Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Purge of Small Wholesale Suppliers
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Important to note that this "purge" is only for wholesale suppliers, not for marketplace sellers like the title implies. Amazon is basically only going to purchase products for resale from large suppliers, and will shove the rest into the normal marketplace operations where they have to compete with everyone else on actually selling and shipping their products direct to consumers. Also of note is that this won't do anything to address the criticisms of rampant counterfeit and/or garbage quality products on the marketplace.
If anything it will only make it worse, as many of shrinking number of items sold by Amazon will now be tossed into the garbage pile along with everything else in the marketplace.
Yes, but I avoid the marketplace sellers. I've been burned too often with those -- if I'm going to roll the dice on that sort of thing, I'm better off with eBay.
eBay on the other hand charges 10% and sellers can ship items the cheapest way. Those same suppliers on Amazon list the their items on eBay for cheaper since they net the same after fees.
A lot of eBay sellers actually source from Walmart. I have. I works pretty great... sometimes. Just gotta be quick about getting their clearance items or pricing mistakes.
However, this:
> And after you're accustomed to 1-2 day shipping from Amazon, waiting a couple weeks for an eBay shipment is a non-starter.
Ignores the fact that (at least for the stuff I buy), you can usually get 2 day shipping from eBay sellers. The only time I have to wait more than a few days when ordering on eBay is if what I'm buying is rare enough that I have to buy from an out-of-country supplier -- and those things are rarely or never found on Amazon anyway.
I like eBay well enough and I have my quibbles with Amazon (especially the marketplace) but they definitely have the one-click-and-you-have-it-tomorrow game nailed.
There's no question about that.
But personally, this isn't a big deal for me. That's one of the reasons that I've really taken to "Amazon Day" for shipping -- I rarely need something the next day, and am entirely happy to wait up to a week for my Amazon order in exchange for only having one shipment per week.
My cutoff for "too long" tends to be a week or two, depending.
I was selling off some old PC Magazines and Bytes from when I was a teenager and was surprised that magazines aren't supposed to be shipped via media mail since they've got advertisements in them.
Priority Mail != Media Mail
That's Amazon Prime. Non-prime purchases are, in my experience, deliberately delayed. I'm two days from their New Jersey warehouse, and my last three purchases were all delivered in 7 business days or longer. All items were fulfilled by Amazon.
> waiting a couple weeks for an eBay shipment
As a former seller on ebay (20-30 items a month), getting things out on time is a priority for lots of people. Especially sellers shipping a lot of packages. Namely, because you want those good ratings from customers. Get a bunch of neutral/bad reviews because of shipping, and your sales will plummet.
Also, at least based on my own buying habits, (I know hardly representative) I'm much more likely to feel "safe" buying something on Amazon. But either way,to hit the most audience and maximize global profit, you can simply sell in both venues. Given some of the sales management tools that let sellers manage inventory & pricing across platforms, it doesn't have to dramatically increase the overhead of a sales & fulfillment operation.
As for switching from selling wholesale to Amazon to Marketplace, it may actually result in a net increase in profits because it is probably likely that selling retail via FBA will get more money in the sellers' pockets than the wholesale cost.
It really would be nice if Amazon gave sellers more certainty in this process though. It sounds like details & timing have yet to be fully nailed down, and it's the type of change that a business should be given something like 6 months of advance notice.
FBA is not a prerequisite for Prime eligibility. We sell on Amazon via Seller-Fulfilled Prime. They have pretty strict time tables for fulfillment to maintain eligibility, and you have to print your shipment labels through Seller Central, though you can link your own UPS account so not to pay extra fees.
That assumes equivalent costs in other parts of your operation. But with FBA, isn't Amazon doing your stock-keeping for you? You can avoid paying for warehouse space if Amazon is your warehouse.
If your inventory sits too long in their warehouse, the fees go from "regular" storage fees to "long-term" storage fees. Those fees are much higher, which incentivizes the seller to put the stuff on sale to blow it out of their warehouses, or you can have the inventory sent back to you.
Also, fees vary by category and season. Around the holidays, you'll see them making a push to increase long-term storage fees to make way for the stuff that will actually sell, and on categories which are hot for the holidays, you might see them providing incentives with lower storage fees.
I'm not the primary person that deals with Amazon FBA, but he sits next to me. Don't take what I'm saying as the gospel, but this is based on somewhat second hand experiencing and reading some of the emails that come through. My partner pays more attention to those details.
