I'm glad this was stated. It is new insight for me.

I got in the habit of only buying from the actual manufacturer store on Amazon, thinking it was benefiting the company. For example: buying Bose speakers on the Amazon Bose site, instead of the bose.com. Now I realize that Bose loses a lot of money going through amazon. I should just be going to the bose.com store and cutting out amazon. I never really need anything I buy online "tomorrow".

The only thing I've run into is the vendor site saying out of stock, but the vendor -store- on Amazon in stock. E.g., I bought a PixHawk4 flight contgroller from HolyBro. The HolyBro site was out of stock, but Amazon's HolyBro store had it in stock. /bangs head on wall/ I understand why, it's just... weird.

That’s another point of the article. Amazon forces Bose not to sell at a lower price anywhere else. So the price you pay at Bose is also the 30-40% Prime premium that Amazon charges. Although you are right that premium goes to the manufacturer as opposed to Amazon but overall a significant loss to all customers prime or non-prime

If you buy the headphones at a brick and mortar store, you’re still forced to pay the Amazon shipping surcharge, even if the money is not going to Amazon. This puts brick and mortar stores at an unfair disadvantage, and it is directly traceable to Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior.

Steam is doing a similar thing. It's wrong there too.

Now, I'm not saying that this should be apply to copies distributed via other channels. Just to those redeemable on Steam.

That's not even mentioning the network effect, where a service has to have enough adoption or demand to "force" other merchants to accept it

On top of that, you could fill a large book with descriptions of esoteric con jobs that only work on PayPal.

Elon builds rockets because of a well-timed exit, followed by lots of hard work and success building Tesla.

I would almost always prefer to click “pay with PayPal” than start some new account or fill in details on a given vendors site.

I would go so far as to say that if large enough retailers who already have storefronts were savvy enough, PayPal could make Amazon obsolete.

I know how returns work with Amazon. If I buy directly, are they going to give me the run around if there's a problem?

The result is exactly as you'd expect: the items sold by third party sellers on amazon have a large markup just to produce break-even margins. Source: my wife, who ran a business including third-party selling on Amazon for a while.

This is another hidden benefit of shopping on Amazon: they see my (egregiously long) shopping history. I'm sure they have some risk profile on me that suggests I'm not buying and returning a bunch of stuff to rip off sellers.

If I say something some pack of kids underwear is the wrong size, or a $15 LED light didn't arrive, or a pair of boots needs to get exchanged, it's dealt with in maybe 60 seconds of clicking on their site.

My guess is that people buying high-end headphones are just not comfortable with such setup.

I bought a product from a seller on their website once, but mistakenly ordered the wrong colour. Upon reaching out to them, I was told I had to ship it back myself (at a multiple of the item's cost), or buy a new one.

Meanwhile the product was listed on Amazon for the same price. Did I also mention that when I ordered the product initially, it came from an Amazon facility? Why does the seller get to benefit from Amazon's logistics but I get stiffed on the return?

There is always the issue of how well the integration performs. It is not uncommon for merchants software to get confused in the process and ship your order to the billing address or for other things to go wrong. When that happens, you now have to deal with customer service of varying quality.

In most cases, the purchase decision is easier for me to make on Amazon than anywhere else. I've been a customer since almost the first days and while I can count a lot of minor irritations, there isn't anything better.

With more and more adoption of ApplePay and GooglePay to power the checkout experience this advantage might away..

But most sites simply tack it on at the end as a payment option and ask for an account, address, etc beforehand.

I had this revelation too when I started buying food from farmers direct and was surprised at the low prices. Its kinda obvious, when you think about it.

Same deal for online retail. You've gotta have a warehouse, someone to box orders, a website to take orsers, customer service, etc. This all costs money and Amazon has the scale to do it all a lot cheaper than you can.

We're able to get fresh milk from a local farm. It's (literally) sold ten steps from where it's milked, you can hear - and smell - the cows in the building.

It comes from a chilled stainless steel vessel with a spigot, you bring your own bottle and serve yourself, and as for payment processing ... there's an honesty box.

Most people forget that the transaction might not have taken place were it not for said middleman.

Which raises an obvious asymmetry: Amazon makes no guarantee that it is not offering more favourable terms for bigger suppliers – and although mere speculation, I would be surprised if that didn’t go on, because I seem to remember traditional retailers doing similar things.

