'Mammoth Nation' is a Scam Alternative to Amazon

Great Market Slice but a Horrible Implementation, and their Model and the Background of its Principals Shows How it Will Fail

I’m ashamed at how much I use Amazon. I know I’m funding bad things and bad people, but the ease of use and the low prices makes it difficult to go elsewhere.

Not to mention their seamless returns policy.

Amazon combines wide selection with low prices and quick shipping.

The old axiom that you can usually only get two of three qualities from any business: speed, price, quality, does not apply to Amazon.

So it is with some excitement that a viable alternative to Amazon has emerged, branding itself the “Mammoth Nation.” This is the latest in a line of potential Amazon challengers, including Mike Lindell’s “My Store.” I think both sites suffer from many of the same problems, but I am going to limit my analysis mostly to “Mammoth Nation” for the moment.

In a basic perusal of its site, I think we can quickly dismiss this as a viable alternative to Amazon.

Here are the few basic things that set it on a path for failure, and a useful discussion about why I think Amazon’s status is secure as the market leader.

The first thing Mammoth Nation wants from you is a tiered subscription plan. This is analogous to Amazon Prime, but with Prime you actually get things of real value: reduced price shipping, and access to Amazon’s video streaming service. Even third-party analysis suggests Amazon’s $139 prime membership yields an average customer value of $1,000. Here, I have no idea what value there is to subscribing to “Mammoth Nation.”

The second notable thing is that their search interface is very bad - here’s the search picture for “steaks and grilling” - it’s interesting that I think Lindell’s “My Store” makes the same mistake here. They seem to fundamentally misunderstand how people shop. Take this search queue for example, it’s on ‘books and videos’ and it is just… odd.

Searching a book on Amazon provides results that list 1) the full title, 2) the byline, 3) the rating and reviews in an easy five-star system, 4) the price, 5) the type of book (paperback/hardcover), 6) whether the shipping is free via prime, 7) other prices from other sellers for price context to give the buyer the confidence they are getting the best price, 8) a copy of the cover to make sure you are looking at the right product. Within the process of searching, Amazon is allowing you to finish deciding you want to buy the book before you even click the link.

It’s simplifying the search process so you aren’t wasting time wondering whether this is the right price, whether you could get it cheaper elsewhere, or if this is the right edition.

By contrast, when you search on Lindell’s “My Store” for books you get this result:

So instead of the 8 points of information I get on Amazon, on Lindell’s search I get by comparison:

1) the full title - no, only a partial headline
2) the byline - no byline
3) the rating and reviews in an easy five-star system - sort of, but there are only two ratings
4) the price - yes
5) the type of book (paperback/hardcover) - no
6) whether the shipping is free via prime - no
7) other prices from other sellers for price context to give the buyer the confidence they are getting the best price - none of this
8) a copy of the cover to make sure you are looking at the right product - yes, but it’s at an angle and thus its harder to see

So instead of eight points of information, discounting #1, 3, 8 by half because of their problems, we get a total of two and a half points of information in Lindell’s search.

Not to mention, Lindell’s “My Store” has 40 books total.

Let me repeat that again for emphasis: there are 40 books available for purchase on Mike Lindell’s alternative to Amazon. By contrast, the last time there was a count, Amazon offered nearly 50 million book titles. There are 3.5 million Kindle titles.

Mammoth Nation has, if you can believe this, 23 options under books. It has about half as many as Lindell’s “My Store.” I mean, this is just ridiculous.

There is a “Vendor Application” for Lindell’s “My Store” and it’s quite lengthy. I don’t think that’s bad, it will help separate the wheat from the chaff, but without knowing the actual market metrics of the site it seems that few reliable companies would take the time to fill out that information on the chance that it generates a sale or two. It would take substantial proof of traffic for an average company to think it should spend the time investing in onboarding on this seller marketplace.

And this brings up the issue that the overall breadth of the selections is very poor on both sites. Now they’re new, and I’m sure their defenders will give them a pass for being new entrants, and for dealing with a wide variety of official harassment for being center-right outlets. But Lindell’s operation is over a year old now, and Mammoth Nation has been around since about May 2020 from their Instagram feed.

