Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

So it sounds like the issue is that Amazon is using its weight to force suppliers into eating their platform fees rather than pass it on to the consumer.

I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but imagine Amazon takes a 10% cut of any sale on its platform. If a supplier sells a widget for $100, they'd only get $90 from an Amazon sale. Amazon is unfairly preventing them from marking up their offerings on Amazon... i.e. preventing the suppliers from selling their widgets for $100 on their direct website, and $111.1 on Amazon (so that a sale is a sale and always gets them $100 in revenue).

If a suppliers margins are razor thin this could cause them to lose money on Amazon sales... so they'd either have to mark up their product everywhere and risk losing their competitive edge, or eat the loss on Amazon... or just not "collaborate" at all with Amazon.

I don't really see why this is necessarily unfair, unless there is literally no other way to reach consumers other than through Amazon: shouldn't their own product pages show up in Google search results, for one, not to mention other online stores?

It's not really about whether it's unfair. It's about whether it's against Japan's democratically defined laws.

Of course; I know very little about Japan's antitrust laws, it's really beside the point whether they are democratically defined or not. It's on Amazon to argue about their interpretation through Japanese courts or by whatever is the mechanism of redress they have in this case, if any.

I was responding to the parent comment calling the arrangement as described in article unfair.

Actually, I never said it was unfair, I just elaborated on what Amazon had allegedly done to warrant a raid from the antitrust regulators.

> unless there is literally no other way

is this a useful standard? this is ostensibly always true - if nothing else, you can grab a sign and walk into any populated area to 'reach consumers'.

Well maybe not to that extent, but to my knowledge things are not that bad in Japan yet :) Let's just not confuse market share with monopoly (in economic sense of course, which is what we are talking about here -- the Japanese legal definition may well be different, and it is that one that matters for Amazon.)

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