9 ms·

Amazon accused of widespread scheme to inflate prices across the economy

694 points by toomuchtodo 9mo ago

toomuchtodo 9mo ago
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-exposes-amazon-price-fixing-scheme-driving-costs https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont... https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDACTED%20Memorandum%20of%20Points%20and%20Authorities%20ISO%20MPI.pdf https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDAC...
SilverElfin 9mo ago
> 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.
- freakynit 9mo ago
  This process can actually be exploited to work against amazon itself.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo ago
    How?
    - freakynit 9mo ago
      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.
  - SilverElfin 9mo ago
    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?
- Groxx 9mo ago
  tbh I thought it was explicitly stated somewhere. literally every seller I've talked to has mentioned it at some point.
array4277 9mo ago
It is a well-documented fact that Amazon forces it's sellers to "fix" their prices to match the Amazon price. If you sell on Amazon, you're not allowed to sell the same item for less ANYWHERE. This- coupled with Amazon's insane fees- should be a huge red flag to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and maybe a Attorney General can get them to do their damn job and crack down on it... I wouldn't hold my breath though.
- zer00eyz 9mo ago
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2025/12/18/how-walmart-and-pepsico-rigged-prices-and-supercharged-food-inflation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2025/12/18/how-w... Why amazon sellers have not opened up a class action lawsuit is beyond me. This case, succeed or fail will surface enough documentation that they may find cause.
  - sethops1 9mo ago
    Because Amazon holds all the power and will certainly retaliate. At best such a case could end up in front of a Supreme Court 6-3 in Amazon's favor.
    - nielsbot 9mo ago
      ackshually I don't think that's the best case, but indeed very likely. SCOTUS judges (politicians in robes, really) are first selected for their pro-business bent.
  - SilverElfin 9mo ago
    Small companies and individuals cannot pursue expensive lawsuits. It risks their livelihood while it goes through courts over years. And even if you win other big marketplaces may stop doing business with you. Plus class actions are prohibited in many contractual agreements - you’re forced into individual arbitration. It shouldn’t be legal but that’s normal today.
    - 9mo ago
chuckadams 9mo ago
Amazon better watch their step or they might get fined a single-digit percentage of the profits they made off this scheme. That'll show 'em.
- cyanydeez 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dmbche 9mo ago
    Markov chain?
    - rationalist 9mo ago
      I thought those would be dead now with LLMs.
jackblemming 9mo ago
Enough is enough. Executives need to do jail time, no bullshit slap on the wrist nonsense.
- netsharc 9mo ago
  [flagged]
burnt-resistor 9mo ago
Oligopoly gonna ...
freakynit 9mo ago
At what levels does greed of people like Bezos, Elon, Gates or Larry comes to a halt?
- SilverElfin 9mo ago
  It doesn’t. They’re sociopaths. They get to where they are because they’re willing to do things others are too nice to do. Otherwise they’re no better than many other talented business people.
  - carlosjobim 9mo ago
    Willing to do things others are too nice to do? Such as accepting returns without a fuzz? Delivering quickly and being transparent about shipping costs? Amazon is gigantic because they give customers a better experience and people feel safe buying from them without having touched the product.
- chii 9mo ago
  Why should the desire to own more and more of the world ever come to a halt?
- aschla 9mo ago
  When the average person stops spending money in ways that enrich them.
  - fhennig 9mo ago
    Individualizing systemic failures to regulate businesses is counterproductive. Meaningful change will only come by regulation. Give me one example, where consumer behavior really changed anything. Usually what follows from large boycotts is political action or the company succumbing to pressure. Just stopping to spend your money there might make you feel good but don't kid yourself, it barely does anything if you're not turning it into an organized action.
    - freakynit 9mo ago
SpicyLemonZest 9mo ago
I just don't believe this is the case. Bonta acknowledges in his press release that Amazon's prices intuitively seem to be cheap, and the concrete examples of alleged price fixing are all so redacted that it's impossible to process them. Like, this is the complete available text of example 2: > Amazon, vendor [...] fixed prices on [...] This is also an example of Breaking the Price Match, but here, Amazon [...] The plan was memorialized in an email from [...] In other words [...] In response, Amazon insisted on [...] The plan was realized [...] The result of Amazon, [...] price fixing agreement was to increase the retail prices I don't know how you could even understand what's being alleged without seeing the unredacted version.
paxys 9mo ago
The fact that California is pushing this gives me some hope. Walmart and Pepsi engaged in a blatant decade-long price fixing scheme designed to raised prices and punish small local competitors and were sued for it by Lina Khan's FTC, but - surprise - the case was thrown out the minute Trump took office.
black_13 9mo ago
[dead]
maerF0x0 9mo ago
Once upon a time Amazon would pressure book sellers to sell for _less_... now they're actually causing prices to go up... Sad fall from grace.
jimbokun 9mo ago
Two things jumped out at me. 1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering. 2. As of now the trial is not scheduled to begin until January 2027 (although the discussed injunction is meant to address that). I believe the length of time required to get a decision in court is the single biggest impediment to justice being served. It usually waters down the final judgment, makes costs prohibitive for plaintiffs, and allows perpetrators to continue benefiting from illegal behavior indefinitely. In some cases, the defendant can be elected President in the interim eliminating any chance of facing a court decision.
- KittenInABox 9mo ago
  I wouldn't ascribe averages to mean much. I expect there is a small minority that buys everything on amazon (everything meaning groceries, holiday gifts, prescriptions, etc) that would jack up the average significantly.
- twoodfin 9mo ago
  Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering. Is it? That’s by households, not individuals. Is it really crazy to imagine a household spending $200-300/month at Costco, Walmart, Whole Foods—or Amazon?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    I spend $200-300 per week at whole foods, much to my own chagrin and moral discomfort.
    - twoodfin 9mo ago