So there’s no reason that certain features on these sites aren’t better adapted to improve the customer experience. And honestly I can’t see much reason, if any, to artificially limit the ability of people to purchase products through the site. One would want to be encouraging as much traffic as possible and not throttling customer traffic by demanding a subscription prior to purchasing.

Amazon thrives here as well: it shows you the product you are looking for and makes it easy to buy. I would characterize this as making the product pages very easy to understand and, thusly, easy to justify buying from the Amazon system. When you go to a product page, everything you need is right there on the screen in a clean three column format, no scrolling, no movement necessary. It’s extremely economical with the user’s time.

By contrast, here is Lindell’s “My Store” featuring the book by the company founder and owner:

The product pages on “Mammoth Nation” are laughably bad.

Maybe it’s better when you’re a paying member, but I have no idea where to go on this page. I have no idea how to buy the product. And I have no idea what the price is. It just looks like a hot mess.

I think the fundamental starting problem with Mammoth Nation is that it doesn’t allow people to window shop their products on an easy-to-use interface. I can’t actually see the products without signing up.

It’s also a suspicious sign that there’s no description of their company or corporate ownership anywhere, just a PO Box in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Upon review it looks like this project is an outgrowth of some snake oil sales about gun cleaners, something called Modern Spartan Systems.

Their communications person is named Paris Procopis. It’s always interesting to me when people involved in projects like this don’t list their relationship on their LinkedIn profile. Procopis is another aspiring conservative media personality. Not a good sign.

And hey, maybe this guy was just a contractor. The trademark is owned by Mammoth Nation LLC. Interestingly there is no “Mammoth Nation LLC” registered in Wisconsin. Elsewhere it appears to be a Delaware corporation. So they appear not to know that business organizations law still requires ‘domestication’ of the right to conduct business in a ‘foreign’ state. Meaning that a Delaware corporate filing, if you’re doing regular business in Wisconsin, still requires a Wisconsin business filing. Mammoth Nation LLC is filing #7604991 in Delaware.

A lawsuit between the original partners reveals a lot more about how it is/was originally set up.

These three were involved in the original formation of Mammoth Nation, LLC were: Robert Black, James Madderom, and Jamie Cowling. They discussed whether to operate as a D/B/A under another entity, Oconee Marketing Group, LLC. Oconee operated three entities according to court filings: Mammoth, The Hispanic Store, and 60 Plus.

I’ve been involved in conservative journalism and politics for 20ish years now, and the fact I’ve never heard of these guys is a little suspicious. Now I don’t know everybody, but it’s just odd I’ve never heard of these guys.

In researching “Oconee Marketing Group”, one name that pops up as a director is Jessica Yearwood. Yearwood is also tied to a similarly-named entity called the Oconee Communications Group. The Communications Group operates radio stations in central Florida. Yearwood graduated high school in roughly 2019, making her roughly 21 years old.

That’s no knock on people just entering the workforce, but I think if I told anyone that one of the richest men on the planet, Jeff Bezos, was going to have his trillion dollar valued monopoly challenged by a recent high school grad, I think you’d be right to be a little skeptical.

There was nothing in her profile about Cowling or Madderom, and Madderom’s Facebook profile is pretty sparse.

What’s interesting is that there’s no mention of 60 Plus, assuming they mean by that the 60 Plus Association, as tied to anything named the Oconee Marketing Group. Perhaps they meant a marketing contract? It’s unclear since the best information we have to go on is from the legal filings, and lord knows they can wildly misstate the truth.

The mention of “The Hispanic Store” is pretty amusing as well, in that it lends itself to many varying interpretations. Doing some research, though, there is a basic Facebook page called “The Hispanic Store” that just stops posting around 2019.

So perhaps what they were discussing were the virtual properties of these profitable entities, and who owned what, or how they could vest the ownership interests in the potential future profits from these digital sites. That kind of arrangement would make sense given the marketing backgrounds of these individuals.

As a relevant aside I want to say that I respect this group’s hustle, and the desire to be entrepreneurial. It’s not normal, and not common, and it’s a shame that it gets somewhat of a bad rap, but all good entities start similar to this: with a driven founder who often has to bootstrap things with people willing to do the necessary work, and often they have a falling out soon after things become profitable. I don’t fault these people for bootstrapping things, but I do think their past experience is a strong indicator if their intention is to genuinely serve a conservative marketspace, or if they are simply cynically milking conservative consumers by blowing the right dog whistles.

