Amazon suspends all deliveries in France

EDIT: I read elsewhere that it was a million euros per day, not per infraction. Much more reasonable.

disclaimer: I'm not living in France right now but I'm french and have lived in Paris for most of my life, and ordered on amazon countless times.

- next day delivery even on Sunday and public holiday

- customer service (return, warranty, no question asked)

- same site for everything

Except very rare things like appliance or foods/household or very high discount, I don't use any other platform. I know how the platform works, it rarely failed me (order or delivery or quality), find everything I need and fast.

I mainly buy things sold and shipped by Amazon, less often fulfilled by Amazon (FBA).

For me its the return policy and warranty, I had to deal with other platforms such as cdiscount and fnac before and will never go back there.

Return is free, you get a sticker and that's all.

Their prices are the same as Boulanger or Darty and I prefer to pay 3€ more and know I will never have problems.

As a counter example, my family was always buying at Darty and one day I went to the shop with a defective device. They first wanted me to choose a similar device because they would/could not repair. I wanted the same or nothing. So the manager told me they would only give me vouchers. I got that in writing and told them I would be back. He was smirking and said good bye. When I came back with a letter from their CEO saying sorry (and a cheque) he was less snarky.

This is the kind of trick I hate because of the tension and most time. This does not happen with Amazon.

Then there is delivery in their lockers. Super easy, open till 21,no need to worry to miss someone.

The only things I wrote not buy from them are home appliances because they do not provide installation (like Darty or Boulanger do)

It’s hard to compare Amazon with FNAC/Darty, because Amazon sells a much wider range of items (food, clothing, musical instruments, unusual electronic items, etc.). Amazon is excellent for finding obscure, hard to find items that FNAC/Darty just don’t sell at all.

Both Amazon and the FNAC offer next day deliveries if you pay 49 euros per year, but Amazon Prime gives you other benefits as well, such as Amazon video.

If you don’t care about one day delivery, and just want to buy books in French and home appliances, FNAC/Darty is arguably as good or better than Amazon. Both have good warranties and deliveries. (I shop at both, depending on what I want to buy. I have Amazon Prime, but mostly for Amazon Video, not for fast deliveries.)

EDIT: Those who're getting upset at it, think why or how is this any different than what OP wrote. If you want to create a liberal democracy with prosperous free markets then you create a set of deterministic rules and let people act under it. IF you don't like an outcome, don't apply hacks to it like break up a big company because you're upset at it, but change the basic rules (if you need to, which I think is a terrible idea in this situation).

Amazon didn't do anything wrong other than played by the rules. If you don't like the outcome, don't try to apply hacks.

"Considering the complexity inherent in our logistics activities and the fine of one million euros per infraction imposed by the court, the risk of contravening the decision was too high."

This seems to be a valid reason for suspending operations, although no where in the tweet-thread explains how frequent the fines would be. If they can't comply with the order fast enough, shutting down operations in order to have time to comply without getting fined seems reasonable.

Also, there is no "real" competitor, and even if there was they would also need to limit their offerings the same way.