I’m not saying this is good or bad, just pointing out that with all retail there has been almost a phase transition once the supplier is a household name, and the dynamics change almost to the point where retailers would offer their products at cost price or even a loss just to make sure that their customers could buy the household name through them.

I'm not sure what, but there's a story on lower end, too.

A lot of crap on Amazon is from no-name brands like MAKNO and TURBLEX which don't even exist outside of Amazon. If I sell $19.99 TURBLEX kitchen knives on Amazon and the $11.87 MAKNO version through AliExpress, then I've not violated the policy.

Gifts generally have strict deadlines. Sadly, Amazon has stopped offering any shipping speed guarantees -- there is no longer even an option in the purchase flow. It will get there when it gets there.

They won't refund if they miss their own self-imposed shipping deadlines, either.

Prime customers get pretty much anything delivered in two days.

I still haven't figured out how they do it. I ordered two obscure oil filters, and they were delivered within a day. I think they had driver go into a local automotive store, and buy them?

Anyhoo, they were cheaper than the store price.

(I don't hate Amazon. I'm pretty amazed how effient they are. I never thought I would pay for Prime, but that MGM buy was brilliant. Local retailers need to up their game. I'm getting tired of being quoted a cheaper price online, just to pay more if I go in to buy. Automotive parts stores are notoriorious for this behavior.)

So? That has nothing to do with my comment.

Amazon used to let you select a shipping speed! The benefit of Prime was that two-day shipping was free, not that it made anything any faster.

You can no longer do this. Amazon will tell you how long they plan to take to deliver the item. Do you want it faster than that? Suck it up. Did it, in fact, take longer? Suck it up.

In New Zealand it can easily take 2 months for packages to arrive from overseas, if at all. In Taiwan I could buy locally-produced electronics and had it delivered in less than a week, and I thought myself lucky - but overseas packages got lost twice (maybe 10% of the time) due to not having a Chinese address written on them.

The long shipping times, combined with moving house periodically to keep a low rent, mean my buying habits usually involve splurging on $$$ of online shopping once a year or two.

Asking girlfriend/parents to forward parcels from Taiwan/France delays it even more. I'm still waiting for my Christmas 2020 present: "Oh, I'll just put something else in!" Friends have been even worse: some belt clip cases would only ship to the US, and a friend there still hasn't sent them on (after buying them in 2014). Similar story with a magnetic iPhone cable from Korea (2016). I've basically given up on ever getting those parcels.

Also import fees are all over the place: on Amazon, a Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB SSD costs $1399 + $992 fees (USD) to ship to NZ. The price to Australia is $1399 + $216 fees. I could fly to Brisbane and back for cheaper than that!

Some products (e.g. MacBook Pro A1494 battery for A1398) can't even be shipped at all: OWC and iFixit won't send lithium-ion batteries overseas due to federal regulations. The third-party knockoffs that are available in NZ are faulty, and broke my logic board. Trying to get a new battery is an ongoing struggle for me, and has been since I noticed the swelling in September 2020. I can only dream of the convenience of 2 day shipping.

They literally told me they wouldn't reply to my emails anymore. It's total crap, they are using the Prime subs of rural customers to pay for same-day delivery in the cities, and hoping we won't notice.

So, yes, it is regional, but I have not even seen the words "Prime Two-Day" on any Amazon checkout in well over a year.

- You complained to customer service about shipping speeds to a low population area

- Customer service refunds your Prime Subscription with a bonus ABOVE your purchase price

- You emailed [email protected] and got it escalated to Amazon higher-ups, who take the time to address your concerns (even if unsatisfactory)

After all of that you're upset at Amazon? What's the outcome you're expecting here? I can't even get the first thing you got in that list from any local retailer.

Presumably for Amazon to stop advertising Prime 2-day shipping to market segments that it won't be able to deliver on that promise to.

That seemed clear from the sentence "they are using the Prime subs of rural customers to pay for same-day delivery in the cities."

- Customer Service refunded 25% of my subscription one time, and then about a week later a sympathetic supervisor/manager reviewed my delivery history and agreed it was sub-par and gave me a 100% refund. I was very honest with him that I had already received 25%, he didn't care. This has been the only person at Amazon who has understood my issue, but he was powerless to fix it.

