How is that hurtful for the consumer? You’re calling that “punishment”, but in fact as a shopper I just want to see the lowest price with the fastest shipping.
The seller fee bit part isn’t relevant. Wal Mart and Target or any other site could well offer lower seller fees - in fact, they’d HAVE to undercut Amazon in order to catch up with Amazon. But that doesn’t mean Amazon has to bring their prices down. I don’t buy that.
One other thing - as a shopper, no other shopping website comes close to Amazon’s customer service.
There is quite a bit to this article that’s disingenuous, for example -
> How do sellers handle these large fees from Amazon, and the inability to charge for shipping? Simple. They raise their prices on consumers. The resulting higher prices to consumers, paid to Amazon in fees by third party merchants, is why Amazon is able to offer ‘free shipping’ to Prime members. Prime, in other words, is basically a money laundering scheme. Amazon forces brands/sellers to bake the cost of Prime into their consumer price so it appears like Amazon offers free shipping when in reality the cost is incorporated into the consumer price.
If pricing on Amazon is too high, consumers won’t buy those products at Amazon and get rid of their Prime memberships too. But this isn’t quite true. Using hyperbole like “money laundering” also doesn’t help the case.
> Amazon also uses its bazooka of cash from Prime members paying high consumer prices, laundered through third party sellers, to distort industries across the economy.
Again, hyperbole. The author merely brushes off the fact that these sellers don’t HAVE to sell on Amazon in the first place. Presumably, Amazon is growing because more and more sellers flock to their website. If it’s a bad deal for sellers, they can sell on other websites. The article makes a one line claim - representing it as a ground truth - that a new business HAS to sell on Amazon. So this is clearly stating that no business can survive if they only have their own store presence or sell on Amazons competitors. I don’t believe this is true (based on a very successful family business). Yes my data point is anecdotal, but if we’re saying no business can survive without the ability to sell on Amazon, then the entire article is moot - the simple reason for breaking up Amazon is that no small business can survive without Amazon.
Again, I don’t think that’s true, and the author knows that - hence, the long wordy article to come at the issue from other angles while sprinkling in hyperbole.