Like this article says, prices are increased across the board because of how Amazon acts.
The yelling comes from the Amazon sellers side, not from the customers.
There is plenty of competition for me to shop around, and if there are none, I'd rather buy from Amazon as I trust that they reduce the costs , fees and taxes effectively.
I would argue that the government should do less and not more. If they really want competition to grow, they could stop charging capital gains on every item a seller flip.
For example, when I was selling on Ebay, after the platform fees, the shipping fees, and the government taxes, it's just not worth it to enter the sector as a small guy.
Say you're a vendor producing widgets for $10 each, costing $9 each to produce. 80% of your buyers prefer the buying and service experience of Amazon, for all the reasons you describe. They have no brand loyalty to you: they go to Amazon, type "widget" in the search box, and buy the first result with 4+ stars costing roughly $10.
Amazon decides out of the blue that they want $1 per sale, and what's more, they will drop you from their platform if you offer a different price on Amazon and other storefronts (be it another giant like Walmart, or your own low-traffic e-commerce website). Because this $1 is the entirety of your profit margin, your only way to stay in business is to raise the price to $11, and because your widget competitors have been given the same deal, all widgets now cost $11, and when consumers are price-shopping, they're now conditioned to see $11 as the normal price for a widget. You could opt out of Amazon entirely, but that would limit you to 20% of revenue, which is also a dealbreaker. (You theoretically get a higher cut from that 20% at the new price-point, but you also suffer the deadweight loss from buyers who can't/won't transact at that price point.)
The standard libertarian retort would be that the seller consented to their contract with Amazon, while no citizen or market actor ever signed some imaginary "social contract" with state regulators, and it's a legitimate point. But saying that a vendor whose livelihood is dependent on a presence on Amazon.com (whose revenue rivals the GDP of many nations [1]) "chose" that relationship is like saying that each citizen "chooses" the laws of the nation-state they live in, because they could have moved elsewhere. Yes, technically there is an exit clause; but in both cases the table is tilted such that exiting is deeply against the interests of each actor, thus each actor is incentivized to perpetuate the asymmetry in negotiating power.
Market competition is a great thing when it works, and many times it does. But oft it's forgot that the whole point of a competition is to win. And whether we're talking political power or economic power, concentrations of power tend to snowball and entrench.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_power
[1] https://www.axios.com/big-techs-power-in-4-numbers-de8a5bc3-...
I truly see an horrible path if government starts to put its big fingers everywhere and start causing all kinds of secondary market effects. When you look in hitory, it ALWAYS ends up being worse.
Nobody speaks about Walmart only sellers, that don't want to work with Amazon (as they are crazy with sellers).
Nobody speaks about Ebay sellers, nobody speaks about shopify only sellers. Nobody speaks about LOCAL sellers.
Those are all competitors than Amazon has no control over it.
Yes Amazon has a large distribution network, and competitor are starting to catch up from what I can see.
But anyway, what can I do other than expressing my disagreement ? I very well know we are going towards a gov intervention. I can only laugh in my corner, alone...
Source? It worked out well for the browser wars. It worked when it blocked (several) telco merger(s). And many more.
And that's just anticompetitive protections. What about the FDA and OSHA putting its fingers into the food industry so there aren't literal fingers in my food?
The point of the lawsuit and detailed in the analysis is that ALL online purchases end up being influenced (controlled?) as a result. This creates prices that are 30-45% higher across all retailers for a given item.
That would include Amazon Prime subscribers and random internet guy buying the same thing from a different site.
If Amazon controls their own storefronts, that's one thing. When they can exert control over competitors' storefronts - or worse, all competitors' storefronts - that's a different matter.
I ended making the sale because someone did not buy at Amazon.
Nobody forced me to raise prices at all. Amazon had no control at all on my prices. The market price is what is offered and what the customer is willing to pay.
If it's too expensive, nobody buys there.
I think we both get the point, except we think in different terms about the solution. I'd rather let the market works, have a transition towards competition which will eventually come down the line (5 to 10 years) than have big government try to solve the problem by making everything worse off.