      AFAICT, the numbers Matt’s referencing include Whole Foods so that’s a Whole Foods + Amazon.com $3,000. Frankly, I think a lot of people have lost perspective on just how rich the average American household is: Around $145k annual income. Not shocking that Amazon is capturing 2% of that gross.
graeme 9mo ago
I can say how this worked for books. Used to be Amazon didn't enforce their pricing policy. So a bookseller could price their book's list price lower on a different site than on amazon. Amazon would discount to match, but pay the bookseller based on the list price. It was effectively a way to get an excess commission out of amazon if you printed through their printing arm, Createspace/KDP. Not sure if this worked the same for non print on demand books but if you printed through createspace you could set a higher list price and get royalties that were about 100% of the actual sale price. No idea if the same mechanic is in play with the FBA rules but it seems very plausible to me that the largest impact is has is closing exploits like this. That doesn't mean it doesn't also entrench market position, raise a few prices at the margin etc but it's very easy to miss the potential for gaming rules, legally, unless you're actively in the system. If an incentive is there the market incentive will be to use it.
SoftTalker 9mo ago
I saw through the Amazon Prime scam about four years ago and canceled my membership. Counterfeit products, obviously returned/resold products, and failure to meet delivery date promises. And prices steadily rising. I just go to Walmart now. And Walmart is no choir boy either but at least I can see what I'm buying.
- bitmasher9 9mo ago
  A product being on a shelf at a Walmart is a better indicator of quality then anything you could post on an Amazon listing.
  - crazygringo 9mo ago
    Funny, it's the opposite to me. A product on the shelf, I don't have the slightest idea if it'll break in a month or have a feature that doesn't work right. When I start browsing Amazon reviews, I feel vastly more confident I know what I'm buying. Only exception is clothing, since it's next to impossible to judge fit and texture and often even color online.
    - shmeeed 9mo ago
      >When I start browsing Amazon reviews, I feel vastly more confident I know what I'm buying. I hate to break it to you, but a large majority of reviews are fake.
      - crazygringo 9mo ago
        I hate to break it to you, but the fake reviews are mostly all positive. But if you find a ton of negative reviews complaining that the handle breaks after 2 months... then that's probably real. That's the stuff you look for, to see if there's any consistent pattern to the negative reviews.
        shmeeed 9mo ago
        I find that even this doesn't work as well as it used to. Too many sellers are using too many dark patterns at scale. IMO this old approach suffers from the ubiquitous flooding and washing of bad reviews with sometimes thousands of positive ones that mask real numbers. Without a half-reliable denominator, it's very hard to tell how prevalent a problem is. E.g. if there are 5k reviews, 50 of which are negative (just to use any numbers), on the surface of it that looks like a pretty normal ratio you'll find in any review section. Some handles just do break off on any product, and in the end there's also always some nutjob who tried to jack his car with a pan. But how many of the total reviews are fake? There's 50 real dissatisfied customers - but out of how many? 100, 500 or 5.000? If I'm being really critical at the sight of any kind of negative review, there's really not much left to buy with a good consciousness. Then there's grouping of very different products on the same page, so reviews get muddled. Those groupings change from time to time, so any amount of reviews on a product page can refer to an item that's no longer available on that page. Strangely, AFAIK Amazon does not provide a possibility to filter those out. So when looking for reviews on, say, a USB cable, I'm made to sift manually through lots and lots of unrelated reviews both good and bad, some of which mention a handle breaking and are obviously not about a cable at all (I'm exaggerating a bit, but the M.O. is real). And above all, really bad products with an actual ton of negative reviews often don't last long. The listings get deleted, the sellers disappear, come up the next day with a different random letter brand name, and buy good reviews in bulk again. Taking these (and more) factors into account, assessing reviews has become like solving a single equation with multiple unknowns. To me at least, finding the signal from the noise at this scale just using common sense has become nigh impossible. I personally don't have any confidence in it at all anymore, let alone a vast one. The mere attempt to wade through reviews has become an incredibly time-consuming and frustrating affair. I increasingly find myself abandoning my research halfway through and question if I really need a product at all, because when I look into it, all the available alternatives seem to be shit. In a way, that's probably a positive. If you've found a way to better navigate this mess, I'm definitely interested to know! But IMO unless Amazon starts to fight those dark patterns, which they show no inclination to, the fight against the review shadow industry is a losing one for customers.
crazygringo 9mo ago
> sued Amazon for prohibiting vendors that sold on its website from offering discounts outside of Amazon... to make sure that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price... First, this is not new. It's been stated policy for years. Second, manufacturers get around it in a clever way. They always list their items on their own site at the same price as at Amazon... but then magically almost always seem to have a 20% or 25%-off sitewide coupon available, whether it's for first-time customers, or "spinning the wheel" that pops up, etc. So I don't know how much this is really raising actual prices in the end. Otherwise, I'm not sure how to feel about it, because pricing contracts are common on both ends. Manufacturers frequently only sell to retailers who promise they won't charge less than the MSRP, and large retailers similarly often require "most-favored-nation" pricing, so they can always claim they have the lowest prices. If you want to end these practices, then it's only fair to have a law prohibiting it across the board, rather than singling out Amazon.
- notimetorelax 9mo ago
  It prevents other sellers from competing with Amazon.
- consp 9mo ago
  They raise prices by 30 percent to offset Amazon's taxes and then offer a 25 percent discount on their own site. How does this not raise prizes?
  - crazygringo 9mo ago
    ...because you can buy it on the other site for the actual lowest price in the end. The exact percentages here are just examples, the point is the retailer is selling it on their own site for the same low price in the end.
- nielsbot 9mo ago
  > First, this is not new. It's been stated policy for years. This is irrelevant.
aschla 9mo ago