- The higher-ups did not try to address my issue. They tried to gaslight me into believing that I didn't have a problem. They kept going back to the "orders take time to process before shipment", which I had explained over and over again that was not my issue. Once my item ships, it takes easily twice as long as it used to arrive.

Lastly, they tried to blame the carrier (usually UPS). Which is also BS, I am able to purchase shoes from Zappos (an Amazon company, BTW), and they arrive THE NEXT DAY. When I pointed that out to them, that is when they told me they would no longer be responding to my emails. I completely understand it is more expensive to ship packages to rural America, but I'm not the one advertising "Prime 2-Day Shipping" to anywhere in the lower 48 states. I just want them to be honest with me and tell me straight-up that I'm not worth a Prime membership anymore.

If they miss their shipping deadline, just select the return reason as defective, or item "not as described" or whatever, and it will let you return it for full refund.

I need something by date X, Amazon says they will deliver by X-1, they actually deliver on X+2, so I buy from a physical store on X because I still need it on X, and now I have an extra item and it's not my fault.

I mean, if someone here is an Amazon manager and can convince their engineers to add an "shipping delayed" option to the list for free return reasons, I'm all for it, and I'll use it.

Returning for the wrong reason just creates more work while you end up with nothing, and creates waste as the returns usually end up in the trash while the seller loses money and reputation for something they can't control.

If you order before 3pm, same day delivery is available for $9.

If you're a procrastinator, yes. About 10 years ago I started buying winter holiday gifts in August. :) But only for my partner.

There is one significant negative with going direct, which is the fact that online stores are often hacked. Amazon has yet to be hacked (afaik) so leaving your data with Bose is a higher risk than with Amazon.

I'll do that if these websites will stop assaulting me with GDPR popups 5 seconds into the site and then newsletter popups 10 seconds into the site, require me to search 10 different coupon websites to find 49 fake "no coupon needed" coupons and 1 real coupon that actually gets me the same price as listed Amazon, and then requiring me to register an account with email (or in some cases $#$*& SMS verification before making a purchase, and then unsubscribe from the goddamn newsletter after making the purchase.

Until they can learn to not annoy me, I'll buy from Amazon, and they will pay the price.

Oh and also, pay for return shipping. Amazon does.

Amazon can do more QC if it goes through them.

The last thing I accidentally bought from a non-Amazon shipper arrived in a semi-destroyed box, inside a too-small bubble-wrap envelope, apparently shipped from someone's condominium (I guess they bought in bulk and repackaged?)

I know somebody who sells stuff at Amazon as a third-party seller. It’s a common strategy to do exactly that: find items that are selling for more than the local store, buy it from the local store and sell it on Amazon. There’s more to it for selecting which products to sell but this is basically how it works. There are people selling courses teaching these things.

A few months back, my partner ordered some books from Taiwan. The books — including nominal “shipping” — were $20; the logistics provider’s bill for the “convenience” of handling our import duties for us, when the seller neglected to do so, was $40.

The worst thing is that there’s no way under an individual shipping recipient account to declare that you want to pay these fees in advance instead (such that there’s no “loan”) or to reject shipment at point of origin if the shipper tries to pull this on you. This is because the “recipient pays” logistical arrangement is intended for businesses, that do both shipping and receiving, and operate without much cash flow, to allow them to postpone the costs of receiving orders until they’ve sold (and profited on) the same goods to others. It’s supposed to be something that they buyer requests the seller to use, for their sake; not something the seller uses unilaterally. So you actually have to register as a shipper business-account to get access to the UX where you can declare that your company wants to pay import duties in advance.

Which would be especially annoying, because 99% of the time, when ordering things online, I don't get to decide — or even know in advance — what logistics provider the shipper will use to send me something.

So mail the bill back with a (obviously-)form letter to the effect of "I did not agree to pay this, whoever told you I would has defrauded you, feel free to send me a letter at this address if you want me to testify against them in court."?

> the "recipient pays" logistical arrangement is intended for businesses,

> It's supposed to be something that they buyer requests the seller to use, for their sake; not something the seller uses unilaterally. So you actually have to register as a shipper business-account to get access to the UX where you can declare that your company wants to pay import duties in advance.

