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Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales
- mitchbob 1y agohttps://archive.ph/2025.09.02-155208/https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/amazon-must-face-us-nationwide-class-action-over-third-party-sales-2025-09-02/ https://archive.ph/2025.09.02-155208/https://www.reuters.com...
- giancarlostoro 1y agoSo what are we all looking at? $100 a piece? Lol "Have you used Amazon from the years x to y?" If it covers 2020 thats basically most Americans.
- like_any_other 1y ago$100 each for 330 million Americans sums to $33 billion, which is about half of Amazon's yearly profit (the whole company, not just e-commerce). While I think it should be higher still (anti-competitive practices should be harshly punished), it's not negligible. The real point isn't in the consumer payout, but in discouraging these practices, so that a handful of companies don't get a chokehold on the market (one could argue it's a bit late for that...)
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoIt should be 10% gross over the time period covered in the case (or about $65 billion per year)
- 3eb7988a1663 1y agoWhat percentage of affected users typically enroll in a class action lawsuit? I could believe anything from 1-90%.
- crazygringo 1y ago> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon. I've noticed that third-party sellers generally get around this by having the same list price on their own site, but basically offering everyone a coupon for 15-30% off. Not just for signing up for e-mails, but spinning a wheel that pops up a discount, items that are on sale 95% of the time, etc. So while this may very well be anticompetitive of Amazon, at the same time it's generally something savvy sellers and savvy consumers have been able to get around easily for a long time.
- levkk 1y agoThat can easily be perceived as violating the ToS and get you kicked off the marketplace. Big risk to take if that's where you're making most of your $.
- crazygringo 1y agoI doubt it. I've seen this for products with 10,000+ reviews. It's totally mainstream. If Amazon had a problem with it, they would have cracked down already. What can they say, that "20% off your cart" coupons are prohibited anywhere else the product is listed? That's not feasible. You see North Face doing the same thing with sports retailers. Their jackets never go on sale, but retailers make cart-wide promotions available so you can still get the discount.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoNeither here nor there, but about 15 years ago while I was a fresh grad/hire at Amazon, I realized that the crawler that was supposed to enforce this had not been running for multiple years. I went out and fixed it and got it running again, and I showed about $8M/month revenue increase from this. What did I get? From my skip level manager: "Great job, but too bad about that bug. Next time if it's perfect we can talk about promo" (the crawler went down for a day from an edge case that was preexisting, I fixed it same day)
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- xyst 1y agoIt’s quite awful that the best this country can do at "enforcing" antitrust violations is through class action lawsuits. The only people that benefit here are the lawyers on both sides.
- pessimizer 1y agoThat's what a do-nothing Congress gets you.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- maxwell 1y agoOur poor representation is an extreme outlier among OECD countries: https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/section/7 https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/... Nordic countries have similar representation to the U.S. in the early 1800s. Though virtual, Colonial Americans had better representation in Parliament.
- henryfjordan 1y agoVirtual representation isn't representation at all, and was so repugnant that we fought a war over it.
- mrbluecoat 1y ago> Amazon argued, that the class was too large to be manageable LOL, they literally have a giant data center at their disposal and some of the best automation geniuses in the world.
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago"I'm sorry your honor. We're breaking the law at such an extent it is impossible for us to be held responsible for it."
- nickff 1y agoThe federal government actually makes that argument all the time, and often prevails with it.
- tonetegeatinst 1y agoWhat sources do you have to back this claim up?
- nickff 1y agoOne easy-to-find example: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/too-big-comply-nsa-says-its-too-large-complex-comply-court-order https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/too-big-comply-n...
- radpanda 1y agoThe DoD is legally mandated to pass an audit but consistently doesn’t: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4992913-pentagon-fails-7th-audit-in-a-row-but-says-progress-made/ https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4992913-pentagon-fails-7t...
- tzs 1y agoThe argument is that it is too large for the court to handle, not too large for Amazon to handle. Class actions work by grouping many plaintiffs who have been harmed in the same way and whose damages if they win can be addressed in the same way (e.g., everyone gets a fixed amount of money, or a fixed percentage of what they spent, or something like that). Then the cases of a small number of representatives of the class can be addressed at the actual trial, and the outcome applied to the whole class. The larger the proposed class the more likely the variation in the harms to the members and in how to redress those harms, which can mean you need a larger number of representatives of the class at the actual trial. Get large enough and it becomes difficult for the court to manage. In that case the class needs to be shrunk down to a set of plaintiffs with more uniform harms that can be addressed more uniformly. The people removed from the class might form another class or classes for separate suits, or sue as individuals, or some mixture of those options.
