alt Hacker NewsAmazon pushes up prices across the Internet
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Amazon searches for anything that isn't a known brand such as Apple & co turn out >90% Chinese products of highly questionable quality for me these days. And you can buy those cheaper by going straight to the source. The sole point of their retail business seems to be providing a support for the inevitable issues with these sellers, but I suspect that increasingly customers won't think it justifies the massive premium they're paying for what's essentially Taobao with an American address.
Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy. I made two purchases through independent sellers' websites in the last year, both with big banners guaranteeing satisfaction and easy returns for 100 days or something. And yet, when I found that the product didn't meet my needs, they would not accept my return. They wouldn't even issue a return label. Both of these sellers used Shop. Shop requires you to fill out an application for a refund and then the seller can drag their feet on processing it. In both cases they let the application sit there for days before rejecting it. In one of the cases my credit card company ruled in favor of the small business when I issued a chargeback.
On Amazon it's easy to request a return and get a return label all on the same day that you discover you have a subpar product. The long and short of it is that consumers do not want to be ripped off, and centralized sellers like Amazon and AliExpress make it easy to not be ripped off. If this raises prices across the board, so be it. It's worth it for the time saved and the accountability that comes along with it.
I use Amazon to buy cheap stuff like zip ties, printing paper and ink and some cleaning products. Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store. For example, I would never buy photography gear on Amazon. I go to Adorama or BH. For my favorite brands in say hiking or running gear I go to REI or RunningWarehouse or visit my local brick and mortar store. Amazon has truly become the convenience store for me, my average purchase is under $10. Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.
I don't get the Amazon bashing. My experience is nothing like that:
Kitchen scale, $20 bucks, looks and operates exactly as described; three years later, it still works fine.
Bed sheets, $16, two days later delivered, better than I thought - at least for the price that is. Best price/quality ratio I could get.
If I don't like something, returning is super convenient; I drop it off at Kohl's over the weekend. Time and again I am stupefied of how is it possible that in small town USA, I can get something shipped by next day while paying a one time yearly fee.
I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
At the employee side, the minimum pay at Amazon is $20 per hour. Walmart is $14, AliExpress ... we can be only guessing at that
> 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.
This kind of abusive practice needs to be banned in whichever countries it's still legal.
You can't really aspire to improve the situation if such things continue to be legal.
Amazon Fair Price Policy doesn't apply in the UK and EU (it's illegal)
The EU are currently running an investigation into how this affects market dynamics, which will be interesting to see
Noticed a big surge in pricing on Amazon for mundane crap. End up checking eBay and AliExpress for the same and both always cheaper, and sometimes in multiple. Things like blow up pool toys, > $20 on Amazon, easily half and lower on the others, and really not even worth a dollar in the scheme of things.
A few years ago I looked at the finances of a company that sells on Amazon (FBA). It was pretty astounding the number of fees they charge. They were paying to show up in sponsored results which obviously increased the fees but from what I remember between all the fees roughly 50% of the sale price of their products was just going directly to Amazon.
Not being allowed to sell your product elsewhere for cheaper seems downright anticompetitive and if our government was functioning government that would be illegal. The whole point of the ideal free market is that fees are supposed to approach zero with increasing competition.
It sucks that sellers cannot offer their products for cheaper elsewhere, but I've also often seen sellers sell their products for a much higher price on their own website than Amazon, and in that case why wouldn't I buy it on Amazon instead?
In that sense having one big marketplace with all kinds of competing products together also seems to motivate sellers more to compete on price rather than relying on lazy consumers.
I've been boycotting Amazon since early 2025. It's not hard once you get reacquainted with things taking several days or weeks to arrive. Plan a little and it all works out. The delay in gratification may even help you avoid impulse purchases.
The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.
I understand logistics is an insanely hard problem, but can't sellers create a co-op? Not on Amazon's scale, but start on a much smaller scale (gotta start somewhere). Maybe at a city level - if a bunch of sellers in Chicago (for example) rent a warehouse and serve only within Chicago, it is worth a try, no? Or is this a stupid question?
I remember hearing about a Uber like app (I might have seen it on More Perfect Union channel, I think). So I guess at least some people are thinking along the same lines, maybe?
As an individual, I guess the only thing I can do is shop as little as possible on Amazon (which I am already doing). Not sure what else I can do to help
I love Amazon because they have a wide variety of goods that ship very quickly, and if something is wrong it’s easy to get support. If there’s a return, it’s super simple to do and often free.