Sounds like evidence/precedent that they're using this mechanism intentionally fraudulently, rather than out of a mistaken belief that you'd actually want that.

Legally speaking, you owe the logistics provider money separately from any contract between the logistics provider and the seller. And so the logistics provider will attempt to collect on it, up to the point of impacting your credit score.

Its similar to if you had a valet park your car, and they parked it in a pay parking lot they don’t have authorization for, and your car got ticketed/towed. The fact that the valet is in trouble, and the fact that you owe money, are independent facts.

No you don't. A transaction occurred That was separate from your quoted price, purchase price, shipping cost, and after a period of time passed since the delivery of the product. The purchaser is not responsible for the costs incurred by other parties.

> It's similar to if you had a valet park your car, and they parked it in a pay parking lot they don’t have authorization for, and your car got ticketed/towed.

Nope. That scenario is entirely different.

The valet committed a tort — but you need to actually to sue them to get the money you're owed for that tort. Torts aren't criminal in the sense of the state resolving them in your favor without you doing any of the work. If you do nothing, you end up on the hook for the ticket/tow, and the valet gets away scot-free.

Even if you pursue the tort, you'll likely have to pay the towing company before you recover the damages — because those are two separate things. The judge isn't telling the towing company who to charge. The towing company gets to charge you either way; they have a contract with the lot owner saying they can bill whoever owns a car that gets towed.

When you sue for the tort, and the judge finds in your favor, the judge is just extracting the money from the other guy, to give to you, in compensation for the money you already had to pay the towing company. Because you did have to pay.

In this case, the scam was convoluted enough that I won't get into it, but no, I didn't pay hundreds of dollars in shipping fees.

On the other hand, I'm sitting at home without having ever received the product I ordered.

I don't see any consumer benefit from Amazon forcing sellers to change their Walmart.com prices.

But the capitalist notion of buyer/seller/market, with government as referee, gets wobbly when a seller buys the market.

It's almost as though Amazon behaves with impunity toward the market, having already purchased the referee.

The same thing would still apply now too: "if sellers are able to offer their goods elsewhere for cheaper, they should be able to", instead of being forced to raise prices everywhere.

It fits with my understanding of traditional retail as pretty brutal for new entrants, taking more of a cut and putting up a much higher barrier to entry than Amazon.

Ebay may have lower fees, but Amazon is where many people go for convenience.

Back in the 80s, I used to sell Datalight C and Zortech C++ through mail order distributors. I was shocked to discover they paid us about half, or even less, of what they sold it for.

But they were all like that. It's what the manufacturer has to pay for distribution.

Just try running a store, or a mail order house, without doubling what you pay for the merchandise. You'll go bust if you don't.

If a customer called us direct to buy, it was priced at about the same as what the resellers sold it for. But, of course, then we had to pay the expenses of fulfillment staff, space, etc.

Many people are outraged by this doubling of price from manufacturer to retailer, and start a business believing they can undercut the other retailers and cash in. They get a rude awakening with how much it costs to run a retailing operation. They confuse "margin" with "profit".

WalMart does offer lower seller fees and (at least sometimes) lower prices than Amazon. The problem for me is that those lower prices are usually on things I don't want. I've bought a few times from WalMart's online store, but more often I look for what I want there, can't find it, go to Amazon, find it quickly, and buy it there. Many other comments in this thread indicate that my experience is not atypical.

Breaking up a monopoly is not a good thing if it results in worse outcomes for us as customers. If we end up finding what we want less often, or having to pay more for it, how is that a win?

The type of contract you are describing is common in many industries. They’re known as “full content agreements” in the airline industry for example, and they’re a continual source of tension between the distribution networks and travel agencies (who want these rules) and the airlines (who would like to be able to sell cheaper on their own direct channels). The same thing exists for hotels etc

I guess the question boils down to whether Amazon can be considered to have a monopoly position in the indirect distribution of the specific type of goods being considered. I imagine that might be possible for books, not sure about other goods

It seems monopsonistic to me, I believe it should be illegal but not sure it actually is?

But that's not how it works, you have to actually violate some law on the books, and I'm not sure what laws against monopsony we have -- for example, Apple is ruthless in driving down prices (for itself) due to its market power, and if it forces vendors to agree to never charge Apple more than what they charge another customer, this would not be illegal, even though the end result might be vendors raising prices for everyone except Apple, and thus seeming "unfair" to everyone else forced to compete with Apple. Demanding the best possible deal is not unfair competition.