- shayway 1y ago> Amazon argued that the class was too large to be manageable Sorry, we've wronged too many people to be held accountable! What a wild argument.
- gruez 1y agoLooking at Amazon's filings, the argument they made is the following: >Given the unprecedented size of the proposed class consisting of 288 million members, the individualized issues on which their claims depend, and the overwhelming evidence that the challenged conduct resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store, Plaintiffs have not—and cannot demonstrate that a class action would be manageable. The "individualized issues" references arguments presented earlier in the filing. They also cite prior cases where class lawsuits have been denied certification because the class was too big to be manageable. You might disagree with Amazon's lawyers here, but it's unfair to characterize it as "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable". It's an "wild" argument because it's a strawman. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.299854/gov.uscourts.wawd.299854.348.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29...
- solardev 1y agoI don't see the difference between what the lawyers are saying and the parent's summary of it. > we've wronged too many people to be held accountable Sounds like exactly what it is... it's too big of a class to be managed, and therefore should not be? In fact, the very next line is the judge saying: > Chun found there was no evidence at this stage that the size of the class was overbroad. Other federal courts had certified class actions with millions or hundreds of millions of class members, the judge said.
- gruez 1y ago>Sounds like exactly what it is... it's too big of a class to be managed, and therefore should not be? You missed the other 2 of the 3 parts of that argument. >In fact, the very next line is the judge saying: I'm not saying they're objectively right, just that there's more to the argument than "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable".
- egypturnash 1y agoaaaw hell yeah
- roughly 1y agoInteresting to see this moving forward in the new administration. I guess spiking the WaPo Harris endorsement wasn't quite enough to get Bezos out of the crosshairs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nosignono 1y ago> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon. Holy shit, do Valve next! They do the exact same thing.
- speff 1y agoElden Ring is currently $15 cheaper on GameBillet compared to Steam[0] - it even comes with a Steam activation key. If Valve did the same thing, sites like isthereanydeal.com wouldn't really have as much of a purpose. [0]: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/elden-ring/info/ https://isthereanydeal.com/game/elden-ring/info/
- toasterlovin 1y agoEvery single major retailer does this. It's not collusion, it's just smart policy. Shelf space is insanely valuable. Retailers have customers walking around their stores (or making searches in Amazon's case) at the final step in the sales funnel. No retailer wants to get a customer that close to buying (often at considerable expense) then lose them because the brand either has weak channel price control or is trying to divert customers to their own website by offering a discount.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoValve does not do this. Best I can tell, the idea that they do was created either maliciously or incompetently by the law firm suing them on antitrust grounds. What Valve does is assert that you may not offer Steam keys for your game at lower prices on other platforms, permanently. This is only possible because Steam lets game makers sell Steam licenses to their games on other platforms, cutting Valve out of the platform fees altogether. If you list your game on both the Epic Games store and Steam, you're just fine setting different prices on the two. If you sell Steam products keys to your users directly, who can then go and use those keys to claim your game on Steam, you can't undercut your Steam store listing on a permanent basis. You are even allowed to do temporary promotions on other platforms where you sell your Steam keys that you don't on Steam.
- delfinom 1y ago
- schmookeeg 1y agoVery excited for my impending choice between a 30-day extension to my Prime membership or a $5 off of $50 coupon for anything in the Prime Fresh store. ...after 5 years of lawfare and gozillions spent, of course. :/
- eth0up 1y agoThe next class action needs to address the anticompetitive procedure of artificially protecting shit products by deleting critical customer reviews. In my Prime account, 90 percent of my reviews are positive, but because I've left several scathing, unapologetic negative reviews for products that shouldn't exist, all my reviews are now placed in eternal limbo. None of my reviews ever actually post. For the reviews that posted, three months later when the product stops working, Amazon prohibits me from updating the original review. The FTC is well aware of this too. Keep this in mind when evaluating a product using reviews as a metric. And further note the egregious usurpation of the review content search function being replaced by Rufus, the world's foremost most worthless heap of artificially generated product deception. Amazon is indefensibly sinister.
- johnnienaked 1y agoI hope they get hard. They've been getting away with intense anti-competitive practices for nearly 2 decades
- antimora 1y agoCan't wait till Amazon is hit with a class action on showing ads on my Echo Show that I can't disable anymore.