We signed up for FBA and they charged $5.95 to fulfill each order. Even if picking and packing costs $1-$2, you still make more profit shipping it yourself. We used to have 3 workers fulfill 150 orders a day from our warehouse which equals $0.80 to "pick and pack" and can be sent to any channel.
This is not universally true. As a seller on Amazon, using both FBA and seller-fulfillment, there is a lot of "it depends" in all of this.
Some items we can ship cheaper, especially to local zones. But as we're on one coast and we have a lot of customers on the other coast, FBA can be a real saver on the shipping charges.
Size and weight of the package affect the shipping charge, but on some products we sell, we find the fulfillment fees to sometimes get as low as less than 1/2 of what it would cost us to ship direct, even by the cheapest method we can use.
If you're looking at the fulfillment fees compared to what you get charged to ship a package, make sure you're also considering that Amazon helps distribute the products to regional fulfillment centers. It's Amazon's employees that pick and pack the orders. Amazon pays for the box it ships in. Amazon handles customer service and return processing, or reshipment if the item is damaged in transit, amongst other things.
Admittedly, this is not easy to consider all of the pros and cons, expenses and savings. FBA can also be a difficult beast to deal with when they don't check in your inventory, temporarily lose 300 units. Having to deal with Seller Support will cost you in terms of stress and its effects on your receding hairline, or your liver if you need to keep a bottle on your desk as you try to get problems resolved.
...and you can do this after you do a search and see results and get to where you have additional filtering options. I'm guilty of using "Show only Prime offers" or whatever that one is called. After becoming a seller that does FBA and seller-fulfilled, I use that filter less. There are great small businesses that still ship very fast, and at competitive prices and since I'm one now, I feel their pain and want to support them too. I can also be patient on a lot of my shipments and don't require 2-day shipping.
The problem is that there are also a lot of scumbags doing the same thing, and it's impossible to tell the great small businesses from the scammers. I've been burned by that a few times, and it's why I don't buy anything from Amazon unless Amazon is fulfilling the order (where I have at least some recourse).
If I'm buying directly from small sellers, I'm either using their website directly or I'm doing it on eBay.
Incorrect, that would entail shutting down FBA which they aren't doing.
"Your margins are our opportunity." -- Jeff Bezos.
Why Outline over the Internet Archive [1]? The Archive is a non-profit with a decent privacy policy and identifiable leadership. Outline is an anonymous entity of unknown organisation with unknown motives.
Outline looks sketchy. Its privacy policy allows for disclosure to analytics companies "or when Outline believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Outline, third parties or the public at large" [1]. (TL; DR Whenever, too whomever.) It explicitly considers business transfers, implying for-profit motives.
We don't know where it's incorporated. We don't know what kind of entity it is, nor to whom its beholden. We don't even know who is in charge nor how they're incentivized.
The Archives is run by honest people. If you don't like using their resources without compensation, donate to them. (Or, better yet, pay for the journalism you value.)
Outline is a lousy attempt at infringement for unknown gain by unknown people, a passable MITM.
“In March 27, 2019, it was announced that Bryan Goldberg and his company Bustle Digital Media had bought The Outline” [1].
So a VC-backed site got acquired by a publisher whose customers are advertisers. Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s “nag wall” is neutered with incognito mode. Outline remains, to me, to be a terrible trade-off.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2019/3/27/18284591/bustle-outline-bryan-...
They've stayed remarkable true to their mission, haven't entered politics (ironic given previous CEO), and continued to offer a good service.
Since the commingling of inventory is now so prevalent at Amazon, I find myself using eBay more and more.
eBay has consistently handled disputes quickly and without hassles. Amazon has never managed that, even when they're the ones fulfilling the order.
There is something to be said for the stability of marketplace rules and ecosystem. No rules are perfect, but if the rules are stable, people eventually learn how to interpret signals and assess risk. If the rules are constantly changing, all that hard-earned customer knowledge is discarded at random intervals, because the platform vendor has silently forked/rebooted the economy into a parallel universe. Now you have sellers in the new universe and buyers in the old universe.
In a sane regulatory environment, platforms would be forced to put a version number on both the UX and ToS, so people would at least know the universe/rules have changed. As with other mandatory reporting, metrics on public notification would reduce "universe churn" and make it part of the marketing/competitive landscape.