Cancelled my Prime subscription last month after the past year of worsening experiences with Amazon: Received several orders that were returned items, with broken open packaging and sometimes the item was something else entirely, purely put there for weight by whoever returned it. When I went to return some things at a major Amazon distribution center, the return area was closed for the week for some sort of construction or renovation, with no indication of that anywhere on the site. The only messaging was a piece of paper in the window once you got there. At another separate major distribution center, the return area was a small room with pieces of paper taped to a door with an arrow pointing to the Amazon lockers where the returns are accepted. Orders are now often so delayed that it makes the Prime subscription pointless. Have had multiple orders over the past year that didn't ship for 3 or 4 days. Amazon listings are almost half Sponsored listings now, and there are unrelated ads on the side of listings. Half of the listings are some random made-up brand name, like XIJGNU, which is just a Chinese seller selling low-quality products, and when the reviews get bad enough, they re-list the product under another made-up brand name. Fake reviews were already rampant before LLMs, but now reviews are effectively useless because they are so easy to fake.
- consp 9mo ago
  At least in the past the sellers branded their whitelabel products correctly. These days you get some random "brand" when you order from an alphabet soup name. It's fun when you have to install apps with it as you have to get the right "brand" app without knowing what "brand" it is as the whitelabel manufacturer has locked it down (though usually only by obfuscation). In my experience I've received a box for a different brand than the device inside with the wrong app listed in the box for a different unrelated brand. Fun times we live in. And don't bother getting a refund as the listing and company will be gone by the time you try.
  - account42 9mo ago
    I wish they would just sell those products unbranded - then they'd actually provide some meaningful value to those of us who don't want themselves and their house to be an advertising billboard.
xrd 9mo ago
Lina Khan is now in Mamdani's cabinet. Maybe NY state and California can team up on this.
binarysolo 9mo ago
Amazon seller/distributor/agency here; I've been in the space for over a decade. The title is a little clickbait-y. As far as I understand it: 1. Think of Amazon as a search engine for products. 2. Amazon wants its site to be the lowest-price destination for products. 3. If Amazon finds your product on another website for lower than its own website, it'll just hide your listing from the search -- this is meant to be pro-consumer (when you go to Amazon you'll get the lowest price). This is where it gets a bit more complicated: 4. Amazon sells ~40% of its goods under its own purchasing arm, known to sellers as Vendor Central. (These are items shipped and sold by Amazon.com). This purchasing arm wants X% margins from *brands, based on whatever their internal targets. From what I've experienced personally -- their terms are generally better than their competitors (Walmart/Target/Costco/Sams), so it's generally a no-brainer to sell directly to them when I can instead of selling direct. So when 4 has a conflict of interest with #1-3, you get the systemic effect that in order for the sellers to get their **sweet purchase orders from Amazon, they now need to raise prices elsewhere so the purchasing arm gets their cut. The sellers don't HAVE to sell to Amazon, but then they'd miss out on giant POs from Amazon at good terms. Designing a system to incentivize sellers to have their lowest prices on Amazon... I'm not sure if calling it a "widespread scheme to inflate prices" is the fairest thing. *edit: Historically, Amazon VC basically ran at near break-even under Jeff, "your margin is my opportunity" and all that. Since Andy took over there's been a reshuffling of chairs and the different business units have different margin requirements now. **edit2: the price inflation mostly affects big brands that sell 8+ figs/yr on Amazon, because smaller sellers don't get POs from VC (too small to bother).
- dataflow 9mo ago
  > Think of Amazon is a search engine for products. > [Amazon's] own purchasing arm ...so we can't think of Amazon as just "a search engine", right? You might as well hand someone a toy and say "Think of this as a toy gun. But this is where it gets a bit more complicated: 40% of these have a trigger that shoots bullets." Whom are you kidding? Clearly with the scheme you described, these are morally two separate entities colluding with each other to use each others' huge powers in the market to raise prices and pocket more profit for themselves.
jadenPete 9mo ago
The article cites Amazon prohibiting sellers from selling their products for less on other platforms as anticompetitive behavior. I don’t doubt that this is happening, nor that it’s anticompetitive. That being said, anyone who’s operated a two-sided marketplace knows that one of the biggest problems is consumers using your site as an index, and then seeking to dodge your fee by meeting with the seller on another platform, where they don’t have to pay it. This was a big problem for my startup. This is a negative externality, because they’re extracting value from your platform (the list of sellers, products, prices, ratings, etc.), without paying for that value. If left unchecked, this could make running the platform financially unviable. One way to prevent this is to paywall your platform, but not every consumer wants to pay a subscription. I think it’d be fair for Amazon to prohibit sellers advertising other platforms on its own, but prohibiting them from offering lower prices outside of Amazon outright definitely seems anticompetitive.
- BrenBarn 9mo ago
  > If left unchecked, this could make running the platform financially unviable. Sounds great to me!
- AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
  > That being said, anyone who’s operated a two-sided marketplace knows that one of the biggest problems is consumers using your site as an index, and then seeking to dodge your fee by meeting with the seller on another platform, where they don’t have to pay it. There is a company that operates an index where people can search for things and doesn't charge the site or the customer for things that rank well in organic search results. I think they're called Google. From what I understand they make quite a bit of money by selling ads next to the listings. That model seems like it would work pretty well for such a platform, unless there was some major company preventing anyone from offering a lower price than they have on their own site so that everybody goes to their site instead of using a price search engine to find a site with a lower price. I mean come on. If they're really using your site just to find a product, you think that's a problem? Meanwhile a platform's fee should be going to things like payment processing, warehousing and shipping, and then if you're offering a competitive price for those services they should want to be paying you because they need those things and can't get a better deal on them somewhere else. If they can get a better deal on them and are only using your site because you're forcing them to with a dirty trick, maybe they're right to object?
