https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDAC...

Walmart and Pepsi engaged in a blatant decade-long price fixing scheme designed to raised prices and punish small local competitors and were sued for it by Lina Khan's FTC, but - surprise - the case was thrown out the minute Trump took office.

1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering.

2. As of now the trial is not scheduled to begin until January 2027 (although the discussed injunction is meant to address that). I believe the length of time required to get a decision in court is the single biggest impediment to justice being served. It usually waters down the final judgment, makes costs prohibitive for plaintiffs, and allows perpetrators to continue benefiting from illegal behavior indefinitely. In some cases, the defendant can be elected President in the interim eliminating any chance of facing a court decision.

It was effectively a way to get an excess commission out of amazon if you printed through their printing arm, Createspace/KDP. Not sure if this worked the same for non print on demand books but if you printed through createspace you could set a higher list price and get royalties that were about 100% of the actual sale price.

No idea if the same mechanic is in play with the FBA rules but it seems very plausible to me that the largest impact is has is closing exploits like this.

That doesn't mean it doesn't also entrench market position, raise a few prices at the margin etc but it's very easy to miss the potential for gaming rules, legally, unless you're actively in the system. If an incentive is there the market incentive will be to use it.

I just go to Walmart now. And Walmart is no choir boy either but at least I can see what I'm buying.

First, this is not new. It's been stated policy for years.

Second, manufacturers get around it in a clever way. They always list their items on their own site at the same price as at Amazon... but then magically almost always seem to have a 20% or 25%-off sitewide coupon available, whether it's for first-time customers, or "spinning the wheel" that pops up, etc.

So I don't know how much this is really raising actual prices in the end.

Otherwise, I'm not sure how to feel about it, because pricing contracts are common on both ends. Manufacturers frequently only sell to retailers who promise they won't charge less than the MSRP, and large retailers similarly often require "most-favored-nation" pricing, so they can always claim they have the lowest prices. If you want to end these practices, then it's only fair to have a law prohibiting it across the board, rather than singling out Amazon.

Received several orders that were returned items, with broken open packaging and sometimes the item was something else entirely, purely put there for weight by whoever returned it.

When I went to return some things at a major Amazon distribution center, the return area was closed for the week for some sort of construction or renovation, with no indication of that anywhere on the site. The only messaging was a piece of paper in the window once you got there.

At another separate major distribution center, the return area was a small room with pieces of paper taped to a door with an arrow pointing to the Amazon lockers where the returns are accepted.

Orders are now often so delayed that it makes the Prime subscription pointless. Have had multiple orders over the past year that didn't ship for 3 or 4 days.

Amazon listings are almost half Sponsored listings now, and there are unrelated ads on the side of listings.

Half of the listings are some random made-up brand name, like XIJGNU, which is just a Chinese seller selling low-quality products, and when the reviews get bad enough, they re-list the product under another made-up brand name.

Fake reviews were already rampant before LLMs, but now reviews are effectively useless because they are so easy to fake.

The title is a little clickbait-y. As far as I understand it:

1. Think of Amazon as a search engine for products. 2. Amazon wants its site to be the lowest-price destination for products. 3. If Amazon finds your product on another website for lower than its own website, it'll just hide your listing from the search -- this is meant to be pro-consumer (when you go to Amazon you'll get the lowest price).

This is where it gets a bit more complicated: 4. Amazon sells ~40% of its goods under its own purchasing arm, known to sellers as Vendor Central. (These are items shipped and sold by Amazon.com). This purchasing arm wants X% margins from *brands, based on whatever their internal targets. From what I've experienced personally -- their terms are generally better than their competitors (Walmart/Target/Costco/Sams), so it's generally a no-brainer to sell directly to them when I can instead of selling direct.

So when 4 has a conflict of interest with #1-3, you get the systemic effect that in order for the sellers to get their **sweet purchase orders from Amazon, they now need to raise prices elsewhere so the purchasing arm gets their cut. The sellers don't HAVE to sell to Amazon, but then they'd miss out on giant POs from Amazon at good terms.

Designing a system to incentivize sellers to have their lowest prices on Amazon... I'm not sure if calling it a "widespread scheme to inflate prices" is the fairest thing.