Unsure if they are the best, but they have maintained their core business. Yes, they lost to amazon in the overall race, but the niche they have carved maintains itself well. I was growing concerned in the last few years they were racing to be amazon, but in the last year they have pulled back on it.
They need to update their app and website, but overall, I like their pro buyer stance on transactions. Incredibly, most of the time I am looking for something specific, ebay sellers have lower prices than amazon.
The irony is that what attracted me to Amazon in the first place was that they could mostly supply the things I used to go to eBay for, but did it better -- because Amazon held the inventory and handled returns.
If Amazon no longer does that for the things I buy, then there's no advantage to using them. It sounds like eBay will be getting more of my business back.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgot.php?cycle=2018&cmte=...
Their CEO also sent a somewhat political all office email after the last presidential election: https://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/13576446/ebay-ceo-memo-us-elec...
My point is just to say that "market liberalism" is a stance, not the absence of a stance.
https://monoskop.org/images/e/e0/Raymond_Eric_S_The_Cathedra...
Maybe presently people have no major beefs with the organization.
But there have been more than enough negative actions by this company in the past including:
Suing craigslist (and losing) for breach of fiduciary duty because it wouldn't exploit its users enough. This was knowing that the shares were acquired in conflict with the ownership and mission of craigslist.
eBay tried to get inside information from Craigslist while it was secretly preparing release of Kijiji.[1]
eBay has been facilitating the sale of counterfeit items long before Amazon. Many sellers were upset by the requirement to use PayPal anded even acted to ban use of competing services.
So while the heat may be on Amazon, I would hold off on elevating eBay to some superior ethical position.
They spun Paypal off into an independent company in 2015.
Ebay is moving away from its tight integration with Paypal and has a deal with a new payment processor (Adyen) after it's current paypal deal ends in 2020. Between that and the fact that they're two public companies with separate freely traded ownership, it's hard for me to buy the argument that the spin off was "just for show".
https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/ebay-to-intermediate-pa...
The lawsuit had nothing to do with "exploiting users". It was about Newmark and Buckmaster's attempt to dilute eBay's shares. A lawsuit eBay won.
The lawsuit also involved reversing the staggered board elections craigslist put in place specifically to prevent eBay from gaining access to confidential material.
Both the share dilution and board procedural change were done in response to ebay’s surprise launch of an attempted direct competitor to craigslist.
Both sides claimed victory, and eBay did not end up influencing Craigslist in any way. So it is hard to paint it as much of a victory. [1]
And whatever you think of craigslists slow, stodgy UX and feature set, it is hard to imagine if eBay had gained control having some positive impact on the site’s destiny apart from some comparably exploitive direction.
Ebay wanted first to make money off craigslist, and failing that to get info that would allow their competing biz to do so.
[1] https://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2010/09/10/did-ebay-really...
EDIT: While the above statement is correct, I'm an idiot and totally forgot that a former eBay CEO ran for governor of California and remains active in politics.
Well, aside from forcing you to use paypal and go through their mediation process. I'll never spend a cent on ebay again, or sell there—credit cards are the only way to shield yourself from bad purchases (that and buying in person).
I think the only beef people have with eBay is how dumb their support people can be sometimes when you run into a problem.
They had skype, a kind of social network. They could have been facebook.
They had paypal they could have been the major payment processor on phones (see WeChat)
A lot of missed opportunities.
Having used eBay since its early days, I stopped when they lost their focus on auctions and became just another platform. Now I have to bother with market research to set a fixed price - much more hassle than auctioning at zero Euros and letting the market find the optimum price (only works in liquid categories though). I understand that the mass market finds auctions bewildering and prefers fixed price... I'm still disappointed.
Selling toilet paper, or USB cables with that sort of bidding model doesn't work. I mean, prices don't need to fixed either. A dynamic bidding system of some sort (eg AdWords auctions) is definitely an interesting idea. But, to be the place where you ship for regular stuff it needs to be lower overhead for the buyer.
That's nothing against eBay's original mission. They did do (not anymore? I haven't tried in years) that job pretty well. I suspect it's still an awesome place to buy a proverbial broken radio.
Ebay's been good to me for nigh on 20 years, and it's not because everything is perfect quality. It's rather that, unlike Amazon, they don't try to hide and commingle differing quality items. Counterfeiting is still a problem, but giving negative feedback is still possible and it seems still encouraged in cases where it's warranted, and that makes the marketplace dynamics actually even out at scale. This is in stark comparison to Amazon, and it makes me trust eBay aggregate feedback scores much more on the whole.
