It's not much of a problem, but not much of an advantage either.
So, the question I'm confronted with is: why pay the same for a worse experience? The Amazon route forces me to pay more (Prime) to get it within 2-5 days, or even more to get it faster. Then there are the AMZL_US delivery hassles on top of that. The Home Depot route costs me 25 cents of gas and a 20-40 min of time to get it now-now.
> Do you have any examples where Amazon is selling a product for "outrageously higher"?
Not offhand, but I specifically recall seeing outrageously higher prices for some grocery/drugstore type items. Stuff like a $2 item selling for $6.
Before the MAP ruling, manufacturers could not ban resellers based on pricing, and you saw a lot more Internet discounting on products that the manufacturer saw as "premier" items, that they didn't want reputationally-impacted by low sale prices.
6 companies might sell the same product at varying prices, some of them uploading 1000s of items they have dropshopping for, but no real inventory. 1 or 2 may legitimately sell the product at a manually entered price that's competitive - when those sellers sell out, the others who dropship at cost+100% show up as the default seller.
The big dropshippers make their profit off infrequent, high margin sales that can be auto fulfilled when legitimate sellers run out of inventory.