BrenBarn 9mo ago
On the one hand, this is good to see. On the other hand, like basically every such thing, it's too late and way, way, too little. It is pointless to try to chip away at Amazon by saying "oh you did this, oh you did that, oh you harmed people this way, oh you cheated this other way". It's like if a house is on fire and you try to stop it from spreading to nearby houses by catching each flying ember individually. You need to put the fire out. Companies with as much market power as Amazon simply cannot be allowed to exist. It was a mistake to ever allow it and every response that is not aimed at a total shattering of the company is another mistake. No retail business of any kind can ever be safe when companies like Amazon exist. (And although this article is about Amazon, the same is true of many other companies as well, like Walmart.)
- Frieren 9mo ago
  Antitrust laws exist for a reason, when judges and goverment stopped enforcing them it created the age of mega-corporations. AT&T did not had the level of control of the economy that modern tech companies have, and yet got split to make room for competition and a healthy economy. The world knows how to fix this problem the rich pay to not allow it.
  - lyu07282 9mo ago
    This is pretty much exactly what Lina Khan would say, I'm still mad Harris sidelined her instead of putting her front and center, drilling that message into people's tick skulls.
newan09 9mo ago
Author is missing a big chunk of what selling retail product requires, which is shipment and delivery costs. For a $5.49 laundry detergent, the cost to ship it your may very well exceed the price of the product if you're small retailer. At least by paying Amazon I can avoid dealing with all that. While I may pass the price to the consumer for Fulfilled-By-Amazon fees, which tends to be around $5.18 ~ $3.5 (quick google search), it's still a lot cheaper than using something like FedEx where it costs $10-12 per order. The takeaway here is that Amazon has democratized fast and cheap delivery by building a monopoly. As the scale of things go up, the cost of operations can really go down. Think of meal prepping, when you cook food in bulk vs each meal separately, you're saving costs on power, gas and produce. The only question is whether we can build a public benefit corporation, just like Amazon.
- pnt12 9mo ago
  I'm not American, but I get free shipping on most products, as long as the order has a minimum cost and I wait a couple of days more? This is true for other sellers too.
  - alt227 9mo ago
    In the UK amazon has completely removed free shipping in an effort to push everyone to prime. YUou used to be able to wait 5 days for free shipping, not any more.
    - 72deluxe 9mo ago
      I think that's because in general shipping in the UK became incredibly expensive during and after COVID, and never ever went down again. Coupled with Brexit, shipping companies all pushed their prices up en masse for no apparent reason, and it's never gone down again.
    - quantum_magpie 9mo ago
      In the German site I get free shipping over 60 Eur, but only by stuff shipped by amazon. And other vendors somehow manage to always screw up shipping, so now I have had all orders for used books that had no/invalid tracking number, not arrive and I have/had to negotiate a refund for all of these refunds with the vendors themselves instead of amazon. So all-in-all, amazon is actually good, makes stuff available that’s impossible to find locally (books in English), and does shipping well.
quillshade 9mo ago
What's interesting is how their recommendation algorithm plays into this. I've been digging into how these systems work (Netflix's specifically), and there's a pattern: the algorithm doesn't optimize for what you'd rate highest, it optimizes for what keeps you engaged. Amazon does something similar but with pricing layered on top. Their rec system pushes higher-margin products, sellers notice which items get promoted, then they raise prices knowing Amazon will keep showing them anyway. So it's not just "algorithm adjusts prices" - it's more like the recommendation layer creates conditions where sellers can safely jack up prices without losing visibility. Basically the algorithm creates artificial scarcity by only showing certain products, which gives sellers pricing power they wouldn't have otherwise.
pipes 9mo ago
I think valve does this steam too? Games can't be a lower price on other platforms?
oort-cloud9 9mo ago
[dead]
thebigspacefuck 9mo ago
I’ve been using Rakuten more recently and it’s provided some alternatives to Amazon where I’m able to get things more cheaply from other stores. If you don’t mind waiting for shipping, give it a try. Or ask Gemini what the best deal is, it’s found some good ones. For smaller stuff, Amazon is usually better than Target or whatever box store nearby.
oort-cloud9 9mo ago
[dead]
rickdeckard 9mo ago
This is not too different from ~2012, when Apple decided to offer eBooks with the launch of the iPad, but found that they couldn't have 30% margin AND match the price of Amazon. So Apple coordinated the major book publishers to raise their prices in order to secure their margin expectations. They settled the lawsuit in the end. [0] https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/us-sues-apple-publishers-over-e-book-prices/ https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/us-sues-apple-publishers...
xenadu02 9mo ago
Who buys on Amazon anymore anyway? You can't find anything. Want a desk fan? There are four types of desk fan in the entire world (per Amazon). Page after page after page of listings of the exact same four designs. Often listed with the same re-used marketing artwork. Put aside brands, quality, et al. Put aside the fact that Amazon removed almost all product specs from their search facility (and is increasingly deleting specs entirely from product pages). Put aside the fake reviews, no-name Chinese drop-shippers. Every category is stuffed full of the same few copycat products over and over. It is extremely difficult to merely find actual choices! Wrenches? Small compartment storage boxes? Paper towel holders? If you can find even 20-30 unique products in a category now you're living like a king. It reminds me of AliExpress in that sense. Lack of specs, lack of manuals, lack of details about any product. The same listings from different no-name stores repeated over and over. I used to think maybe AliExpress & co were actually good if you spoke Chinese but a Chinese coworker kindly informed me that nope, it is just as horrible for everyone living in China using Chinese. I don't know where we went wrong but this is not the future we were promised. Can any of you remember when Amazon was actually good? When their search was useful? Those were some amazing times and how little did we realize they were fleeting.

