> 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).

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.

This reads like propaganda. Amazon has no business de-listing products because of their price elsewhere.

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 doesn't make sense; these days it seems like the majority of products on Amazon can also be found on AliExpress for a third of the price, both of them sold by FWHZHW. From what you're saying, these things should disappear from Amazon's search listings, but in my experience they're the ones promoted straight to the top, and anything else gets buried under that mountain.

> 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 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.

> 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).

Most favored nation clauses are often considered anti-competitive.

How did you manage to turn "increase their lowest price to appear on Amazon" into "incentivise sellers to have their lowest prices on Amazon"?

Like other commentators I'd argue that the intentions don't matter much, the outcome does.

"The purpose of a system is what it does" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...)

> this is meant to be pro-consumer

it's pro-Amazon and anti-competition, surely. (Amazon doesn't care about consumers except as profit sources)

> The sellers don't HAVE to sell to Amazon, but then they'd miss out on giant POs from Amazon at good terms.

So they have to sell to Amazon?

> I'm not sure if calling it a "widespread scheme to inflate prices" is the fairest thing.

It's fair if it's true, effectively or otherwise.

Here’s an example where Amazon strait up increases prices.

There’s a great deal of self published fiction posted online for free. Amazon is happy for people to sell bundle that into a book and sell that.

Kindle Unlimited specifically requires authors to remove earlier copies of their own works to become part of kindle unlimited. Thus increasing the minimum price for everyone above what it would otherwise be.

Some authors make the transition and win, but many destroy their audience and thus current and future revenue sources like donations and patron subscribers. It’s a tempting infusion of cash, but the long term consequences can be devastating making the whole thing really predatory.

The thing I noticed and is not talked about is used books on Amazon. There was a golden time when they were effectively a buck each due to companies processing so many systematically and now you can't find a used book there that isn't a few dollars off new at best.

Does anyone know what happened here?

That isn't lowering prices at all, it is raising prices.

> 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).

It’s not pro-consumer, take two seconds to consider second order effects here. If a producer can sell for lower elsewhere they can’t compete on price with Amazon unless they want to lose amazon sales.

> Think of Amazon is a search engine for products.

> [Amazon's] own purchasing arm

...so we can't think of Amazon as just "a search engine", right?

You might as well hand someone a toy and say "Think of this as a toy gun. But this is where it gets a bit more complicated: 40% of these have a trigger that shoots bullets." Whom are you kidding?

Clearly with the scheme you described, these are morally two separate entities colluding with each other to use each others' huge powers in the market to raise prices and pocket more profit for themselves.

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)

Yeah, no, this is meant to be pro-Amazon, not pro-consumer.

What you mean it is not fair? Imagine you are huge company that will not fail, you can enter any market, dump the prices, gather market share, make that the main stream of revenue, and suddenly you can click to kill someone whole business. This is a vendor lock-in based on a dumping model.

On the other hand, don't tell that prices are not personalised anywhere. 4 is destroying the economy with gray area tactics Anyone working there should be ashamed of being part of that

> 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).

Calling this pro-consumer is insane.

> 1. Think of Amazon as a search engine for products.

That's difficult to do when their search is so atrociously bad. It ignores keywords and places matches well down the page, if it displays them at all.

Plus the classic 'choose a department to enable sorting' prompt. 30 years and their programmers can't work out how to order items from different 'departments'. Why should a customer have to know about their internal taxonomy?

It's probably better to think of Amazon as a product promotion engine. What the customer thinks they want is less important than what Amazon wants to sell.

Thank you for your insight and sharing of your perspective. This system leads to some interesting conclusions and observations. One is, that it explains why big brand products made a significant dive in quality. My decades old bose QC25 where of superb quality at 250 € while my somewhat new Bose quiet comfort ultras priced at 350 € are of comparatively very poor quality.

It also opens the market for cheap knockoffs. If some chi-fi headphones for 60 bucks are almost as good as the big brands and the big US brands are forced for high prices despite the bad build quality by Amazon, another big seller website should emerge. Oh wait, this already happened with AliExpress and temu.

| Designing a system to incentivize sellers to have their lowest prices on Amazon...

