Solid interview. But one thing I saw that was missing was that Amazon also doesn't charge itself the 15% marketplace fee (it varies slightly depending on categ

Solid interview. But one thing I saw that was missing was that Amazon also doesn't charge itself the 15% marketplace fee (it varies slightly depending on category but most are 15%) that it charges 3rd party sellers. Since Amazon directly sells tens of millions of items, it had at least a 15% head start on every single one of those products in terms of price competition. Since we're talking retail here, the margins on most items don't exceed 15% in many cases. The fact that they have been allowed to charge 3rd party sellers this fee while not facing it themselves or being forced to stop selling products at all if they are going to run the marketplace is mind-boggling to me. At the previous company I worked for, they were very careful about this issue. It was a fintech company that had 20+ different lines of business/revenue. Due to the nature of the fintech space, certain business units wanted information/data/services from the other divisions. For example, the index and ETF team wanted corporate actions data from the team that monitored all corporate actions globally and delivered it via a standardized feed. The ETF and index teams were forced to take money from their budget and actually buy the service from the other team to avoid legal issues. They knew that if other ETF and index providers found out they had to pay for the product but our internal team got everything for free and could then undercut them and charge less for the ETF and index products, I guaran-fucking-tee you they would have sued us. Every division in the company was financially separated for exactly this reason. There should be some sort of class-action lawsuit on this basis from all sellers against Amazon, in my opinion. Amazon should be forced to separate that business that actually sells its own products into a new legal entity and have to pay the fees.