694 points by toomuchtodo 9mo ago

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-exposes-amazon-price-fixing-scheme-driving-costs https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont... https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDACTED%20Memorandum%20of%20Points%20and%20Authorities%20ISO%20MPI.pdf https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDAC...

SilverElfin 9mo ago

> 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.

freakynit 9mo ago
This process can actually be exploited to work against amazon itself.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo ago
  How?
  - freakynit 9mo ago
    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.
- SilverElfin 9mo ago
  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?
Groxx 9mo ago
tbh I thought it was explicitly stated somewhere. literally every seller I've talked to has mentioned it at some point.

array4277 9mo ago

It is a well-documented fact that Amazon forces it's sellers to "fix" their prices to match the Amazon price. If you sell on Amazon, you're not allowed to sell the same item for less ANYWHERE. This- coupled with Amazon's insane fees- should be a huge red flag to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and maybe a Attorney General can get them to do their damn job and crack down on it... I wouldn't hold my breath though.

zer00eyz 9mo ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2025/12/18/how-walmart-and-pepsico-rigged-prices-and-supercharged-food-inflation/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2025/12/18/how-w... Why amazon sellers have not opened up a class action lawsuit is beyond me. This case, succeed or fail will surface enough documentation that they may find cause.
- sethops1 9mo ago
  Because Amazon holds all the power and will certainly retaliate. At best such a case could end up in front of a Supreme Court 6-3 in Amazon's favor.
  - nielsbot 9mo ago
    ackshually I don't think that's the best case, but indeed very likely. SCOTUS judges (politicians in robes, really) are first selected for their pro-business bent.
- SilverElfin 9mo ago
  Small companies and individuals cannot pursue expensive lawsuits. It risks their livelihood while it goes through courts over years. And even if you win other big marketplaces may stop doing business with you. Plus class actions are prohibited in many contractual agreements - you’re forced into individual arbitration. It shouldn’t be legal but that’s normal today.
  - 9mo ago

chuckadams 9mo ago

Amazon better watch their step or they might get fined a single-digit percentage of the profits they made off this scheme. That'll show 'em.

cyanydeez 9mo ago
[flagged]
- dmbche 9mo ago
  Markov chain?
  - rationalist 9mo ago
    I thought those would be dead now with LLMs.

jackblemming 9mo ago

Enough is enough. Executives need to do jail time, no bullshit slap on the wrist nonsense.

netsharc 9mo ago
[flagged]

burnt-resistor 9mo ago

Oligopoly gonna ...

freakynit 9mo ago

At what levels does greed of people like Bezos, Elon, Gates or Larry comes to a halt?

SilverElfin 9mo ago
It doesn’t. They’re sociopaths. They get to where they are because they’re willing to do things others are too nice to do. Otherwise they’re no better than many other talented business people.
- carlosjobim 9mo ago
  Willing to do things others are too nice to do? Such as accepting returns without a fuzz? Delivering quickly and being transparent about shipping costs? Amazon is gigantic because they give customers a better experience and people feel safe buying from them without having touched the product.
chii 9mo ago
Why should the desire to own more and more of the world ever come to a halt?
aschla 9mo ago
When the average person stops spending money in ways that enrich them.
- fhennig 9mo ago
  Individualizing systemic failures to regulate businesses is counterproductive. Meaningful change will only come by regulation. Give me one example, where consumer behavior really changed anything. Usually what follows from large boycotts is political action or the company succumbing to pressure. Just stopping to spend your money there might make you feel good but don't kid yourself, it barely does anything if you're not turning it into an organized action.
  - freakynit 9mo ago

SpicyLemonZest 9mo ago

I just don't believe this is the case. Bonta acknowledges in his press release that Amazon's prices intuitively seem to be cheap, and the concrete examples of alleged price fixing are all so redacted that it's impossible to process them. Like, this is the complete available text of example 2: > Amazon, vendor [...] fixed prices on [...] This is also an example of Breaking the Price Match, but here, Amazon [...] The plan was memorialized in an email from [...] In other words [...] In response, Amazon insisted on [...] The plan was realized [...] The result of Amazon, [...] price fixing agreement was to increase the retail prices I don't know how you could even understand what's being alleged without seeing the unredacted version.

paxys 9mo ago

The fact that California is pushing this gives me some hope. Walmart and Pepsi engaged in a blatant decade-long price fixing scheme designed to raised prices and punish small local competitors and were sued for it by Lina Khan's FTC, but - surprise - the case was thrown out the minute Trump took office.

black_13 9mo ago

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maerF0x0 9mo ago

Once upon a time Amazon would pressure book sellers to sell for _less_... now they're actually causing prices to go up... Sad fall from grace.

jimbokun 9mo ago

Two things jumped out at me. 1. Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering. 2. As of now the trial is not scheduled to begin until January 2027 (although the discussed injunction is meant to address that). I believe the length of time required to get a decision in court is the single biggest impediment to justice being served. It usually waters down the final judgment, makes costs prohibitive for plaintiffs, and allows perpetrators to continue benefiting from illegal behavior indefinitely. In some cases, the defendant can be elected President in the interim eliminating any chance of facing a court decision.