I'll use Amazon for low-risk purchases, but otherwise, I'll find another retailer these days. The risk of something going awry and receiving poor after purchase support is too high.
Yeah, I'd like to be able to be able to look into / find who's a member of the bazaar and just fencing products, versus who's selling their own items directly. For example - I wouldn't buy speakers from some random reseller. I'd buy 'em from the original manufacturer, or the handful of "known" resellers that we all know like the big box stores.
It's quite brilliant actually.
That would cut out most of my purchases from Amazon. It makes no sense to buy stuff from Amazon that I can get from my local big-box retailer, after all.
They are significantly more expensive than Walmart. Which is new, this was not true 4 years ago.
They don't have the selection of stores like digikey.
They lost their purpose completely. I only use Amazon for Email due to modern Email standards.
When Canada Post couldn't deliver my package I only had to walk 5 minutes to pick it up.
Whoever their new delivery partner is. I'd have to drive to the edge of the city to pick up my package.
I bet you $5 that:
1) their decision was not made in a vacuum with no information
And
2) you might not represent a significant portion of their customer base.
Which is probably a good thing, really. Maybe I'll even be able to ditch my Prime membership!
I only buy items from Amazon that are fulfilled by Amazon. If Amazon isn't holding the inventory and fulfilling the order themselves, then I'm not interested. I'll be going to eBay instead.
To explain my confusion, here's a quote from the article:
> Amazon secures inventory two ways. The company buys products directly from wholesale vendors, reselling them like a traditional retail store, and it lets independent merchants post their own products on the site in a marketplace model similar to EBay Inc. or a consignment shop. About half of the goods sold on Amazon come from independent merchants, and the change will push the marketplace share of revenue even higher.
What is happening: Amazon will only do that for the largest brands like Lego, P&G, etc. Smaller brands will still be fulfilled by amazon (products stored in amazon's warehouses) but the actual seller will be the product's brand. This makes that brand compete with other sellers selling their products instead of selling wholesale to Amazon and Amazon having to carry the stock.
> Smaller brands will still be fulfilled by amazon (products stored in amazon's warehouses) but the actual seller will be the product's brand.
As opposed to whose brand? Isn't this how it's worked for years already?
> This makes that brand compete with other sellers selling their products instead of selling wholesale to Amazon and Amazon having to carry the stock.
But you just said that Amazon will still be carrying the stock.
I am so very confused here.
If Amazon buys an iPhone, and then lists it for sale on the Amazon store, that's Amazon's iPhone. If Amazon doesn't manage to sell it, Amazon has lost money. If Amazon does sell it, they capture the profit margin between the price they bought it at, and the price they sold it at. Apple, who sold Amazon the iPhone originally, has no further business relationship with the person that buys the phone from Amazon; after the initial sale, it became Amazon's phone to sell, and their customer relationship to have.
This is the traditional "retail" sales model. Amazon is only a retailer for a relatively few products—and now fewer.
For any other brand that shows up on Amazon, Amazon is acting as a Logistics-as-a-Service provider to that business. If you buy a Samsung TV on Amazon, then it's coming from an Amazon warehouse, but Amazon does not own that TV; Samsung (or someone else, maybe a retailer!) does. Samsung (or whoever) are effectively renting warehouse space from Amazon to hold their TVs for them, paying Amazon to deliver their products, etc. in the same way that a developer would pay Amazon to hold data in S3 and deliver messages over SNS. If Samsung wants that TV back, Amazon has to give it back. It's not Amazon's property. But nor did Amazon have to buy it. It's neither an asset nor a liability on their balance sheet. They possess it only in the sense that a self-storage business possesses the contents of a storage unit; or in the sense that FedEx possesses a parcel while delivering it.
This is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consignment model of sales. The Amazon store is effectively a consignment store.
Well known examples of consignment:
• Commercial art galleries where the works are for sale. The gallery doesn't own the works; the artist is renting space to display and attempt-to-sell their work.
• Brick-and-mortar book stores. (New) book stores don't own their stock of books; the books' publishers do. The book-store-as-storefront has some limited power to declare sales, but mostly sales are "ordered" by the publisher. When a book store can't sell enough of a book, and have left-over stock that looks like it isn't going anywhere, they must nominally "return" the stock to the publisher by destroying it (i.e. by ripping off the covers, like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/7mw74c/why...)