I hope it’s the former but experience teaches me it’s probably the latter.

Regrettably I’ll confess to you that my impression is the latter much more than the former: this site and this whole operation seems like a fraud.

Requiring payment for a subscription is the first suspicious act. And providing access on that basis gets people ‘bought in’ and creates no incentive for the company to provide more products. Aligning the company’s profitability with the same incentives that benefit the customer is the right model because it forces the company to add more products and transact more sales.

Amazon’s 20% ‘take’ from third-party sellers is abusive and exploitative, but it at least aligns along with the right incentives for all parties: Amazon wants more sales and more traffic to generate more sales. By taking a percentage of the sale, Amazon is not in conflict with the buyer or seller. 58% of paid sales on Amazon are from third-party sellers.

When that alignment is off, then suddenly adding more products is merely a promotional act in order to get more subscribers. Providing more sales only tangentially benefits the company, and the company can continue operating profitably with a larger subscriber base regardless of the number of sales on the platform. It creates the disincentive for the company to use marketing tactics to hype the products already on the platform in lieu of actually expanding the scope and quality of the site’s offerings.

In short: Mammoth Nation is set up to fail. It is set up to be a cash cow, and the lawsuit between the three partners illustrates that to be strongly the case.

I don’t know how many more red flags an entity would need to show or frankly could show, to indicate suspicion as to their operations.

A friend who was very wise in marketing and branding, Jim E., once noted to me that nothing that starts off by saying it’s the ‘conservative BLANK’ will ever succeed. Because at its core it uses the ideology as a subsidy and a crutch. Poor business operations can make it more successful than it should be, and those subsidies help companies avoid often painful decisions that would laser focus them on profitability and better customer service.

The marketplace is littered with the corporate corpses of the ‘conservative facebook’ and the ‘conservative youtube’ and so on. Most of them are unusable from day one, and almost all of them are unusable after you weigh the alternatives. People will sacrifice for their beliefs, but it’s not reasonable to expect them to bleed when buying merely for ideology.

Over time inferior products get increasingly obnoxious when there are ready alternatives.

A truly free market helps companies focus on serving the customer’s needs above all else. When you enter the market by saying you are demanding customer fealty based on politics or ideology, then you’re not really interested in serving the market - you’re serving politics.

In this way I think the left was smart to become parasites upon otherwise profitable major corporations. They aren’t busying themselves trying to start the liberal oil company, or the liberal bank, they are just infiltrating and taking over the boardrooms of BP and Bank of America. They spend their efforts where the money is already at, they are a tick who finds the healthiest host for their parasitical interests.

I also think it’s interesting and relevant that Amazon started as a bookseller. That had a variety of benefits: it forced them to offer a wide variety of listings and publishers/booksellers from the start, since there are so many books available out there. It also forced them to offer the lowest rates and provide for the quickest turnaround, it necessarily forced them into a logistics game early on, which ensured that they could easily scale up.

If you asked me to start a bookselling alternative to Amazon, I’m not sure that would be wise at any price because Amazon is the unquestioned leader of the pack. They dominate the book space because:

• Breadth. Can easily offer any book with their site. Their scope won’t be beat.

• Low-Cost Inventory. Have pioneered print-on-demand technology that allows them to print and ship new copies as they’re ordered.

• Easy Third-Party Sellers. Have the easy capacity to offer third-party sellers, resellers, and publishing houses the ability to onboard and get some revenue from their huge traffic. This has the effect of greatly reducing competition in the bookselling and other spaces. You used to even be able to list your own home library for sale easily on their platform but they discontinued that feature.

• Lowest Prices. Contractually they force sellers on their site to give Amazon the lowest price publicly offered. Meaning that there’s no reason for a price-conscious buyer to go anywhere else. This has the added effect of keeping the window shoppers engaged because they explicitly and implicitly know that they won’t find better deals elsewhere.

• Fastest Shipping. I have never met a company that could beat Amazon’s ability to timely get things onto my porch. They take logistics so seriously that I often find myself wondering whether I actually need something as soon as they can offer delivery.