KittenInABox 9mo ago
I wouldn't ascribe averages to mean much. I expect there is a small minority that buys everything on amazon (everything meaning groceries, holiday gifts, prescriptions, etc) that would jack up the average significantly.
twoodfin 9mo ago
Average American spends THREE THOUSAND DOLLAR year at Amazon. That’s staggering. Is it? That’s by households, not individuals. Is it really crazy to imagine a household spending $200-300/month at Costco, Walmart, Whole Foods—or Amazon?
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  I spend $200-300 per week at whole foods, much to my own chagrin and moral discomfort.
  - twoodfin 9mo ago
    AFAICT, the numbers Matt’s referencing include Whole Foods so that’s a Whole Foods + Amazon.com $3,000. Frankly, I think a lot of people have lost perspective on just how rich the average American household is: Around $145k annual income. Not shocking that Amazon is capturing 2% of that gross.

graeme 9mo ago

I can say how this worked for books. Used to be Amazon didn't enforce their pricing policy. So a bookseller could price their book's list price lower on a different site than on amazon. Amazon would discount to match, but pay the bookseller based on the list price. It was effectively a way to get an excess commission out of amazon if you printed through their printing arm, Createspace/KDP. Not sure if this worked the same for non print on demand books but if you printed through createspace you could set a higher list price and get royalties that were about 100% of the actual sale price. No idea if the same mechanic is in play with the FBA rules but it seems very plausible to me that the largest impact is has is closing exploits like this. That doesn't mean it doesn't also entrench market position, raise a few prices at the margin etc but it's very easy to miss the potential for gaming rules, legally, unless you're actively in the system. If an incentive is there the market incentive will be to use it.

SoftTalker 9mo ago

I saw through the Amazon Prime scam about four years ago and canceled my membership. Counterfeit products, obviously returned/resold products, and failure to meet delivery date promises. And prices steadily rising. I just go to Walmart now. And Walmart is no choir boy either but at least I can see what I'm buying.

bitmasher9 9mo ago
A product being on a shelf at a Walmart is a better indicator of quality then anything you could post on an Amazon listing.
- crazygringo 9mo ago
  Funny, it's the opposite to me. A product on the shelf, I don't have the slightest idea if it'll break in a month or have a feature that doesn't work right. When I start browsing Amazon reviews, I feel vastly more confident I know what I'm buying. Only exception is clothing, since it's next to impossible to judge fit and texture and often even color online.
  - shmeeed 9mo ago
    >When I start browsing Amazon reviews, I feel vastly more confident I know what I'm buying. I hate to break it to you, but a large majority of reviews are fake.
    - crazygringo 9mo ago
      I hate to break it to you, but the fake reviews are mostly all positive. But if you find a ton of negative reviews complaining that the handle breaks after 2 months... then that's probably real. That's the stuff you look for, to see if there's any consistent pattern to the negative reviews.
      - shmeeed 9mo ago
        I find that even this doesn't work as well as it used to. Too many sellers are using too many dark patterns at scale. IMO this old approach suffers from the ubiquitous flooding and washing of bad reviews with sometimes thousands of positive ones that mask real numbers. Without a half-reliable denominator, it's very hard to tell how prevalent a problem is. E.g. if there are 5k reviews, 50 of which are negative (just to use any numbers), on the surface of it that looks like a pretty normal ratio you'll find in any review section. Some handles just do break off on any product, and in the end there's also always some nutjob who tried to jack his car with a pan. But how many of the total reviews are fake? There's 50 real dissatisfied customers - but out of how many? 100, 500 or 5.000? If I'm being really critical at the sight of any kind of negative review, there's really not much left to buy with a good consciousness. Then there's grouping of very different products on the same page, so reviews get muddled. Those groupings change from time to time, so any amount of reviews on a product page can refer to an item that's no longer available on that page. Strangely, AFAIK Amazon does not provide a possibility to filter those out. So when looking for reviews on, say, a USB cable, I'm made to sift manually through lots and lots of unrelated reviews both good and bad, some of which mention a handle breaking and are obviously not about a cable at all (I'm exaggerating a bit, but the M.O. is real). And above all, really bad products with an actual ton of negative reviews often don't last long. The listings get deleted, the sellers disappear, come up the next day with a different random letter brand name, and buy good reviews in bulk again. Taking these (and more) factors into account, assessing reviews has become like solving a single equation with multiple unknowns. To me at least, finding the signal from the noise at this scale just using common sense has become nigh impossible. I personally don't have any confidence in it at all anymore, let alone a vast one. The mere attempt to wade through reviews has become an incredibly time-consuming and frustrating affair. I increasingly find myself abandoning my research halfway through and question if I really need a product at all, because when I look into it, all the available alternatives seem to be shit. In a way, that's probably a positive. If you've found a way to better navigate this mess, I'm definitely interested to know! But IMO unless Amazon starts to fight those dark patterns, which they show no inclination to, the fight against the review shadow industry is a losing one for customers.

crazygringo 9mo ago

> sued Amazon for prohibiting vendors that sold on its website from offering discounts outside of Amazon... to make sure that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price... First, this is not new. It's been stated policy for years. Second, manufacturers get around it in a clever way. They always list their items on their own site at the same price as at Amazon... but then magically almost always seem to have a 20% or 25%-off sitewide coupon available, whether it's for first-time customers, or "spinning the wheel" that pops up, etc. So I don't know how much this is really raising actual prices in the end. Otherwise, I'm not sure how to feel about it, because pricing contracts are common on both ends. Manufacturers frequently only sell to retailers who promise they won't charge less than the MSRP, and large retailers similarly often require "most-favored-nation" pricing, so they can always claim they have the lowest prices. If you want to end these practices, then it's only fair to have a law prohibiting it across the board, rather than singling out Amazon.

notimetorelax 9mo ago
It prevents other sellers from competing with Amazon.
consp 9mo ago
They raise prices by 30 percent to offset Amazon's taxes and then offer a 25 percent discount on their own site. How does this not raise prizes?
- crazygringo 9mo ago
  ...because you can buy it on the other site for the actual lowest price in the end. The exact percentages here are just examples, the point is the retailer is selling it on their own site for the same low price in the end.
nielsbot 9mo ago
> First, this is not new. It's been stated policy for years. This is irrelevant.