Amazon, as a consignment storefront, doesn't make money off the sale itself; nor can they set profit margins or declare sales. Instead, they make money by charging the supplier for their logistics services. In some consignment businesses, this is a simple flat pay-per-use fee; but for the Amazon store, this is taken as a cut "off the top" of the supplier's gross revenue from the products sold.
I guess what gets me confused is two things -- first, I thought that the only things that Amazon didn't sell on a consignment basis were things that actually carried Amazon branding. Second, the article seems to imply something a bit different than what you're explaining here.
So, just to check my understanding, this move by Amazon won't really affect anything as far as I am concerned as a customer?
In other words, right now I avoid buying anything from Amazon that Amazon isn't fulfilling out of its warehouses because I've had truly terrible experiences with things that aren't. This change won't reduce the number of items available for purchase with that constraint?
1. Comparative ROI of different business models at different scales. When you're smaller, there's more money in being the middleman (if you can source products more cheaply through negotiation or clever sourcing, you can capture a large profit margin); and there's less money in being a logistics provider (since, without a built-up brand in the space, you have to compete on price.) Now that Amazon is huge, the scales are flipped: being the middleman and sourcing products is now more of a burden than a profit source, while running a well-known and trusted logistics provider is now a huge profit center. But this wasn't always true.
2. Bootstrapping. Consignment is a partnership built on trust. Big manufacturers won't do it with small/unknown storefronts. A retail supply-chain relationship (where the goods are—from the manufacturer's perspective—a sale, as soon as the retailer takes possession of them) is safer and lower-commitment for both parties. It's like hiring someone as a contractor instead of as an employee. Amazon ca. 1994 needed goods in their storefront, and the only way to get those goods into their storefront as a relative unknown was by buying them at wholesale, like a regular retailer.
> So, just to check my understanding, this move by Amazon won't really affect anything as far as I am concerned as a customer?
Definitely; in the long term, nothing will change. But, in the very short term, you might see a blip.
If nobody other than Amazon was selling some product on the Amazon storefront, and the manufacturer is asleep on their feet, the product's listing might pop out of existence for a few days, before the manufacturer bothers to take possession of the listing. Every manufacturer that Amazon was retailing for inevitably will re-list the products themselves (as a consigner), because Amazon is now too large to ignore as a sales channel.
- A) Amazon house brands
- B) Amazon retail
- C) 3rd party seller, fulfilled by Amazon (FBA)
- D) 3rd party seller, fulfilled by Merchant (FBM)
Amazon house brands are the things like Amazon Basics, or a host of other brands that are owned by them even though they're not explicitly labeled as such. Retail is the traditional retail model described by last user, Amazon buys inventory from other companies and then handles sales & fulfillment. FBA is sort of the consignment model, where Amazon doesn't own the inventory but they handle fulfillment. FBM is basically the Ebay model - Amazon is just facilitating the marketplace, taking customer payment etc, but the merchant is responsible for shipping/logistics.
They're going to scale back the number of companies they buy from for retail (B), and those companies will have to use C or D or stop selling on Amazon altogether.
If I'm not buying from Amazon I have no reason to shop there. Its just another marketplace and I like ebay a lot more for that.
It's the difference between a chain coffee shop in a bookstore being staffed by employees of the bookstore, or being staffed by corporate employees of the coffee-shop chain. Either way, you can go into the bookstore and get coffee. It's just a matter of who's getting the profit margin and dictating sales deals.
Also, most big-ticket name-brand items on Amazon are already sold by their manufacturer, because that's a better deal for the manufacturer. For example, iPhones on Amazon are sold by Apple, because not even Amazon has enough bargaining power to get wholesale prices from Apple. This has always been the case. It's only the medium-sized businesses, large enough to matter to Amazon's bottom line, but small enough for Amazon to bully, that Amazon was acting as a middle-man for. They're giving some of that up, because the profit margin they were capturing as a middle-man, which was previously enticing to them, is now too slim to matter to them.
Amazon buys are now just as risky as Ebay ever was.
I hate to sound like a cynic, but me thinks Amazon's legal team cooked this up, or at least had a heavy hand in it.