*edit: Historically, Amazon VC basically ran at near break-even under Jeff, "your margin is my opportunity" and all that. Since Andy took over there's been a reshuffling of chairs and the different business units have different margin requirements now.

**edit2: the price inflation mostly affects big brands that sell 8+ figs/yr on Amazon, because smaller sellers don't get POs from VC (too small to bother).

That being said, anyone who’s operated a two-sided marketplace knows that one of the biggest problems is consumers using your site as an index, and then seeking to dodge your fee by meeting with the seller on another platform, where they don’t have to pay it. This was a big problem for my startup.

This is a negative externality, because they’re extracting value from your platform (the list of sellers, products, prices, ratings, etc.), without paying for that value. If left unchecked, this could make running the platform financially unviable. One way to prevent this is to paywall your platform, but not every consumer wants to pay a subscription.

I think it’d be fair for Amazon to prohibit sellers advertising other platforms on its own, but prohibiting them from offering lower prices outside of Amazon outright definitely seems anticompetitive.

Companies with as much market power as Amazon simply cannot be allowed to exist. It was a mistake to ever allow it and every response that is not aimed at a total shattering of the company is another mistake. No retail business of any kind can ever be safe when companies like Amazon exist. (And although this article is about Amazon, the same is true of many other companies as well, like Walmart.)

At least by paying Amazon I can avoid dealing with all that. While I may pass the price to the consumer for Fulfilled-By-Amazon fees, which tends to be around $5.18 ~ $3.5 (quick google search), it's still a lot cheaper than using something like FedEx where it costs $10-12 per order.

The takeaway here is that Amazon has democratized fast and cheap delivery by building a monopoly. As the scale of things go up, the cost of operations can really go down. Think of meal prepping, when you cook food in bulk vs each meal separately, you're saving costs on power, gas and produce.

The only question is whether we can build a public benefit corporation, just like Amazon.

Amazon does something similar but with pricing layered on top. Their rec system pushes higher-margin products, sellers notice which items get promoted, then they raise prices knowing Amazon will keep showing them anyway. So it's not just "algorithm adjusts prices" - it's more like the recommendation layer creates conditions where sellers can safely jack up prices without losing visibility.

Basically the algorithm creates artificial scarcity by only showing certain products, which gives sellers pricing power they wouldn't have otherwise.

Or ask Gemini what the best deal is, it’s found some good ones.

For smaller stuff, Amazon is usually better than Target or whatever box store nearby.

So Apple coordinated the major book publishers to raise their prices in order to secure their margin expectations.

They settled the lawsuit in the end.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/us-sues-apple-publishers...

Want a desk fan? There are four types of desk fan in the entire world (per Amazon). Page after page after page of listings of the exact same four designs. Often listed with the same re-used marketing artwork.

Put aside brands, quality, et al. Put aside the fact that Amazon removed almost all product specs from their search facility (and is increasingly deleting specs entirely from product pages). Put aside the fake reviews, no-name Chinese drop-shippers.

Every category is stuffed full of the same few copycat products over and over. It is extremely difficult to merely find actual choices! Wrenches? Small compartment storage boxes? Paper towel holders? If you can find even 20-30 unique products in a category now you're living like a king. It reminds me of AliExpress in that sense. Lack of specs, lack of manuals, lack of details about any product. The same listings from different no-name stores repeated over and over.

I used to think maybe AliExpress & co were actually good if you spoke Chinese but a Chinese coworker kindly informed me that nope, it is just as horrible for everyone living in China using Chinese.

I don't know where we went wrong but this is not the future we were promised. Can any of you remember when Amazon was actually good? When their search was useful? Those were some amazing times and how little did we realize they were fleeting.

Why amazon sellers have not opened up a class action lawsuit is beyond me. This case, succeed or fail will surface enough documentation that they may find cause.

It's insane that the landlord of the mall is also running the biggest store in the mall

It's led to this scheme, but also just the general enshittification of buying things online. You can never trust what you buy from Amazon because their "marketplace sellers" will send you a counterfeit, and it's hard to find some brand names because they don't want to be in that cesspool

As low rent and lowest common denominator as Walmart was in the 90s, at least I could go in and know that a) I probably was getting the lowest price on that Rubbermaid trash can b) it was legitimately a Rubbermaid trashcan and not someone who ripped off the molds, used plastic that was 50% as good, and sells it under the brand Xyxldk, and c) could reasonably expect to find that trashcan offered for sale in the first place

Is it? That’s by households, not individuals. Is it really crazy to imagine a household spending $200-300/month at Costco, Walmart, Whole Foods—or Amazon?