aschla 9mo ago

Cancelled my Prime subscription last month after the past year of worsening experiences with Amazon: Received several orders that were returned items, with broken open packaging and sometimes the item was something else entirely, purely put there for weight by whoever returned it. When I went to return some things at a major Amazon distribution center, the return area was closed for the week for some sort of construction or renovation, with no indication of that anywhere on the site. The only messaging was a piece of paper in the window once you got there. At another separate major distribution center, the return area was a small room with pieces of paper taped to a door with an arrow pointing to the Amazon lockers where the returns are accepted. Orders are now often so delayed that it makes the Prime subscription pointless. Have had multiple orders over the past year that didn't ship for 3 or 4 days. Amazon listings are almost half Sponsored listings now, and there are unrelated ads on the side of listings. Half of the listings are some random made-up brand name, like XIJGNU, which is just a Chinese seller selling low-quality products, and when the reviews get bad enough, they re-list the product under another made-up brand name. Fake reviews were already rampant before LLMs, but now reviews are effectively useless because they are so easy to fake.

consp 9mo ago
At least in the past the sellers branded their whitelabel products correctly. These days you get some random "brand" when you order from an alphabet soup name. It's fun when you have to install apps with it as you have to get the right "brand" app without knowing what "brand" it is as the whitelabel manufacturer has locked it down (though usually only by obfuscation). In my experience I've received a box for a different brand than the device inside with the wrong app listed in the box for a different unrelated brand. Fun times we live in. And don't bother getting a refund as the listing and company will be gone by the time you try.
- account42 9mo ago
  I wish they would just sell those products unbranded - then they'd actually provide some meaningful value to those of us who don't want themselves and their house to be an advertising billboard.

xrd 9mo ago

Lina Khan is now in Mamdani's cabinet. Maybe NY state and California can team up on this.

binarysolo 9mo ago

Amazon seller/distributor/agency here; I've been in the space for over a decade. The title is a little clickbait-y. As far as I understand it: 1. Think of Amazon as a search engine for products. 2. Amazon wants its site to be the lowest-price destination for products. 3. If Amazon finds your product on another website for lower than its own website, it'll just hide your listing from the search -- this is meant to be pro-consumer (when you go to Amazon you'll get the lowest price). This is where it gets a bit more complicated: 4. Amazon sells ~40% of its goods under its own purchasing arm, known to sellers as Vendor Central. (These are items shipped and sold by Amazon.com). This purchasing arm wants X% margins from *brands, based on whatever their internal targets. From what I've experienced personally -- their terms are generally better than their competitors (Walmart/Target/Costco/Sams), so it's generally a no-brainer to sell directly to them when I can instead of selling direct. So when 4 has a conflict of interest with #1-3, you get the systemic effect that in order for the sellers to get their **sweet purchase orders from Amazon, they now need to raise prices elsewhere so the purchasing arm gets their cut. The sellers don't HAVE to sell to Amazon, but then they'd miss out on giant POs from Amazon at good terms. Designing a system to incentivize sellers to have their lowest prices on Amazon... I'm not sure if calling it a "widespread scheme to inflate prices" is the fairest thing. *edit: Historically, Amazon VC basically ran at near break-even under Jeff, "your margin is my opportunity" and all that. Since Andy took over there's been a reshuffling of chairs and the different business units have different margin requirements now. **edit2: the price inflation mostly affects big brands that sell 8+ figs/yr on Amazon, because smaller sellers don't get POs from VC (too small to bother).

dataflow 9mo ago
> Think of Amazon is a search engine for products. > [Amazon's] own purchasing arm ...so we can't think of Amazon as just "a search engine", right? You might as well hand someone a toy and say "Think of this as a toy gun. But this is where it gets a bit more complicated: 40% of these have a trigger that shoots bullets." Whom are you kidding? Clearly with the scheme you described, these are morally two separate entities colluding with each other to use each others' huge powers in the market to raise prices and pocket more profit for themselves.

jadenPete 9mo ago

The article cites Amazon prohibiting sellers from selling their products for less on other platforms as anticompetitive behavior. I don’t doubt that this is happening, nor that it’s anticompetitive. That being said, anyone who’s operated a two-sided marketplace knows that one of the biggest problems is consumers using your site as an index, and then seeking to dodge your fee by meeting with the seller on another platform, where they don’t have to pay it. This was a big problem for my startup. This is a negative externality, because they’re extracting value from your platform (the list of sellers, products, prices, ratings, etc.), without paying for that value. If left unchecked, this could make running the platform financially unviable. One way to prevent this is to paywall your platform, but not every consumer wants to pay a subscription. I think it’d be fair for Amazon to prohibit sellers advertising other platforms on its own, but prohibiting them from offering lower prices outside of Amazon outright definitely seems anticompetitive.

BrenBarn 9mo ago
> If left unchecked, this could make running the platform financially unviable. Sounds great to me!
AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
> That being said, anyone who’s operated a two-sided marketplace knows that one of the biggest problems is consumers using your site as an index, and then seeking to dodge your fee by meeting with the seller on another platform, where they don’t have to pay it. There is a company that operates an index where people can search for things and doesn't charge the site or the customer for things that rank well in organic search results. I think they're called Google. From what I understand they make quite a bit of money by selling ads next to the listings. That model seems like it would work pretty well for such a platform, unless there was some major company preventing anyone from offering a lower price than they have on their own site so that everybody goes to their site instead of using a price search engine to find a site with a lower price. I mean come on. If they're really using your site just to find a product, you think that's a problem? Meanwhile a platform's fee should be going to things like payment processing, warehousing and shipping, and then if you're offering a competitive price for those services they should want to be paying you because they need those things and can't get a better deal on them somewhere else. If they can get a better deal on them and are only using your site because you're forcing them to with a dirty trick, maybe they're right to object?