• Accountability. Seller ratings and reviews are honest enough that they steer you away from cheap Chinese knock-offs and often give useful insights into a potential product. Other sites clearly get filled with fake reviews likely from the seller, or bots that junk up the space making it hard to trust. The trusted Amazon reviews give a great deal of trust that the product being sold is as described and is a good use of funds. Amazon’s return policies are also, as I mentioned, exceptionally good, simple, and fair.

• Smart Suggestions. Can easily harness their amazing traffic statistics to direct people to other suggested titles. Amazon’s ability to suggest similar topics, authors, titles, is really second only to Facebook’s advertising algorithms.

If there is any weak point in the Amazon ecosystem, it is perhaps their recent penchant for censorship and deplatforming topics and authors they find politically incorrect.

Most I think assume that means those books who deny the holocaust and what not, which is over 850 at last count, but Amazon is also taking out authors who aren’t controversial. Amazon banned anything that doesn’t push the new party line on transgenders, a party line whose dissidents were mainstream until just recently. Amazon’s Web Services infamously banned lukewarm center-right Parler from their systems in 2021. Amazon has become large enough that they don’t need to give a reason when banning authors.

You would think that another outlet had come along with a solution for selling banned books, but I was surprised that this was not easily the case. I had a hard time even finding a comprehensive list of the titles that Amazon had de-listed.

Here are a few of the alternative booksellers from across the political spectrum, there’s not a very vibrant market here:

• One outlet for politically incorrect books has 142 titles available: PoliticallyIncorrectBookstore.com.

• Another center-left outlet, Banned Books Box.com, has a paltry number of actual titles available.

• A Holocaust denial site claims there are only 72 books deplatformed by Amazon for that reason and offers them for sale. A similar site, BannedAmazonBooks.com, offers 73 titles for sale.

• Contrarian press “Nine Banded Books” has 59 titles in its store, though many are sold out.

I note that a book I discovered when writing another as-of-yet unpublished piece about Mike Judge’s movie “Idiocracy” has been banned by Amazon. It is Elmer Pendell’s “Why Civilizations Self-Destruct” and you can find it on Goodreads and the Internet Archive but not on Amazon.

Pendell’s thesis is the same as Judge’s movie: prosperous societies allow the weakest to breed and, over time, outbreed the more intelligent. It’s an example of how dysgenics can play out over time: smart people make prosperity, and that prosperity empowers others who aren’t so smart, and the unsmarts ultimately crush the smart people.

I haven’t seen this book on any list of books banned by Amazon, and it makes me suspect that there are quite a few that have been swept up in the censorship craze of the last few years.

I haven’t read the book but its thesis doesn’t seem too dangerous, too hot to handle. I’ve seen Idiocracy three of four times and that hasn’t changed my pro-life views in any way I’ve noticed. But even though movies are more subversive than books, modern society seems a lot more content to explicitly ban books than to ban movies. Banning books with bad ideas has become normalized, I guess we’re just not quite there yet for cinema censorship.

But cancel culture is on the march, they have met no resistance to their fatwas, so I wouldn’t expect them to stop anytime soon.

Amazon doesn’t even apologize for banning books critical of transgenders. Yet there’s no dedicated center-right place where you can find those titles.

Frankly that could be due to the dual left-wing monopoly around financial services represented by Visa’s acts of political advocacy. It’s no secret that Visa will de-link anyone they find politically inconvenient. So the desire to continue doing business may outweigh one’s desire to actualize Voltaire’s infamous comment about defending the right to hear dissenting voices.

Also, it’s a bit surprising that Amazon has not entered the financial services space in the way that EBay did when it acquired PayPal for payment processing from 2002-2015. There are I suppose many regulatory and compliance issues involved in combining those operations that might make the operation of both cost prohibitive.

Anyway I’m a big fan of the saying that critiquing without providing solutions is just whining and complaining. It’s easy to have a retrospective analysis but very difficult to prospectively know what to do.

So, what would I recommend if I were advising either “Mammoth Nation” or Lindell’s “My Store”?

I would start from a first premise that I am not trying to launch an all-out alternative to Amazon from the start. That’s a recipe to lose money. The goal should be to capture smaller discrete markets.