Most of us live in a democracy, laws aren’t black and white and can be changed on a whim with little more than a single election cycle, or interpreted by courts in any arbitrary fashion. Sure, a large company can push unfair practices to a point, and can throw lawyers at it to a point but I think some large companies fatally underestimate the danger of flouting their position; the US government or a pissed off Judge could shut down Amazon’s entire operation in a day if there was the political will or some scandal came about. So it is absolutely in their self-interest to make sure their practices are “fair”.

So as is often the case, the legal system is quite conservative whereas people wildly claim that whatever they don't like at the moment -- whatever seems "unfair" should be illegal, and fortunately there are usually enough roadblocks to prevent that from happening.

> the US government or a pissed off Judge could shut down Amazon’s entire operation in a day if there was the political will or some scandal came about.

Nope.

Even if there are pissed off or crusading judges -- of which there are plenty -- those decisions will get appealed and overturned via the appeals process and it definately will not take one day, these cases can take a decade as they wind their way to the supreme court where they are finally turned into nothingburgers most of the time, to the constant fury of those who insist that their ever-changing moods should be encoded in law, or that a pissed off judge should be able to carve apart a company. There is a reason this has never happened in the history of the U.S. Sometimes monopolies are broken up, but you can usually count on one hand how many times that will happen in your lifetime -- I think ATT was the last time that happened, before most of the people on this site were born. And it hasn't happened since. The judicial system just doesn't have this power and laws are very slow to change, requiring much more than just a shift in public opinion.

Pretty much in agreement with everything else, but had to note that people viewing the world that way would not have much experience with real HR departments. Maybe there is another reason for the misconception.

Walmart does offer a 3rd party seller market and its largely junk in comparison - however, I don't know their fees.

0% is an imaginary fee btw... It costs money to staff/warehouse/sell/distribute/ship/package - i'm willing to bet the 30-45% fee includes amazon warehouse sellers who use prime shipping...

per the post below, a company like bose knows they only make 50% if even that much selling to any retailer, if they can make 55-65% selling direct on amazon and reach the market of people who just default to amazon then they're ahead of other sellers... Prime now for a speaker company is a godesend considering UPS shipping rates and last mile for heavy items are why they depended so much on brick and mortar retail traditionally.

I don't think the system is perfect by anymeans, but Amazon is just playing in a market that was previoulsly dominated by others and a market where fixed 30-45% is much cheaper, than everyone doing payperclick and hopoing for coneversions (googles market)

IIRC they do something like it with books through Kindle Direct Publishing: you have to sell on Amazon at the lowest price available anywhere, or else they take a much bigger cut.

It will probably be argued that Amazon isn’t actually a monopoly in these areas, therefore it’s not an abuse of monopoly. I’m only half joking.

Some have a clear statement on the website like "10% discount for ordering by phone", others will apply a similar discount when ordering in person, or will put a 10% off coupon (must order by phone / their own website) in with every delivery.

You ought to see what b&m retailers charger their suppliers !

The size of the fee they charge on top of this doesn’t matter.

how would Amazon know if a particular seller is also selling elsewhere?

Of course that is hard to prove because they have plausible deniability.

If instead this is a war between corporations and society, then we would expect to see a huge number of people feel like amazon exploited them in a time of weakness, furthered an already bad state of wealth inequality and classism, and accrued an order of magnitude more power over everyone than they had before.

Which outcome do you think is a better reflection of reality?

How is that hurtful for the consumer? You’re calling that “punishment”, but in fact as a shopper I just want to see the lowest price with the fastest shipping.

The seller fee bit part isn’t relevant. Wal Mart and Target or any other site could well offer lower seller fees - in fact, they’d HAVE to undercut Amazon in order to catch up with Amazon. But that doesn’t mean Amazon has to bring their prices down. I don’t buy that.

One other thing - as a shopper, no other shopping website comes close to Amazon’s customer service.

