> Because Amazon is where the shoppers are: it accounts for about 40% of all US online retail sales.

A lot of the competition is gone, so now it's time for the "price hike" step of the VC playbook - enter markets with insane amounts of cash, slowly boil the competition alive until it goes away and/or the users are hooked, raise prices.

> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.

IIRC that kind of shit is at least illegal in the EU. Bookingcom and other sites have had their "best price" enforcement invalidated here in the past.

The bad thing is, due to the sheer scale Amazon has, it is all but impossible to compete with it. You won't get the scale deals that Amazon gets at shippers (USPS, DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD, whatever). You won't get the money to construct warehouses across the world that make Amazon's fast shipping work in the first place. You won't have the insane amounts of money coming in from customers that allow for its extremely generous return policies. And you won't have some sort of cash cow like AWS that allows you to run your business at near zero profit or even loss.

The only way you can compete is if you are in a market where you can provide a better experience for the customer and the customer is willing to pay a premium.