Yes, I believe this to be the case. I'm an Amazon seller. We also sell through our own website. We use Amazon to fulfill those orders as well. For those orders,

Yes, I believe this to be the case. I'm an Amazon seller. We also sell through our own website. We use Amazon to fulfill those orders as well. For those orders, Amazon gives us an estimate of when it will ship and when it will deliver. So far, they have been essentially 100% accurate (and occasionally a day early) with these estimates, without any delivery times being pushed out 2-3 weeks. That being said, some warehouses/regions seems to be experiencing longer delays than others. Sometimes we put in a fulfillment order and it will ship same day and get delivered in 2 days. So, totally normal. Other times we put in a fulfillment order and it won't ship for 4-5 days and/or it'll take 3-4 days to deliver. So it appears to me that Amazon knows exactly how long it'll take to get products to you, and lead times are nowhere near the 2-3 weeks that they're showing to customers. The conclusion has to be, I think, that they're doing this to reduce demand. The other way I think they're reducing strain on their warehousing infrastructure is by preferentially showing Fulfilled By Merchant (FBM), as opposed to Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) listings in search results. We've been seeing this as well.