There is quite a bit to this article that’s disingenuous, for example -

> How do sellers handle these large fees from Amazon, and the inability to charge for shipping? Simple. They raise their prices on consumers. The resulting higher prices to consumers, paid to Amazon in fees by third party merchants, is why Amazon is able to offer ‘free shipping’ to Prime members. Prime, in other words, is basically a money laundering scheme. Amazon forces brands/sellers to bake the cost of Prime into their consumer price so it appears like Amazon offers free shipping when in reality the cost is incorporated into the consumer price.

If pricing on Amazon is too high, consumers won’t buy those products at Amazon and get rid of their Prime memberships too. But this isn’t quite true. Using hyperbole like “money laundering” also doesn’t help the case.

> Amazon also uses its bazooka of cash from Prime members paying high consumer prices, laundered through third party sellers, to distort industries across the economy.

Again, hyperbole. The author merely brushes off the fact that these sellers don’t HAVE to sell on Amazon in the first place. Presumably, Amazon is growing because more and more sellers flock to their website. If it’s a bad deal for sellers, they can sell on other websites. The article makes a one line claim - representing it as a ground truth - that a new business HAS to sell on Amazon. So this is clearly stating that no business can survive if they only have their own store presence or sell on Amazons competitors. I don’t believe this is true (based on a very successful family business). Yes my data point is anecdotal, but if we’re saying no business can survive without the ability to sell on Amazon, then the entire article is moot - the simple reason for breaking up Amazon is that no small business can survive without Amazon.

Again, I don’t think that’s true, and the author knows that - hence, the long wordy article to come at the issue from other angles while sprinkling in hyperbole.

You as the customer are being tricked.

I sell for 15 on Amazon, 10 on my own site and someone else sells the same product for 20 everywhere. Guess what price goes in the buy box. 20.00

"One other thing - as a shopper, no other shopping website comes close to Amazon’s customer service"

Where is the chat button? Where can I ask a question? Where can I let Amazon know something was wrong with the refund they sent?

There's no dark pattern involved here. When the buy box doesn't show you the lowest price, you usually see something like "Available for a lower price from these sellers" or some wording like that. In my 15+ years as a Prime customer, I've seen this quite a bit where I can find a competing offer for a lower price, often though with a longer delivery time.

>Where is the chat button? Where can I ask a question? Where can I let Amazon know something was wrong with the refund they sent?

I'm going to assume you're not writing this in bad faith and that this isn't a rhetorical question. From Amazon.com, I see "Customer service" is the second link from the left just below the search box. From that page, I see a big box in the center titled "Returns and Refunds".

I had a refund where the seller shorted me on the shipping and the refund ended up costing me money. I had no way to contact Amazon.. I would hope for the best customer service they could provide a chat button where I could address an issue like this.

Others sites have a floating chatbox ready to assist you on your purchase. The best customer service should include something similiar, I am right?

The chatbot has always given me an option along the lines of "I still have a question about this", which then connects me to a human. If that option weren't there, I'd simply choose another order so I could reach a human, and then explain the situation to the human.

You're also making the assumption that the buy box always offers the lowest price, which isn't true if Amazon are factoring non-price variables like is the manufacture undercutting Amazon on their own site. So as a seller you could be offering the lowest price with the fastest shipping, but still lose the buy box because you had the audacity to offer a better price on your own site or at Walmart.

This in turn creates a very strong incentive to sell your products everywhere for the same price, regardless of your actual costs. So your prices at Walmart and your own site go up.

If pricing at other stores wasn't a factor in the buy box algorithm, then consumers could find lower prices else where if they wanted to. Thus allowing competitors to slowly loosen Amazon strangle hold on online retail, and reduce prices for consumers.

> If pricing on Amazon is too high, consumers won’t buy those products at Amazon and get rid of their Prime memberships too.

How can this ever happen if selling cheaper elsewhere loses you the buy box on the biggest online store?

> If it’s a bad deal for sellers, they can sell on other websites.

Again you're completely ignoring the size of Amazon market share here. Who is voluntarily going to give up 50%-60% of all online sales? It's a bit like US ISPs, if Comcast screws with fees stupid prices on your cable contract you can just go to a competitor right, we'll just ignore the fact the competitor is selling 2mb DSL.

I'm on Amazon page right now. It tells me that I can get a product the fastest with the buy box offer, or I can get a cheaper price from other "offers". And when I click that link, it shows me higher and lower prices, but the lower prices have a delivery date (actually a range, between X and Y) more than a week out.