If I am ever given the choice between Amazon and some third party site I’ll always choose Amazon. It’s just too convenient.
Seems like a relatively simple fix, Amazon shouldn't be allowed to tell suppliers what price they can set on their site. No one should be able to tell a supplier what price they can charge to others.
I didn't notice it until earlier this year. I was shopping for some new shoes of a specific brand that I like. Was about to pull the trigger on Amazon and then realized I would happen to walk by a shoe store while doing other errands later in the day and thought it would be nice to get them even sooner than 1-2 day prime shipping. I went to the store and tried them on and realized I needed a 1/2 size smaller than what I ordered. Then I paid and realized the shoe store price was $10 less than Amazon. So you really are paying for laziness/convenience with Amazon, which if you think about it from first principles, makes sense given there is a dude delivering this stuff to your house. It's just that this convenience fee was hidden for the longest time as Amazon was growing its industry dominance. What's next? If they follow the Walmart model they will continue to squeeze suppliers and also push competitors out of business. So if you can, try to use alternatives.
The problems with Amazon these days, which may or may not be related to a buyer's specific location:
- Shipping delays. Prime's biggest selling point, is useless if orders aren't shipped in the advertised Prime timeframe. I've quit my Prime subscription multiple times this year because this keeps happening.
- Excessive advertising/sponsored listings. Over half the listings in a search are now sponsored listings, which are often lower quality listings. And Amazon now puts unrelated banner ads next to listings.
- Returns. While returns are typically hassle-free, this leads to abuse of the system. The returns get put back on the "shelf" without much inspection, and there have been more than a few times where I got an item listed as New, which was very clearly Used.
And then there are the cases where someone returns an item, but puts something else in the box for weight, so you end up getting a completely different thing than you ordered.
I once ordered a parallel LiPo battery charging board, and in the box was a LiPo battery, which someone clearly put in the box for weight. That situation was particularly dangerous, because a LiPo, let alone a used LiPo of unknown charge state, cannot be shipped by air and must be shipped by ground. If Amazon had put that box on a plane, that'd be a serious safety issue.
A factor I don't see mentioned that I think is relevant: Repricers
Google "FBA repricer" and you'll find companies like https://goaura.com/ and https://sellersnap.io/.
These are a must for any mid-size seller. Their goal is to pretty self-explanatory; reprice your ASIN, live, to hit maximum sales. If your competitor is selling the same mug for $10.00, the repricer sees that and immediately reprices your mug for $9.99.
Its one of those "Well, if I don't use one, others will" situations.
I try to avoid Amazon as much as possible. 95% of the products are throwaway junk brands. It's tiring to shop there. I think Amazon is a great example of why competition, while good in most cases, has its limits when the information asymmetry due to overwhelming and opaque choices. I wish those junk, throwaway brands were banned...
> But today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon. Half!
This is how resellers work.
Back in the 80s, I was selling my compiler direct. I also engaged a reseller, if you recall, those were ones that advertised in computer magazines with full page ads crammed with items for sale.
The resellers demanded that I sell it to them at half the retail price. I was shocked and horrified! I soon found out, however, that all resellers are like that. They cannot make money otherwise.
Amazon is no different.
Could you sell a box of 10x Item A on amazon, and a box of 15x Item A on your own website for cheaper per unit? Without triggering the amazon Fair Pricing Policy?
Interesting article. But I wish it explained which fees made the share that Amazon takes go from 19% to 46%. The fulfilment fee is evidently necessary, it takes people to do that, and doing it yourself may cost more. The advertisement is also evidently necessary, but could have risen. The referral fee alone can't explain the increase.
And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.
Stopped using Amazon a while ago because I want to support smaller (and less controversial) businesses. But recently I went back there to look for a phone protector as for some reason that's the only time Amazon has been cheaper for something.
I was amazed at how janky the app experience was having been away for a couple of years. It felt a really dated and ad-bloated experience. Considering Amazon pioneered so many advances in e-commerce, I was surprised I don't miss it at all.
I don't see much of a need to buy from Amazon anymore. Almost always there is a smaller business selling same stuff cheaper, and as a plus I feel good about not supporting big American corporation.
Of course there are exceptions, like some businesses selling exclusively through Amazon.
