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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon responds that it is within its rights to not promote uncompetitive offers

Sounds to me like Amazon has found a loophole in the law. It agrees to list anything for sale, with no anti competitive conditions, but then only recommends customers buy things that it believes are in the customers best interests.

The FTC will struggle to argue that is illegal. Amazon can't be compelled to recommend stuff. (free speech etc). Also, what they recommend is in the consumers immediate best interests.

It will be hard for the court to argue that amazon should start recommending more expensive items to consumers, just to push consumers into looking for a cheaper platform.

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> what they recommend is in the consumers immediate best interests.

How? Amazon routinely recommends products to me that are objectively inferior compared to other products. For example, I just searched for "peak design travel tripod" and the number one result, which is also marked with "Overall Pick", is a tripod made by a company with the name of KINGJUEEQUESTER that looks like it's made out of cardboard tubes, but at least comes with a free 21 piece lens filter set and selfie stick for $18.99. And it has 3000+ 5 star reviews that are almost nearly identical. "Edward Von McTavish: The KINGJUEEQUESTER tripod arrived. It is of the most impressive quality. The Leg Lock feature fulfills my needs. I recommend for you."

The thing I'm actually searching for isn't even on the first page of results. It's on page two, under "More Results" and has a title of "Peak Design Travel Tripod (Carbon Fiber)" and is priced at $599.95 (the same price you'll find on Peak Design's site).

How is it that showing me anything other than what I searched for supports me as a consumer?

The Amazon experience in a nutshell. I have yet to see a comment that captured it so comprehensively.

Say Amazon offers three items all equivalent: one is priced at $9 and two are priced at $9.50 all are Prime.

If the vendor for the $9 offers it for $8.50 elsewhere and Amazon starts focusing on a $9.50 offer is that "better for the consumer"?

If the $9 doesn't exist and there are two vendors at the $9.50 price and one has a higher review history but offers it lower elsewhere is Amazon making things better by focusing on the other one?

The "buy box" is a product-level feature, not a seller-level feature. On any given product page, there may be multiple sellers with offers (one for $9, two for $9.50). The $9 offer would be prominently displayed in the buy box and the other two would be in the "other offers" section.

If another site starts selling the same product for $8.50 (regardless of who the seller is), Amazon may hide the buy box and put all the offers in the "other offers" section to avoid advertising an offer that isn't the best price available online.

Consumers price compare across sites, and Amazon wants to maintain its reputation for low prices (and in truly egregious cases prevent sellers on Amazon from price gouging).

Except they do the same for non-new products which muddles things tremendously.

If I don't see a price I assume it is out or they only have used ones. Certainly occasionally I have seen scalpers when I double checked anyway to see what the price would be if it returned but generally Amazon caught maybe half the scalpers in my experience.

Having a signal that means "you could get it less elsewhere" be the same signal as "I only have scalpers" isn't exactly good for consumers.

Also this implies that Prime shipping is worthless given they exclude it from the calculation...

The max price filter in the left margin is worth the effort to find the same product selling cheaper but only displayed a few pages later than than the primary search results.

Is buying from the buy box ever to the customers advantage?

Amazons fees are making the offer uncompetitive thus Amazon is actually not competitive meaning that they’re relying on their monopoly position to maintain market dominance instead of competition which they evidently cannot do.

>It will be hard for the court to argue that amazon should start recommending more expensive items to consumers, just to push consumers into looking for a cheaper platform.

Yes, 100% this. That's why I said that this lawsuit has a major remedy problem. Even if the court agrees this is anticompetitive, how do you fix it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37767994

The insurmountable problem is that the practical interests of "consumers shopping on Amazon" don't actually align with the abstract interests of "consumers in general" that the government is purporting to defend. On Amazon we want to find the right item (search, description, reviews), have strong confidence in the inventory and shipping promises (fulfilled by Amazon) and have reasonable confidence we're not getting screwed on price including shipping (Buybox, Prime eligible etc). If you chop those things apart it becomes essentially impossible to offer the overall experience that consumers clearly prefer.

The cause of this is that it should be an anti-trust violation for any wholesaler or manufacturer to dictate retail prices to the retailer. They agree on the wholesale price because that's what they're negotiating with one another, then the retailer chooses the retail price in their store.

Now if Amazon wants the MFN clause, no problem -- but it's the wholesale price they can't sell to someone else below, not the retail price. If Amazon wants the lowest retail price, that's up to them.

Amazon isn’t recommending “more expensive” items to consumers, it’s offering different products. It should be recommending the best product for the user at the price it can offer the product at.

The fact that the product exists $1 cheaper on another site does not make it not the best recommendation for the customer’s need. If I search “tablet” are you saying I should be recommended a cheap off brand tablet promoted to me because Amazon has the cheapest price or an iPad even though I can buy an iPad on apple.com for $10 cheaper?

>The fact that the product exists $1 cheaper on another site does not make it not the best recommendation for the customer’s need. If I search “tablet” are you saying I should be recommended a cheap off brand tablet promoted to me because Amazon has the cheapest price or an iPad even though I can buy an iPad on apple.com for $10 cheaper?

I think you are misunderstanding the issue. Amazon is selectively determining to show the "buy box" on a specific product page based on whether the prices for that SKU on Amazon are competitive with prices for the same SKU on other websites.

In your example, Amazon might not have a buy box for a given iPad model if the same model was available on apple.com for less. The presence of cheaper non-iPad tablets would not impact the iPad buy box.

I was referencing the article which seems to indicate it’s more than just a buy box issue.

> Today, Amazon tells sellers that if it detects a lower price for their products on any other online store, they will be punished, which is to say, their ability to get their products onto a place on the Amazon website where customers click will go away. The net effect, as Amazon itself wrote, is that "prices will go up."

I haven't studied antitrust policy in ages, but IIRC one aspect of this in the past has been to forbid the monopolist from peeking at their competitors' prices.

> Sounds to me like Amazon has found a loophole in the law.

No, not necessarily. This is just what companies always do. As long as it looks like they're "trying" to comply, they don't get in big trouble. In the meantime, they get to make microadjustments to their policy and find out exactly how far they have to comply until they're legally in the clear.

> only recommends customers buy things that it believes are in the customers best interests.

You mean like this outright scam with an "Amazon's choice" label on? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34588734

It’s product placement. Happens in retail and grocery all the time. Sellers pay to have their products at eye level, stores optimize placement to boost spending. Now that it’s digital it’s illegal?

Could you explain how this is in the customers' interests?

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