Amazon is not just a US company either.

They also have an ad business. You could rightfully argue that ad spend gets passed on to the consumer.

Where else would americans be getting home goods like soap, appliances, electronics? Vitamins, perscriptions, etc?

The answer to almost every one of those, for the vast majority of Americans, is one of like 5 megacorps. Target, Walmart, Kroger, CVS, Amazon. Things have largely stopped being available retail because of all this consolidation. If I want to go buy a multivitamin, its no joke like $25 a bottle at my grocery store, and $8 on amazon. It is just kinda... a part of people's lives now, and the alternatives all involve either spending more money or time.

Sounds great to me!

There is a company that operates an index where people can search for things and doesn't charge the site or the customer for things that rank well in organic search results. I think they're called Google. From what I understand they make quite a bit of money by selling ads next to the listings.

That model seems like it would work pretty well for such a platform, unless there was some major company preventing anyone from offering a lower price than they have on their own site so that everybody goes to their site instead of using a price search engine to find a site with a lower price.

I mean come on. If they're really using your site just to find a product, you think that's a problem?

Meanwhile a platform's fee should be going to things like payment processing, warehousing and shipping, and then if you're offering a competitive price for those services they should want to be paying you because they need those things and can't get a better deal on them somewhere else. If they can get a better deal on them and are only using your site because you're forcing them to with a dirty trick, maybe they're right to object?

Most favored nation clauses are often considered anti-competitive.

[0] https://kindlepreneur.com/audible-royalty-changes/

In my experience I've received a box for a different brand than the device inside with the wrong app listed in the box for a different unrelated brand. Fun times we live in. And don't bother getting a refund as the listing and company will be gone by the time you try.

If it wanted to be pro-consumer, I don't know, it could warn the consumer the price is lower somewhere else, and point them there, like a good search engine of products! Sounds ridiculous? Yeah, because those claims are a bit ridiculous too.

This is true for other sellers too.

This is irrelevant.

Stockholm syndrome at its finest -- reinterpreting "punishing a seller if an item is cheaper anywhere else on the internet, even a site they don't directly control" as "pro-consumer".

If Amazon really were a search engine for their own products, they should just give an accurate answer for their own site. If they really wanted to be pro-consumer, they'd say "Available cheaper here: ..."

ETA: Showing competitor's prices could still be a strategic win for Amazon. It conditions users to always first check Amazon; and most of the time if it's cheaper, the ease of one-click ordering and/or batching deliveries should make it worth ordering from Amazon even if it's a few dollars cheaper elsewhere.

The world knows how to fix this problem the rich pay to not allow it.

This is a funny idea of pro-consumer, as we all know that the result of this is increased prices.

The seller can not afford to reduce the Amazon price to match other channels and still pay Amazon's margin, or afford to have the product hidden and lose the channel - and so is forced to increase the price elsewhere.

The net result is prices increase across the board, and Amazon gets to tell customers they are getting the 'lowest price', but they did it by increasing the price across the whole market.

This is pro-Amazon both in terms of margin and market share. In many ways, it is also pro-competitor/seller/distributor/agency... but it is very much anti-consumer.

And, as I hope we will soon see proven, illegal.

https://www.amazon.com/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/prev...

They will send you a bunch of spreadsheets and it's pretty easy to calculate your total expenditures. That showed us we were spending about $5k a year, mostly small stuff with very few purchases over $100. With Prime it was easy to order a little here and a little there. All those littles add up.

We got rid of Prime and now spend about $300 a year on Amazon. Half of that for Kindle books. We do spend a $100 a month more at Costco to make up for it. A nice side effect is that we have a lot less clutter and junk around the house.

This is happening constantly with the private label brands you see in major stores. There is no CFPB needed here, Amazon has no obligation to carry your product and can dump you anytime. Why would CFPB get involved?

Some of you are just ridiculous with “get gubbermint involved” on everything. If you want to combat this then don’t buy from Amazon, we don’t need CFPB.