How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet

>Setting a price on a product or service that is significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off Amazon;

This is the text from the policy that the article says "And they can't charge less elsewhere." This is just wrong. They just can't randomly charge Amazon a higher price. If it's solely due to Amazon's cut that sounds like a reasonable increase. There are tons of products on Amazon that are above their fair market value.

> Because Amazon is where the shoppers are: it accounts for about 40% of all US online retail sales.

A lot of the competition is gone, so now it's time for the "price hike" step of the VC playbook - enter markets with insane amounts of cash, slowly boil the competition alive until it goes away and/or the users are hooked, raise prices.

> 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.

IIRC that kind of shit is at least illegal in the EU. Bookingcom and other sites have had their "best price" enforcement invalidated here in the past.

The bad thing is, due to the sheer scale Amazon has, it is all but impossible to compete with it. You won't get the scale deals that Amazon gets at shippers (USPS, DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD, whatever). You won't get the money to construct warehouses across the world that make Amazon's fast shipping work in the first place. You won't have the insane amounts of money coming in from customers that allow for its extremely generous return policies. And you won't have some sort of cash cow like AWS that allows you to run your business at near zero profit or even loss.

The only way you can compete is if you are in a market where you can provide a better experience for the customer and the customer is willing to pay a premium.

I hate Amazon and I still shop there. It's not about price, I will pay more for a product to buy it directly and not via Amazon /if/ I can find an original. The issue for me is threefold:

1. Discoverability: Many products are so rapidly and thoroughly cloned that it is difficult to impossible to identify the original maker, find their site, and purchase through them. The insane proliferation of counterfeits, clones, and sometimes outright scam products means that Amazon at least gives me an opportunity to buy a clone/counterfeit and return it if its not meeting my expectations. Sometimes the original is notably higher quality but no longer produced/sold, as well. Recently I wanted to buy a Polar Magnetic Pen as a gift. The website is up and the shopping cart works, but checkout is disabled. They're out of stock everywhere. There's hundreds of random worded Chinese clones on Amazon that are 25% of the price and 30% of the quality, so I bought a clone and risked it.

2. Logistical Certainty: I work a lot and have little free time after basic households tasks, other than the weekends. So if I want to do a project or something, I plan it for a following weekend and order things. If I can't order on a Tuesday or Wednesday and /know/ that I will get it by Friday, it's basically pointless. Sometimes I'll just roll the dice, but generally I prefer logistical certainty. I actually have gone back to buying at brick and mortar stores if possible to really cement this (I use Best Buy now a lot more than in the past, although selection is poor). There's a few other online retailers I strictly prefer to Amazon that can also deliver this like B&H Photo.

3. Breadth of Catalog / Access: There's basically nothing I can't acquire via Amazon. If I need, let's say 6 things, to do some sort of hobby project my options are generally either: A) go to 2-4 different stores, either physically and waste a day of my life or online and hope the shipments all arrive in time or B) order on Amazon everything at once delivered as one.

These things are way more important than price. I still hate Amazon PRIMARILY because of commingling of SKUs meaning there's no real quality indicators and I cannot do anything as a consumer to ensure I receive legitimate, actual, quality products. If they hadn't fucked that up, I'd probably still like Amazon despite everything else. I used to love Amazon back in the day, now I hate it, because of how often I've received counterfeits and fraudulent products and the proliferation of Chinese dropshipper fly-by-nights.

Big Tech always becomes Big Enshittification; it is the only way the scaling economics work for the massive returns expected by VC.

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