Let me start just by saying that the offer is still shown. It's not immediately in the buy box, but as a shopper, I have access to the lower prices and can buy from a different seller. This information is not obfuscated from me or hidden through some dark pattern.

>This in turn creates a very strong incentive to sell your products everywhere for the same price, regardless of your actual costs. So your prices at Walmart and your own site go up.

>If pricing at other stores wasn't a factor in the buy box algorithm, then consumers could find lower prices else where if they wanted to. Thus allowing competitors to slowly loosen Amazon strangle hold on online retail, and reduce prices for consumers.

The incentive goes away if you don't sell on Amazon, right? Any Amazon "strangle" (your word, not mine) only exists because people choose to sell on Amazon, right?

>How can this ever happen if selling cheaper elsewhere loses you the buy box on the biggest online store?

See my previous point. Don't sell on Amazon.

>Again you're completely ignoring the size of Amazon market share here. Who is voluntarily going to give up 50%-60% of all online sales? It's a bit like US ISPs, if Comcast screws with fees stupid prices on your cable contract you can just go to a competitor right, we'll just ignore the fact the competitor is selling 2mb DSL.

I don't agree with this. Companies like Comcast are deemed monopolies because their customers don't have a choice. Just as you stated, Comcast gives me high speed broadband. But my choice is limited to Comcast, and the only competitor (if there even is one in my neighborhood) will offer 2MB DSL.

This is NOT the case with online shopping.

I can purchase an iPad from Apple, Amazon, Best Buy, and a bunch of other websites.

I can purchase my razor blades online from Target, Amazon, Gillette, etc. including several of the grocery stores in my city (who will ship them.

Yes people shop at Amazon, but it's because they choose to. I have the option of not shopping with Amazon. As a matter of fact, I bought 10 "5 Star" brand notebooks on Amazon. I saw later that Wal-Mart had them for $3 instead of $7/notebook. I sent them back to Amazon and got them from Wal-Mart instead.

With internet service, many people don't have a choice but to go with Comcast, Cox, or whichever single provider offers the service in their neighborhood.

And you can exit any monopoly of some industry by exiting the industry altogether, then know that anti-trust regulations exist despite of this.

> This is NOT the case with online shopping.

Does this mean that Google doesn't have monopolies, with its 90% market share in search, 70% market share in video sharing (Youtube), and 60% market share in web browsing (Chrome), just because there are alternatives available?

I also buy on Ebay, Craglist, Walmart and diverse retailers that are entering the eCommerce game.

The thing here is that markets take longer to work but if you look around, there is plenty of competition.

Like this article says, prices are increased across the board because of how Amazon acts.

The yelling comes from the Amazon sellers side, not from the customers.

There is plenty of competition for me to shop around, and if there are none, I'd rather buy from Amazon as I trust that they reduce the costs , fees and taxes effectively.

I would argue that the government should do less and not more. If they really want competition to grow, they could stop charging capital gains on every item a seller flip.

For example, when I was selling on Ebay, after the platform fees, the shipping fees, and the government taxes, it's just not worth it to enter the sector as a small guy.

The point of the lawsuit and detailed in the analysis is that ALL online purchases end up being influenced (controlled?) as a result. This creates prices that are 30-45% higher across all retailers for a given item.

That would include Amazon Prime subscribers and random internet guy buying the same thing from a different site.

If Amazon controls their own storefronts, that's one thing. When they can exert control over competitors' storefronts - or worse, all competitors' storefronts - that's a different matter.

I ended making the sale because someone did not buy at Amazon.

Nobody forced me to raise prices at all. Amazon had no control at all on my prices. The market price is what is offered and what the customer is willing to pay.

If it's too expensive, nobody buys there.

I think we both get the point, except we think in different terms about the solution. I'd rather let the market works, have a transition towards competition which will eventually come down the line (5 to 10 years) than have big government try to solve the problem by making everything worse off.

Say you're a vendor producing widgets for $10 each, costing $9 each to produce. 80% of your buyers prefer the buying and service experience of Amazon, for all the reasons you describe. They have no brand loyalty to you: they go to Amazon, type "widget" in the search box, and buy the first result with 4+ stars costing roughly $10.