If this sounds good (hey, no middlemen, better for us) consider this typical situation (I know it well)... Retail company buys toys for sale in store, but uses marketplace for overstock, offsets, and to keep products on shelves fresh... Not a huge profit center, but an important part of "flow" - now the viability of that shrinks as suppliers squeeze prices upwards.
And the cycle continues... retailers have to raise prices to make up for what little "volume" sales they do... people stop shopping retail because it is "too expensive" and down go more independent stores.
The result is well known. It quickly became apparent that very few people went online to buy "upscale brand stuff," and it overloaded their logistics big time
They have become just another store.
Moves like this show they are losing their benefits more and more
Hah. Their picking and shipping logistics are far and away superior to any other retailer. They offer free 1-day shipping to large swaths of the U.S. for Prime members.
It also seems this only effects wholesalers, not the traditional resalers.
It was their original take on "direct upscale retail brands" online mall.
They were a late comes after JD had some early success, and followed by countless clones.
T-mall was losing money big time, and none of bigger Taobao merchants wanted to move, moreover new Taobao brand stores were beginning to eat into T-mall.
So, at around 2016 Alibaba decided to "give them a nudge" with racking up their fees, putting arbitrary limits on their accounts, and blatant "first dose free" offers to switch to T-mall.
In the end, only few did, and one who did really did not manage to get full advantage of the platform.
Most "upscale" brand suppliers valued control given by having their Taobao store too much to switch to being banal wholesalers.
Lately, they reversed their stance on Taobao brand stores. But yeah, they definitely shot themselves in the foot with that move.
Especially this line:
>T-mall was losing money big time
For the first few years, T-mall was effectively running at near 0 profit, when they (unsuccessfully) tried to catch up with JD.
Please substantiate your commentary
Some more background: https://www.tlgcommerce.com.hk/blog/why-brands-are-leaving-t...
Client/customer concentration is something that every business needs to be watching as a matter of critical importance.
The big boys will always play rough and negotiate things on their terms when they can get away with it - be it the Government, Apple, Walmart or Amazon.
I have sympathy for the companies that are about to be put under immense stress, but it should also be something that every business has already planned for.
I'm surprised. I thought that when the entire store was run by computers the marginal cost of adding another supplier would be zilch, and the long tail would prosper.
Even with automation of on-boarding, scaling the selection still requires scaling inventory costs if it’s merchandised by Amazon itself.
The rise of tech giants like Amazon has largely coincided with their development of entire markets that they control. There's so much money to be made establishing the market and taking small transaction fees as opposed to just bringing a product to an existing market.
Not only did Amazon make money by creating the go-to online marketplace, they captured tremendous amounts of data on what people were and weren't buying. This allowed them to spin off cheaper versions of competing products, undercutting the businesses that they were already making money from. They dominate the sales channels, and now they're going after the vendors directly, starting with the small, low-hanging fruit.
Walmart perfected large-scale logistics and built a network of one-stop-shops across America, taking out small mom-and-pop shops along the way.
Amazon set out to be the go-to online shopping platform largely by encouraging small mom-and-pop shops to sell through Amazon. Once the platform was big enough, it started making more sense for Amazon to cannibalize vendors instead of just continuing to let the market grow.
Sure, both companies are large behemoths that do their part to decimate local economies and avoid paying taxes, but their strategies were pretty different, IMO.
Where did you get this idea? I don't see how Amazon, or anyone else for that matter, could ever run afoul of "antitrust forces" in the US, because there's simply no such thing in America any more. America hasn't enforced antitrust law in ages.
They might have problems in other countries, but the US is by far their largest market, and they have absolutely nothing to worry about here.
A lot of American antitrust enforcement is private. Witness, for instance, the recent Apple Inc. v. Pepper [1].
(We need more public enforcement. But claiming we have no antitrust enforcement is false.)
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/apple-v-pepper/
We used to do some development work for a client in florida. They sold all kinds of batteries on amazon. One day, a single dispute brought their whole business down. They had a whole warehouse of employees and they all got fucked because some temp employee somewhere in the world half-read a dispute while hungover from the night before and clicked a button.
No appeals, no recourse. Your entire company shut down just like that.
It's nontrivial to get the business back but the main barrier is playing Amazon's game, writing the doc exactly the way they want it, and being super vigilant once you're on probation.
(though according to a sibling comment, that may not be what the article is talking about - unfortunately I'm paywalled out)
From a customer point of view, I have no issue shafting those 4-hour-workweek-types.