The difference is that Target is a retail store, not a marketplace. Target has already bought your products from you when Target sells them to customers, and aggregates data about its own sales of your products.

Amazon is a marketplace, and pays nothing to buy your products when they're offered for sale on its virtual shelves. It purports to provide an open and equal common area for companies (including itself) to sell products, yet only Amazon has access to the treasure trove of data about the behavior of consumers on its site.

> Target has already bought your products from you when Target sells them to customers

This is not true for all products. Some are sold under a pay-per-scan model, where the product is owned by the supplier up until the barcode is scanned at checkout, whereupon it is immediately purchased by the store and sold to the consumer.

For other products, suppliers may also be required to accept unsold goods for a full refund of the store’s purchase price.

Stores are marketplaces too, and shelf space – particularly the valuable shelf space like end caps – is not free.

There are products like that, but to my knowledge, there's not a lot of them and it tends to be certain specialized categories. The only example I can think of where the supplier will refund the product if it doesn't sell is live plants.

Another example of a product that commonly has a full refund clause is books.

But pay-per-scan is much more common. Examples include everything from trading cards to makeup to sandwich bread. The supplier will often restock these products themselves, so the store doesn't even need to track inventory.

I'm having trouble finding any solid numbers on what percent of products are sold pay per scan. I just know that in the retail stores I've worked in, the only examples I know of are live plants and possibly aquarium fish.

Target is an online marketplace for 3rd-party products. They don't go out of their way to advertise it, but they call the program Target+. You can find online-only 3rd-party items by searching their website. They ship the items to you, and you can return them in-store if there's a problem. Most people never notice the middleman supplier.

Walmart does this too. Newegg made the switch several years ago. Large retail outlets which do not have a "marketplace" online option are the exception rather than the rule.

Different companies do different levels of vetting, but the retail ecosystem is vastly more accessible to small-timers than it was in the 2000s.

The most salient difference, in my opinion, is that Amazon stood in front of Congress and lied about it.

If they instead told Congress that this is a long established retail practice, I would be more sympathetic to that argument.

Beside the fact that they lied to Congress about.. I guess there is an expectation.

If you put your products on Amazon marketplace, you are expected to join a marketplace. You don't necessarily expect for Amazon to also join the marketplace by using your data to compete against you.

Also you can use Amazon services and warehouses even for products that you do not wish to sell on Amazon website. Essentially using Amazon as a 3PL service. Again, you might not expect Amazon to use your data for their own products.

If you sell your products to Target, this isn't exactly a marketplace. This is a retail outlet. You know they can measure your sales, measure your competitor sales, etc. And you know they won't lie to you about doing it.