BrenBarn 9mo ago

On the one hand, this is good to see. On the other hand, like basically every such thing, it's too late and way, way, too little. It is pointless to try to chip away at Amazon by saying "oh you did this, oh you did that, oh you harmed people this way, oh you cheated this other way". It's like if a house is on fire and you try to stop it from spreading to nearby houses by catching each flying ember individually. You need to put the fire out. Companies with as much market power as Amazon simply cannot be allowed to exist. It was a mistake to ever allow it and every response that is not aimed at a total shattering of the company is another mistake. No retail business of any kind can ever be safe when companies like Amazon exist. (And although this article is about Amazon, the same is true of many other companies as well, like Walmart.)

Frieren 9mo ago
Antitrust laws exist for a reason, when judges and goverment stopped enforcing them it created the age of mega-corporations. AT&T did not had the level of control of the economy that modern tech companies have, and yet got split to make room for competition and a healthy economy. The world knows how to fix this problem the rich pay to not allow it.
- lyu07282 9mo ago
  This is pretty much exactly what Lina Khan would say, I'm still mad Harris sidelined her instead of putting her front and center, drilling that message into people's tick skulls.

newan09 9mo ago

Author is missing a big chunk of what selling retail product requires, which is shipment and delivery costs. For a $5.49 laundry detergent, the cost to ship it your may very well exceed the price of the product if you're small retailer. At least by paying Amazon I can avoid dealing with all that. While I may pass the price to the consumer for Fulfilled-By-Amazon fees, which tends to be around $5.18 ~ $3.5 (quick google search), it's still a lot cheaper than using something like FedEx where it costs $10-12 per order. The takeaway here is that Amazon has democratized fast and cheap delivery by building a monopoly. As the scale of things go up, the cost of operations can really go down. Think of meal prepping, when you cook food in bulk vs each meal separately, you're saving costs on power, gas and produce. The only question is whether we can build a public benefit corporation, just like Amazon.

pnt12 9mo ago
I'm not American, but I get free shipping on most products, as long as the order has a minimum cost and I wait a couple of days more? This is true for other sellers too.
- alt227 9mo ago
  In the UK amazon has completely removed free shipping in an effort to push everyone to prime. YUou used to be able to wait 5 days for free shipping, not any more.
  - 72deluxe 9mo ago
    I think that's because in general shipping in the UK became incredibly expensive during and after COVID, and never ever went down again. Coupled with Brexit, shipping companies all pushed their prices up en masse for no apparent reason, and it's never gone down again.
  - quantum_magpie 9mo ago
    In the German site I get free shipping over 60 Eur, but only by stuff shipped by amazon. And other vendors somehow manage to always screw up shipping, so now I have had all orders for used books that had no/invalid tracking number, not arrive and I have/had to negotiate a refund for all of these refunds with the vendors themselves instead of amazon. So all-in-all, amazon is actually good, makes stuff available that’s impossible to find locally (books in English), and does shipping well.

quillshade 9mo ago

What's interesting is how their recommendation algorithm plays into this. I've been digging into how these systems work (Netflix's specifically), and there's a pattern: the algorithm doesn't optimize for what you'd rate highest, it optimizes for what keeps you engaged. Amazon does something similar but with pricing layered on top. Their rec system pushes higher-margin products, sellers notice which items get promoted, then they raise prices knowing Amazon will keep showing them anyway. So it's not just "algorithm adjusts prices" - it's more like the recommendation layer creates conditions where sellers can safely jack up prices without losing visibility. Basically the algorithm creates artificial scarcity by only showing certain products, which gives sellers pricing power they wouldn't have otherwise.

pipes 9mo ago

I think valve does this steam too? Games can't be a lower price on other platforms?

oort-cloud9 9mo ago

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thebigspacefuck 9mo ago

I’ve been using Rakuten more recently and it’s provided some alternatives to Amazon where I’m able to get things more cheaply from other stores. If you don’t mind waiting for shipping, give it a try. Or ask Gemini what the best deal is, it’s found some good ones. For smaller stuff, Amazon is usually better than Target or whatever box store nearby.

oort-cloud9 9mo ago

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rickdeckard 9mo ago

This is not too different from ~2012, when Apple decided to offer eBooks with the launch of the iPad, but found that they couldn't have 30% margin AND match the price of Amazon. So Apple coordinated the major book publishers to raise their prices in order to secure their margin expectations. They settled the lawsuit in the end. [0] https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/us-sues-apple-publishers-over-e-book-prices/ https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/us-sues-apple-publishers...

xenadu02 9mo ago

Who buys on Amazon anymore anyway? You can't find anything. Want a desk fan? There are four types of desk fan in the entire world (per Amazon). Page after page after page of listings of the exact same four designs. Often listed with the same re-used marketing artwork. Put aside brands, quality, et al. Put aside the fact that Amazon removed almost all product specs from their search facility (and is increasingly deleting specs entirely from product pages). Put aside the fake reviews, no-name Chinese drop-shippers. Every category is stuffed full of the same few copycat products over and over. It is extremely difficult to merely find actual choices! Wrenches? Small compartment storage boxes? Paper towel holders? If you can find even 20-30 unique products in a category now you're living like a king. It reminds me of AliExpress in that sense. Lack of specs, lack of manuals, lack of details about any product. The same listings from different no-name stores repeated over and over. I used to think maybe AliExpress & co were actually good if you spoke Chinese but a Chinese coworker kindly informed me that nope, it is just as horrible for everyone living in China using Chinese. I don't know where we went wrong but this is not the future we were promised. Can any of you remember when Amazon was actually good? When their search was useful? Those were some amazing times and how little did we realize they were fleeting.