Is not what you conlude, not at all, and is contradicting yourself just two lines up:

| they now need to raise prices elsewhere

Bingo! The claim exactly! And you really say, that this is not a widespread, also as you described intentionally designed systematic effort to infalte prices?! Come on!! : /

I wish ebay would hide listings that are more expensive than amazon. It's extremely frustrating getting amazon packages from ebay purchases. I make sure to 1 star all of them.

> Think of Amazon as a search engine for products

Hahahahaha you lost me

> Amazon wants its site to be the lowest-price destination for products

Have you not used target.com or walmart.com recently?

> when you go to Amazon you'll get the lowest price

> there's been a reshuffling of chairs

Hmm.. I think those two things are in conflict.

> The title is a little clickbait-y.

The attourney general of California disagrees with you.

So If Amazon wante to be the lowest price Destination, but Takes fees for Listings, FBA etc, then the product price needs to include that fees. That will make the product more expensive and since amazon wanted to be the cheapest Destination, the price does need to gonup everywhere? It's maybe the Fairest Thing, but is it good for the Overall Economy?

> 1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon.

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.

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

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?

This is very bad math on the part of the article. You can’t just take total revenue/number of households. I mean have they not heard of a little side business Amazon has called AWS?

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.

Lol, that sounds about right. I checked, our household spent $2700 last year on amazon. Only 3 things above $100 though, so it's just accumulation of lots of smaller purchases.

3k is less than I expected considering median disposable income is ~50k. Where does the rest go?

Average household, not American

The author ignores that a small business shoppers falls in North America retail, so only dividing consumer household is incorrect

My relatives use it for ordering office supplies for their business.

I wouldn't ascribe averages to mean much. I expect there is a small minority that buys everything on amazon (everything meaning groceries, holiday gifts, prescriptions, etc) that would jack up the average significantly.

You definitely shouldn't hold your breath considering the CFPB effectively doesn't exist anymore.

The biggest mistake we've made is allowing Amazon (and now Walmart) to both be a seller and to operate what is supposed to be an open marketplace

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

Similar to the shit they're doing on Audible, too. If you want to be part of their subscription service, then you cannot sell your book anywhere else, including your own website, or have it available in libraries. And if you're not part of their subscription service, then part of your sale proceeds gets diverted to authors who are part of the subscription service [0].

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

https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2025/12/18/how-w...

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.

This is why Andy Jassy was a big supporter of BLM in the Biden era and is now funding the Melania documentary in the Trump era. Amazon bribes each administration to avoid the law. Many companies do this though, not just them. Companies worth more than a trillion shouldn’t exist, yet here they are corrupting our entire system.

They raise prices by 30 percent to offset Amazon's taxes and then offer a 25 percent discount on their own site. How does this not raise prizes?

It prevents other sellers from competing with Amazon.

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

This is irrelevant.

Antitrust laws exist for a reason, when judges and goverment stopped enforcing them it created the age of mega-corporations. AT&T did not had the level of control of the economy that modern tech companies have, and yet got split to make room for competition and a healthy economy.

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

At least in the past the sellers branded their whitelabel products correctly. These days you get some random "brand" when you order from an alphabet soup name. It's fun when you have to install apps with it as you have to get the right "brand" app without knowing what "brand" it is as the whitelabel manufacturer has locked it down (though usually only by obfuscation).

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.

A product being on a shelf at a Walmart is a better indicator of quality then anything you could post on an Amazon listing.

I'm not American, but I get free shipping on most products, as long as the order has a minimum cost and I wait a couple of days more?

This is true for other sellers too.

When the average person stops spending money in ways that enrich them.

Why should the desire to own more and more of the world ever come to a halt?

It doesn’t. They’re sociopaths. They get to where they are because they’re willing to do things others are too nice to do. Otherwise they’re no better than many other talented business people.

> 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.

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?

> If left unchecked, this could make running the platform financially unviable.

Sounds great to me!

The problem is this is all rent seeking and the leverage of moats like capital and network effects. It’s not actually valuable to society to defend. For a time it was new - now it’s not, and is just damaging fair competition. Amazon and other megacorp need to be taxed a lot more and broken up.

This process can actually be exploited to work against amazon itself.

tbh I thought it was explicitly stated somewhere. literally every seller I've talked to has mentioned it at some point.