My issue is buying groceries from Amazon. You have to fill up your cart to > $30 to get a free delivery (in NYC). So you start searching for whatever you might want to include to get the free delivery. But the items like milk can come from
a) Amazon ("proper")
b) Amazon Groceries
c) Amazon Fresh
d) Whole Foods
Each of these have their own "cart" which must have goods > $25 etc. to get a free delivery. If you add an item from another list it does not count, so you must add things which you maybe don't really need just because they come from the same list as milk. Or, you will need to fill up multiple carts.
Then once you reach the threshold for free delivery and make the order, you may, or may not notice an extra line in the total bill: A tip for $5 in very small print which you have to edit away, or it is NOT FREE DELIVERY AFTER ALL, like promised.
What I lament is that Amazon is making me feel guilty for not tipping the delivery person. It is making me take extra action to NOT tip -- I must be a bad person. And it's making delivery people angry at me if I don't include the tip. And Amazon is adding the $5 there always as a default, even though they already said I have earned a free delivery.
It's a transaction between me and Amazon but now Amazon can implicitly blame bad service on the lack of tipping. I assume they would like to not pay their delivery people at all, just let them live on the tips.
Recently some big billion sale. Since i run low on funds i use to add things to cart, not buy though.
I added an item for its cost was 48$.
Now during sale, i revisited same product, they say original price is 80$ and on sale 13% off, so 70$ around
Aside from the whole amazon problem:
I really love how the (flow-)chart in this article has two starting points and both flow perfectly into the vicious circle loops without any awkward gap no matter from which direction you start reading the chart.
But to put it into perspective, a retail shop would also expect to take at least 50% of the sale price. Often much more.
More generally, the unprecedented levels of market concentration and pricing power in the US, a consequence of the gutting of antitrust enforcement from the inside by Robert Bork and the Chicago School, have led to much higher inflation in the US.
US can just legislate that one marketplace cannot force how vendors use other marketplaces. This is not about free spech but rather about price fixing (in indirect/perverse ways).
One thing that pushes prices up is the expectation that "free" shipping is offered on all products. The shipping cost gets rolled in to the price of the product, and the Fair Pricing Policy prevents selling the product cheaper elsewhere, even if you charge for shipping there.
Heard from our business partners, that every 4$ out of 10$ go to Amazon nowadays
I think people over index on “convenience” for lower quality products that further the growth of businesses like Amazon that can now fuck you over like this as a result.
We live in a convenience era (delivery services, etc) that allow people to “live” their life from a couch. There is a great Kurt Vonnegut quote I’ll paraphrase
“My wife says to buy a hundred envelopes online, but I’d rather go out and buy just one. Along the way, I’ll meet people, see interesting things, and enjoy life. The point isn’t the envelope—it’s everything that happens while getting it.”
I usually don’t care for the price.
I care for the return policy and warranty being attached to an entity that will still exist in 6 month.
Maybe the time has come to stop cheering for quasi-monopolies as some success story. They hurt everybody besides their shareholders.
boycott, but nobody does
never buy from third party sellers and you won't have an issue
I love Amazon. I'm unbothered by voluntary contracts between individuals.
It just keeps on going
Why is this legal?
In the UK Amazon have now raised the price of general shipping to be 2/3 the price of a months prime subscription. Before prime, delivery regularly used to be £1.99 or £2.99. Now if you dont have prime everything is £4.99 to be delivered. It makes it seem silly to pay that when you could pay £8.99 for a months subscription of free deliveries, which is their whole game.
I hate that they have done this with a passion.
5-10 years ago we did pretty much all our shopping besides groceries, on Amazon.
~2 years ago I cancelled Prime and rarely ship at Amazon these days, instead buying directly from manufacturers' websites. It is useful for items that are hard to find elsewhere.
One side effect of cancelling Prime is that we buy less stuff that we don't really need. Reducing our consumption is a good thing.
classic aggregation theory to create a monopoly.
the only way to prevent such things from happening is e-commerce is spread across non-platform channels but independent ones e.g woo commerce etc where a seller runs and hosts their own shop, then maybe go to semi-platforms such as shopify etc that don't aggregate everything on one storefront.
because sellers are reliant on amazon bringing in shoppers, unlike say woo commerce & shopify - then yeah amazon feels rightly so that they need to take 50% margins on a seller's item.
the same thing plays out everywhere where some producer is reliant on someone bringing in the buyers - uber, Spotify, apple App Store.
The greatest catalogue of consumer goods with the greatest logistics to back it up of all time. And the thread complain complaining about it. What a time to be alive.
