of the final client, a productive step as intended and described by the kit producer, and correctly hands over the instruction of the kit producer to the final client for the performance of the final productive step as intended and prescribed by the kit producer.
If I sell oranges and orange juice, and somebody else buys my oranges to make his own orange juice to sell, that's fine for me.
If Ikea sells "mount it yourself" furniture kits, and somebody buys them and mounts them for the final client, so be it. The fact that the Ikea instructions are handed over to the final client is not relevant. The Goodman mark might actually have been removed for fear of infringing on some trade norm.
In any case the other agent performed an intermediate step for the client, as directed by Jon's instructions, and handed the resulting good to the final client, with Jon's instruction. Doctoring the author of the instruction is the only debatable part, but a case could be made that correctly the other person omitted Jon Goodman trade mark for fear of being accusing of stealing its name*.
I see, on the contrary, as an unfair business practice to restrict sale to a client who is going to perform a productive step from semifinished good to finished good. We should ask how would we feel if Ikea didn't sell furniture to us only because we mount it instead of the final client. And as a final client I ask if it is legal that the sale of a semifinished product is negated to a competitor because the seller of the semifinished product also sells the finished product. Can the seller select his buyers? (in many jurisdictions he cannot. Don't know about the US. But if we talk ethics, well, in my ethic jurisdiction nobody can negate business to anybody who agrees to his terms).
Jon was in two businesses of this "cottage model" industry: the business of selling a certain semifinished product, and the business of selling a certain finished product.
If really his goal in business life were to squeeze out somebody who buys his semifinished product, his business answer would have been to raise the price of the unfinished product and lower the price of the finished product. He might have discovered that his unwanted client would have gone somewhere else and that he lost business for no reason.
From a strictly business point of view I think Jon has no sound complaint here.
Selling only the finished product, and selling through his own site, are decisions that he could have made regardless of any other consideration, and which might turn out to be very valid ones, but if I am prepared to sell a semifinished product to a client (giving up on the added value of the cutting work, which I don't perform), what's the problem for me if somebody else, instead of the final client, makes the cutting work for a fee?
Fabrizio
PS Sorry for late replies, I'm leaving tomorrow for a week.
* The objection "he could have written his own instruction himself" doesn't hold in my opinion as the intermediate performer performs, so to speak on behalf of the final client, a productive step as intended and described by the kit producer, and correctly hands over the instruction of the kit producer to the final client for the performance of the final productive step as intended and prescribed by the kit producer.
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I agree. Whilst is seems unfair, in reality it is what businesses do all the time and have done since people started trading things.
Steve.
While I know nothing about business, I do know that I have some foam drying on my Ricoh 500G at the moment and that Jon's a great guy.
Likewise. As nice a chap as Jon is to deal with and as good a product as he sells, I think he's on a sticky wicket trying to say what buyers may or may not do with his materials once they have bought and hence own them. Shifting the previous IKEA analogy to something more photographic, when Ilford sell me paper they don't get upset if I subsequently print a picture on it and sell it on for more money (not that that often happens!)
It seems to be the scale of the business involved that makes this an emotive issue, along with perhaps a perception that apart from simply providing a product, Jon is providing a service. I'm sure he's not making a mint or cruising around in the latest Cadillac! Unfortunately, I've had to go elsewhere for my camera foam and felt as I use it quite a bit for restoration of cameras that I buy and I don't want to have to order something specific and then have to wait for it to arrive from overseas when I can otherwise just trim something from stock. I've never in any way, shape or form make money from repairing cameras, though I have done a few freebies for friends.
Steve
If I buy your oranges and use them to make watered-down orange juice, and my label says, "Made with Fabrizio's oranges", would you still be okay with it?
As long as a vendor doesn't commit an act of discrimination as defined by law, he absolutely does have the right to choose his buyers, at least here in the USA. And if a particular buyer is violating the vendor's copyright by adulterating the instruction sheet, regardless of his reasons, blocking them may be a good business decision.
It doesn't matter. If it's true, you can't do much about it.
Except for that.
Steve.
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- BobD
- Deleted
That isn't the situation being discussed here at all. Where has anyone said that what Jon's 'reseller' is selling in any way inferior? If anything, it's as if Jon only sells orange,s and now he's upset that the guy buying his oranges is making them into orange juice.
I was pointing out to Fabrizio that there are circumstances under which it might not be "fine for him". If I were in Jon's place, I surely would be concerned about the quality of the product after the other guy did the pre-cuts from my kits.
And no, it's not as if Jon only sells oranges, because he was selling both general and pre-cut kits (the oranges and the juice, to flog the analogy).
Please click on my name and go back to my post from 7/7/09. You'll see more information on this situation.
Inferior? Good grief...everything is an imitation. Would you rather have a real parachute or one sewn together from old pantyhose and old dishtowels? Would you rather have a surgeon who had actually gone to school and graduated and become licensed or one who had simply watched a few episodes of "Grey's Anatomy" and decided it looked like fun to cut people open? Even my eBay ID was imitated for a while. I'd say it is 100% inferior. You definitely won't get the same quality of foam, the same precisely cut strips, the same bamboo tool and you'd better not be still getting my instructions. If somebody had been buying my material and improving it, I'd not been upset. However that was not the case at all.
Driving the latest Cadillac? No. I have a tired 14+ year old Chevrolet which is hard to start, rattles a lot and gets low gas mileage. But the brakes are good and the A/C does a fair job.
Jon
Inferior? Good grief...everything is an imitation. Would you rather have a real parachute or one sewn together from old pantyhose and old dishtowels? Would you rather have a surgeon who had actually gone to school and graduated and become licensed or one who had simply watched a few episodes of "Grey's Anatomy" and decided it looked like fun to cut people open? Even my eBay ID was imitated for a while. I'd say it is 100% inferior. You definitely won't get the same quality of foam, the same precisely cut strips, the same bamboo tool and you'd better not be still getting my instructions. If somebody had been buying my material and improving it, I'd not been upset. However that was not the case at all.
Driving the latest Cadillac? No. I have a tired 14+ year old Chevrolet which is hard to start, rattles a lot and gets low gas mileage. But the brakes are good and the A/C does a fair job.
Jon
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