Selling Garbage as a Business Model

There is a saying that one man's garbage is another man's treasure. You might have an old chair with a broken leg that you think is junk and put out on the curb. Someone else may walk by and see a chair that just needs a new leg to be good as new. So, your junk is someone else's diamond in the rough.

But, often, garbage is just garbage. A bag full of used disposable diapers isn't anyone's treasure. Granted, there are some places that could take those diapers and convert them for use as fuel but, for the most part, most people walking by your curbside trash bins are going to pass on taking home a bag of used disposable diapers.

If you took that old chair with a broken leg, and offered it for sale for $5, you might get someone to buy it from you. Eventually, it would probably sell. All it takes is the right buyer.

With that bag of used disposable diapers, if you offered it for sale for $5, probably no one is going to buy it. You might hold out hope that one of those fuel conversion places might buy it, but they can probably get used diapers for free, from people that just want to get the smelly stuff far away from their house. You, too, will probably end up giving it to them for free just to get rid of it.

Generally speaking, the big bucks in garbage are made by hauling it away, not selling it!

Amazon could be considered as an example of this.

As many realize, Amazon has been cleaning out a lot of "duplicate" content from its Kindle marketplace. Hopefully, for Amazon, this will result in greater consumer confidence in buying eBooks as well as increased sales.

So, by taking out the trash, Amazon should end up making more money.

Some argue that they should leave it there. Let consumers decide what's garbage on their own, and refund accordingly. But, refunds should always be a last resort. You want to offer refunds to your customers to assure them they will be satisfied with their purchase or they will get their money back. However, you don't want them to actually have to request a refund. They will get their money back, sure, but they've lost a lot of time in downloading a bad product, in perusing that product to determine it's bad and then going through the process of actually getting a refund.

You want to prevent refunds by offering quality products with clear descriptions.

The fact that customers even have to request a refund makes a merchant look bad. The more those refunds add up, the worse the merchant looks. Why aren't they vetting their products better? Why are they peddling garbage?

That bag of used disposable diapers sitting out on the curb with a $5 price tag isn't giving passersby a buying opportunity. All it's doing is stinking up the place and making the neighborhood look bad.

So, it's no wonder Amazon wants to clean up the place.

Plus, it's a better opportunity for quality purveyors of eBooks to make a name for themselves and earn money.

Consider the old days of book publishing. Those "old days" are just a few years past, and not entirely obsolete even today! A writer would write their book--or maybe just a few chapters--and then start contacting publishers to get their work published. Some might even have an agent seek out publishers on their behalf for a percentage. A writer might have a quality book, well-researched with lots of useful information. But, they might go through contacting dozens, even hundreds, of publishers and still not get published.

Mind you, this "gatekeeper" system also weeded out a lot of trash. But, sometimes, a good book might go unpublished because it was too small of a niche for some publishers to deal with. So, the fact that a writer couldn't find a publisher didn't necessarily mean that their book was poor quality.

Some might have gone the self-publishing route. However, that earned the stigma of being "vanity publishing" because many of those authors with low-quality books also went the self-publishing route.

But, then the Internet helped even the score. A writer could start a blog and build a following. Those readers would already be familiar with that writer's quality when the book was released.

Or, if a writer had a good book in a niche too small for the big publishers to handle, they could self-publish it online and those prospects hungry for books on their topic would finally have something useful to buy, having been ignored by the big publishers.

So, when Amazon wanted more content for the Kindle, they developed a system to allow such writers to sell their books.

The problem came when certain marketers got wind of the idea and said, "Hey, you can buy some cheap content, throw it together, and launch a dozen new books every day! You will be a big time publisher and make a gazillion dollars for doing next to nothing!"

And, thus, Amazon's Kindle marketplace began to fill up with bags of used disposable diapers for $5.

Customers began to notice the stench and the quality writers found themselves competing with dozens or hundreds of new competitors, many of whom were peddling the exact same book.

Some will argue it's giving customers a choice.Do you think it makes a store a better place when you have dozens of people standing in the aisles, offering bags of used disposable diapers at competing prices? A choice between a dozen different bags of smelly diapers isn't really a choice at all.

Thus, it is a GOOD THING that Amazon is cleaning up the place. It's better for customers. It's better for quality writers.

As for those trying to sell those stinky diapers, maybe this will be the kick they need to realize they need to develop a real business model and to start selling things of actual value. In the end, that means it may be good for them too.