> Vendors, cowed by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, comply—agreeing to raise prices on competitors’ websites (often with the awareness and cooperation of the competing retailer) or to remove products from competing websites altogether

Amazon has been openly doing this for years. They scrape other competitor websites, even though it’s against their terms of service, and if you sell for less elsewhere they find out and punish you. It’s blatantly anti competitive.

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freakynit 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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SilverElfin 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How? It seems constructed so that despite the high costs of doing business on Amazon (seller fees), you have to not charge more there. If you raise prices everywhere, your sales elsewhere drop. What’s the loophole?

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2OEH8eoCRo0 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How?

	▲	freakynit 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		By giving their scrapers false signals using dummy ecomemrce stores with artificial/dummy prices. If done constantly, it might render their scrapers useless or less reliable for buy-box algorithms.

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Groxx 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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