Amazon has a toilet paper problem.

“We can’t be in the same cart as toilet paper, and for us, that’s the biggest recurring theme,” said one attendee from a high-end French luxury brand at Glossy’s Store of the Future Forum last Friday.

During the event, while discussing whether or not Amazon as a retail partner was a smart relationship or something to steer clear of, a pattern emerged: Beauty and hair-care brands find more benefit in befriending Amazon than trying to steer clear of it, but luxury fashion brands are still fixated on Amazon’s down-market leanings.

“I may shop on Amazon, but I’m certainly not going to sell my brand on Amazon,” said a manager from a second luxury fashion brand.

That a brand selling a $3,000 coat or an $800 blouse could end up in the same one-click-checkout shopping spree as a family-sized pack of toilet paper is a favored retail scare story that’s brought up any time Amazon’s role in luxury retail is considered. Of course, there’s little proven consumer evidence to back up the idea that anyone would shop like this – not because Amazon would share the details of its customers’ carts, but because luxury brands have stayed far enough away to ever find out. The mere proximity is enough to seal the deal. After all, Charmin and Chanel start with the same three letters.

“The problem is price discipline and neighbors,” said Luca Solca, managing director of global luxury goods at Exane BNP Paribas. “Luxury retail is about maintaining prices and selling side by side to peers. Amazon, by contrast, is keen to beat competitors on price and does not have a ‘high end’ dedicated space.”

Amazon has created a dedicated “Luxury Beauty” landing page with content around featured brands like L’Occitane, and participating brand partners get a Luxury Beauty badge on all product pages. The initiative is to help confirm that the products are being sold by trusted brand sellers and not third-party sellers with counterfeit items. Inclusion in the Luxury Beauty hub and the badge are free, say execs.

Amazon hasn’t done the same for the luxury fashion space. Amazon Fashion, the retailer’s dedicated fashion hub, sells brands like Kate Spade and Rebecca Minkoff alongside Amazon’s private-label mass lines. Its higher-end fashion site Shopbop, which it acquired in 2006, has seen competition swell around it in the luxury marketplace era, with sites like Net-a-Porter and Farfetch gaining ground. These marketplaces have been able to pitch to luxury brands that they’re the anti-Amazon of online retail.

“The Amazon era hasn’t really happened in luxury yet. We’re watching the allergic reaction that brands and retailers in luxury have had to Amazon, against being commoditized and brought down to the lowest-common denominator on the platform. Amazon is a real turn off for luxury,” said Alistair Crane, the CEO of Hero, a startup technology company that is capitalizing off luxury’s reticence to partner with Amazon. It pitches itself as a barrier between brands and Amazon’s dominance by connecting online shoppers to nearby brand associates at local boutiques and department stores. “But when it comes to new technology and new consumer luxury behavior, Amazon has championed where all of that is headed. You’re just seeing that trickle into luxury right now.”

And in the Amazon age, a heritage fashion house has more to lose than a brand of toilet paper.

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Amazon’s investment in private-label brands is charting a new era of what brands can compete and win on, and both the brands that sell and don’t sell on Amazon are feeling the effects.

• Armed with years of purchase and search history and a network of algorithms, Amazon could change the way customers search for and consider the products they ultimately decide to purchase by conditioning customers to put less weight on name brands and more emphasis on convenience and price.
• Brands have two choices: Get as far away from, or as close to, Amazon as possible.

Read more about Amazon’s invisible brands on Digiday. (For Digiday+ subscribers.)

By partnering with major institutions like JPMorgan, the “bank of Amazon” is shaping up to be a bigger threat to up and coming startups, rather than the banks themselves.

• Amazon could squeeze the market that startups are competing in, which is easy customer service and low fees, by pumping these resources into existing banks. Already, these new companies struggle with data capture and brand recognition.
• Amazon’s said to be working with Capital One and JPMorgan to operate checking accounts under their umbrellas, which would put the banks’ front-end relationship with customers at stake, but not kill business.

Learn about the bank of Amazon – and why it’s coming sooner than we think – on Tearsheet.

The Digiday Media Buying Summit invited agency executives and media buyers to New Orleans earlier this month to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing their industry. The topic of Amazon was top of mind, as Amazon has made recent moves to position itself as a more visible partner for media buyers, through a “total wallet” proposition, increase in self-service options for Amazon Media Group, and the addition of an application programming interface for sponsored product ads.

Retailers may be wary to partner up with Amazon, a formidable competitor, but according to Kris McDermott, head of commerce solutions at Resolution Media, they’ll soon realize they have no choice but to work with Amazon in the end.

The bottom line: Amazon’s ad products are maturing, and emerging as a viable third option to Facebook and Google.

You can read the full Digiday+ briefing from the event here.

$1 – The target cost per delivery for Amazon packages delivered by drone, which the company has continued to invest in jumpstarting. (Raconteur)

$50 million – The amount UPS estimated it could save by cutting the last mile of shipments on 66,000 deliveries. 

30 minutes or less – The goal delivery window for Amazon Prime Air, for packages that weigh around five pounds. 

• Amazon is on track to be a $1 trillion company by 2022, Jeffries says [Bloomberg]
• Amazon will be a major disrupter to live sports [CNBC]
• Amazon is reportedly bringing Alexa to businesses [Engadget]

Want to hear directly from retailers like Glossier and Dia & Co on how they're tackling the Amazon effect? Join me at the upcoming Glossy Summit, taking place in Miami from May 21 - 23, where we will discuss how fashion, luxury and beauty brands are tackling the age of Amazon, through partnerships or forging their own paths. Reserve your spot in Miami today.