Any seller charges 50%+ margin on anything.
How you spend your cash has always been a better democratic tool than a vote.
If you buy Amazon, then that's what you get in society and politics. Every Amazon purchase is a vote for monopolistic behaviour, the destruction of local services/industry, and for yet another America tax.
I do everything possible to avoid them, buy locally-made, etc, but it's becoming harder and harder. It's so ironic that people will complain about a declining economy, no jobs, etc, then will joyfully donate money to promote foreign jobs and enrich middlemen on a weekly basis.
wish they would push up their delivery speed
wish they delivered faster
I own a dozen brands that sell primarily on Amazon, and I have to say that this whole issue seems quite overstated, especially with regard to its impact on consumers. I don't get the impression that the person writing this actually sells things on Amazon, which seems to be par for the course with these critiques.
People love to complain about Amazon fees, but when I read things like "In 2014, this was about 19% of sales. But today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon. Half!" I wonder why people who are so lacking in subject matter expertise decide to write these articles.
The main reason that Amazon charges so many fees is that they provide a truly mind-boggling amount of infrastructure for you. The main reason the percent you pay to Amazon has gone up is because they've added more services. The author of the post notes that only the referral fee is mandatory, but doesn't manage to quite put together why going from only referral fee to a bunch of extra services means that Amazon now takes more of every dollar.
Once upon a time, you'd list your stuff on Amazon, and when someone ordered a product, you'd ship it yourself. Then Amazon decided to allow third party sellers to use Amazon's storage and fulfillment. Now suddenly the percentage of each sale's revenue that went to Amazon doubled! And yet, this was 100% positive for merchants, because Amazon's storage and fulfillment prices are cheaper than almost any alternative. When you move from a 3PL to Amazon's fulfillment, you pay Amazon more, but your profit margins increase. (There are exceptions for some product types, but the overwhelming majority of the time you save money.)
Of course, Amazon's fulfillment centers started running out of storage, so they'd limit how many units people could store there. That meant larger sellers would still have to maintain their own storage solution for anything that wouldn't fit at Amazon. But then Amazon introduced AWD, an upstream storage solution where you can store basically an infinite amount of stuff still packed by the case, and it ships to FBA warehouses when needed. More money for Amazon! But AWD is cheaper than basically any 3PL's storage, so more money for me too.
Amazon then introduced a service that let you book freight in the US with them to get things to their warehouses. Then they introduced freight to get things into the US from overseas. Then they introduced even cheaper AWD warehouses in China. You're not required to use these things, but Amazon wins a lot of business with them because they're cheaper than competitors.
This is not to say that everything Amazon does is great or that all of their fee increases have been net positive. First they introduced a fee if your products sit in FBA warehouses more than six months, then they introduced a fee if your inventory gets too low relative to demand. These are annoying! (Though also I have almost never been affected by them, because the amount of inventory Amazon wants you to have is basically the optimal amount from a planning perspective anyway.)
There's advertising, which, yes, is very annoying to have to pay for, but y'know what? You have to pay for that on your own site too! I have one brand where I do a healthy business on my own Shopify site, but I keep less of every dollar on there than on Amazon because I have to spend more on Meta ads to get a sale than I do on Amazon ads.
People love to hate on Amazon (and, again, lots of valid reasons for this!), but at the end of the day they collect an enormous amount of money because they provide an enormous amount of value.
Direct result of the weakening of antitrust from a 2007 case legalizing vertical price-fixing, justified by the dumb fake rationale that Wikipedia paraphrases as:
> manufacturer-imposed minimum resale prices can lead retailers to compete efficiently for customer sales in ways other than cutting the retail price.
It has nothing to do with technology, just oligarchy and corruption. Nothing "capitalists" hate more than competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leegin_Creative_Leather_Produc....
edit: as an aside, why are almost none of the top level comments, and absolutely none of the 5 most upvoted comments, about Amazon pricing policies? They're all about how people like to (or don't like to) shop at Amazon. Who cares?
I find that 20 years ago I shopped at Amazon for the low prices, but 2020s+ I shop at Amazon due to their logistics.
The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).
Many online stores big & small in the year 2026 will still take days to even send shipment info, followed by using unreliable carriers that miss ETAs.
I would even be OK with these stores giving a narrow range or probability "90% of the time this arrives between Tuesday & Wednesday".. But I am not in the mood to order stuff that may arrive in 2-10 days with very little clarity on which end of the range.