Literally every merchant large enough for store brands uses their own sales data to gain an advantage! They know they get a good deal of sales so they can reduce expenses by vertical intergrating commodities.
Amazon presents itself as a marketplace, and gets a few advantages from that (such as being able to shift responsabilities for some issues to the "real" seller), and as such they must act like one on other aspects too.
Other French exemples of marketplaces with such rules to follow would be cdiscount for exemple (2nd after amazon in volume).
This isn't as clear a distinction in practice as you are making it out to be.
Current law for electronics is, 2 year warranty minimum, your point of contact is the seller. Oftentimes after a few month they redirect you to the manufacturer for the warranty, but if you get in conflict with him, in terms of the law, the onus of the 2 year warranty is on the seller. So if I buy a Samsung phone in Carrefour, and my phone fails, usually after the first week they will redirect me to Samsung, but if Samsung refuses to deal with me for one reason or another, it's Carrefour that has the obligation to fix my issue.
The law was made that way with the benefit of the end user in sight, I used Samsung but I could have used "random brand with no presence here and very hard to contact", so since it's the store that sold it to you, they are the one responsible to fix the issue.
When going through a marketplace, the seller is not the marketplace. Now, Amazon is rather clean on that one, and they deal with it as if they were, but buy from Cdiscount's or Fnac.com's marketplace and quickly you realize that hiding behind "I'm a marketplace" covers their ass since you need to deal with the actual seller, even if it's some random chinese import company.
And in the end, whether the distinction are large or not doesn't matter, they're two different things with different rights and obligations, and you're one, you can't benefit of being the other.
This is simply not true in many cases and you should stop saying it so directly. It is not a fact that every item you see in a retail space has been purchased by the retailer for resell, period.
What may have started as a simple analysis to evaluate share of shelf, easily could turn to "what if we sold these"?
The main difference vs Amazon is the Reviews data (that's worth what's worth with all of the fake reviews), and you can't buy on Amazon without using your account so every sale is bound to an specific person. In that regard no retailer has this data.
Even those who have loyalty programs that end up being a tracking card, people can still buy without using cards.
Like I said, you're not obliged to be in a loyalty program, and you can buy in cash, debit card - at least in Europe that's pretty common.
Plus I didn't want to go through the whole type of sellers on amazon. You have:
Products sold by Amazon: these are all amazon brands + products from other brands (maybe this is the closest to the retailers)
Products Fulfilled by Amazon: Where amazon only deals with fulfilling and customer service (to some extent), and Shops pay referral fees and fulfillment fees;
And you have Fulfilled by Merchant: where people set shops and pay only referral fees (this is maybe the closest to set a quiosque in a mall);
So it's quite tricky, yet Amazon gathers data on everything.
In the US (not sure about EU countries), there is price discrimination based on loyalty program membership. Some retailers (Costco) require membership to even walk in the door.
For loyalty programs you give explicit consent to be in a marketing program. They can't simply use your banking data to profile someone, neither your tax number which you give (in some countries) in order to get a valid receipt.
I'm also not familiar with what you sign away with a credit or debit card but I would not be surprised if it included this tracking since that's a core part of the credit card business model.
I do admit to almost complete ignorance on this topic however so you could be right.
Wondering now if Amazon knows which reviews are fake, and leaves them up to obfuscate truly useful reviews to keep their dataset “public” but hard for competitors to utilize?
Reviews are mainly a selling factor, and second a way to gather insights imo.
Honestly I think they don't know how to deal with fake reviews, oddly enough because some are so obvious - namely from chinese sellers.
Amazon doesn't need to be a monopoly to be an antitrust concern. It just needs to have a dominant market position (a monopoly is just a per se example of such).
I don't really get why everyone is bashing Amazon here. They sell a lot of stuff, and they sell it well. By the very act of selling they get data on what is being sold - what kind of retail business could last more than 12 hours without knowing data about its own sales operations?
But apparently in the EU that's now illegal. Or more realistically, it's illegal if you're rich enough to pay huge fines directly into the pockets of the EU Commission, which is desperate for money and can directly levy fines without needing to win a court case in front of a neutral judiciary.
I'm not bashing on Amazon, I'm a regular customer. But I'm trying to explain how antitrust generally works. EU has more rigorous antitrust rules than the US. If Amazon has antitrust issues under US laws, then it has a serious antitrust problem under EU laws.
Of course, many of them belong to the same group, but even with that, we are nowhere near a monopoly.
I would argue that Amazon is also not near a monopoly. Google, Ali Express, eBay, NewEgg, Overstock, and so many direct to consumer brands and marketplaces also are healthy competition.