The second key premise I would start with is trying to capture customers and not sales. The initial users of the platform are going to be ideological conservatives, that lends itself to a few key lifestyles: homeschoolers, religious, stay-at-home moms, a certain type of professional like doctors and lawyers, rural living. You might as well cater to that demographic.

The third key premise is that I would focus on specific products that generate repeat sales. I love books, but very few people buy the same book repetitively. But there are certain products that people need regularly, and they want good deals on those products. This is basically the Amway model: get people captured via contract to continually get their basic household needs repetitively.

The fourth key premise is that I would recommend capturing profitable smaller ignored markets. One of those I suspect is something like Netflix’s DVD service. Many are surprised this is even still around, but there are a significant number of people who don’t have streaming capacity, or who want to watch a different selection of movies than is offered in streaming. One prominent example is that the mid-90s action movie “True Lies” is unavailable anywhere on streaming. Many famous John Wayne movies are unavailable on streaming. The legal licensing for streaming is much different than the more stable secondary market for movies which easily permits their use and re-sale. There are little markets like that, ones that involve logistics and repeat sales, to the kind of customers who are homeschoolers desiring older movies, and rural folks who might not have high-speed internet, that would be potentially profitable.

The fifth key premise is that I think people want value for their money over price. Especially conservative buyers, I think they want to check a box that says it’s made in America and that it’s not funding Planned Parenthood and generally supporting the center-right, but in terms of their actual buying behavior I think they want quality over price. That may not sound especially revealing but I think in practice it has major consequences.

American economics is highly focused on reducing price and providing for the widest market appeal. It’s hard to find high-quality anything, because corporate sophistry is sophisticated and companies generally eschew any kind of warranties. This truism even infects our politics: neoliberalism itself tries to run the same game of efficiency and rational interests above all else, and forcing everyone to adopt those values through education or bombings (soft power vs. hard power), whichever works fastest.

So what profitable markets does that lead one to? What should these Amazon alternatives be practically selling?

• Consumable home goods bought regularly. Similar to Amazon’s ‘subscribe and save’ program, they should sell a conservative package for soap, shampoo, dishwasher detergent, and the like. If I could order a monthly package of my home goods from a conservative outlet with little hassle, I would easily set that up on repeat even if it wasn’t cheaper than Amazon.

• Novelty Niche Packages such as the prepper packages, ‘bug out bags’ and the like. There’s a surprising market for this, motivated by rational conservatives who think they have figured out the astrology necessary to predict the end times. I’m not a fan of this mindset personally, but I recognize there are many people who will spend money for that purpose.

• Firearms are highly discouraged for political reasons on other platforms. The current market leader in this space is gunbroker.com and its interface has a very 1998 Geocities.com feel to it.

• A website alternative sales program similar to Google’s AdSense. Having the products is nice, but giving specific businesses the ability to interface with the products offered on their platform would be a great way to drive traffic. Initially, I would operate this at a revenue-neutral basis in order to get buy-in from participants. Every content creator I have met is privately resentful and quietly furious at the way they have been treated by Google in this space. The loyalty to Google is zero, and the motivation for people to jump ship is high. If people felt that they were getting a reliable flow of revenue from sales, they would easily and quickly ditch AdSense. Google deserves a comeuppance even more than Amazon, and this would have the benefit of driving traffic to either of these new sales sites.

• Services within a specific geographic area. So many skilled conservatives are being kicked out of big companies or off of other gig-like platforms, there’s a lot of untapped talent that is looking to connect with customers.

One other caveat for a reselling site would be to encourage validated third-party selling, akin to Facebook Marketplace, but also provide the financial methods to do so without taking a cut of the transaction. If you made it seamless for people to sell items where they could click a third-party Venmo link or otherwise transfer funds without taking a bit cut, it would drive a lot of interest and traffic fast.

I’m sure there are many other things that would be profitable and make sense, but these are some of those that I thought would be low-investment, easy repeat business, and otherwise profitable.

There’s an enormous untapped market to sell into what is essentially the Fox News demographic of people who want non-woke companies to provide high quality goods and services. That need isn’t being met, and with their current sites and operations, neither “Mammoth Nation” nor Lindell’s “My Store” will meet that need effectively.