Amazon decides out of the blue that they want $1 per sale, and what's more, they will drop you from their platform if you offer a different price on Amazon and other storefronts (be it another giant like Walmart, or your own low-traffic e-commerce website). Because this $1 is the entirety of your profit margin, your only way to stay in business is to raise the price to $11, and because your widget competitors have been given the same deal, all widgets now cost $11, and when consumers are price-shopping, they're now conditioned to see $11 as the normal price for a widget. You could opt out of Amazon entirely, but that would limit you to 20% of revenue, which is also a dealbreaker. (You theoretically get a higher cut from that 20% at the new price-point, but you also suffer the deadweight loss from buyers who can't/won't transact at that price point.)

The standard libertarian retort would be that the seller consented to their contract with Amazon, while no citizen or market actor ever signed some imaginary "social contract" with state regulators, and it's a legitimate point. But saying that a vendor whose livelihood is dependent on a presence on Amazon.com (whose revenue rivals the GDP of many nations [1]) "chose" that relationship is like saying that each citizen "chooses" the laws of the nation-state they live in, because they could have moved elsewhere. Yes, technically there is an exit clause; but in both cases the table is tilted such that exiting is deeply against the interests of each actor, thus each actor is incentivized to perpetuate the asymmetry in negotiating power.

Market competition is a great thing when it works, and many times it does. But oft it's forgot that the whole point of a competition is to win. And whether we're talking political power or economic power, concentrations of power tend to snowball and entrench.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_power

[1] https://www.axios.com/big-techs-power-in-4-numbers-de8a5bc3-...

I truly see an horrible path if government starts to put its big fingers everywhere and start causing all kinds of secondary market effects. When you look in hitory, it ALWAYS ends up being worse.

Nobody speaks about Walmart only sellers, that don't want to work with Amazon (as they are crazy with sellers).

Nobody speaks about Ebay sellers, nobody speaks about shopify only sellers. Nobody speaks about LOCAL sellers.

Those are all competitors than Amazon has no control over it.

Yes Amazon has a large distribution network, and competitor are starting to catch up from what I can see.

But anyway, what can I do other than expressing my disagreement ? I very well know we are going towards a gov intervention. I can only laugh in my corner, alone...

Source? It worked out well for the browser wars. It worked when it blocked (several) telco merger(s). And many more.

And that's just anticompetitive protections. What about the FDA and OSHA putting its fingers into the food industry so there aren't literal fingers in my food?

Are you a client and subscriber of Amazon ?

This means that if I buy the product from say Walmart or Target, then I am paying 25 to 35% more for it. This is because the merchant cannot list it anywhere else cheaper than they list it on Amazon.

That is a clear violation of monopoly laws and I applaud that AG for his efforts to abolish these "most favored nation" status agreements.

And the buyers will move towards it.

I haven’t found any sites where I can get cheaper small items anymore. I’m up for suggestions for other online retailers.

Yes, and more and more counterfeit goods.

They must feel really confident with their market position (ie, monopoly), because they just don't seem concerned about counterfeit products.

I’ll usually let a slight increase in price slide for the convenience, but I’m always looking for a reason not to use Amazon if I can - and a rip off price is a good trigger for me to be patient and get the product next week with a smaller shop.

They're banking on being people's default retailer which lets them get away with this behavior.

Correct, but besides the point. The relevant laws are not just about monopolies.

>but if you look around, there is plenty of competition.

Also correct, but again not really relevant.

Maybe not relevant for the lawsuit specified in the report, they are certainly entitled to sue for any reason. But the classic theme still show its nose.

On an other note, if amazon has 128 million prime subscribers and they like the service, it is something politicians need to be aware if they still want to be elected.

And it's pretty clear that Amazon has led to much lower prices and a consumer surplus compared to alternatives in the market.

And for all the shit AMZN gets on HN and over social media, broadly it is still one of the most widely respected and popular companies in the US across a broad spectrum of consumers.

You can argue whether that's overall good or bad, but I'm talking about the law as it is and has been enforced vs. what people WISH the law said.

As a general point, it's not even close to being true.

You didn't read the article, which demonstrates how Amazon's actions raise the prices at Wal-Mart.

When a single entity in the market can control and set the prices for the entire market it indicates an uneven shift in market power. Amazon has such market power at the moment, and this puts them at risk of committing monopolistic behaviors.