Amazon Discriminatory and anti-competitive on eGift cards? | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Discriminatory and anti-competitive on eGift cards?

3 pointsrebrad14 comments

The only company that can sell eGift cards on Amazon.com is Amazon? I wanted so sell eGift cards for my hobby site aipetphotos.com BUT

"Please be informed that you cannot list the e-gift card listing as it falls under prohibited listing as per the Amazon policy as mentioned in the following help page. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G200164450

The example listing you have sent is owned by Amazon."

example: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-1_US_Email-eGift-Card/dp/B004LLIKVU/

Should I make an eGift store? Would you use it?

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> Should I make an eGift store? Would you use it?

You'll be overrun with fraud to the point that you can't process payments in short order.

Surely some sort of quality control would need to be in place for new suppliers. Assume it’s solvable though.

Have you bought e-gift cards before?

Amazon won’t even acknowledge when asked what the process is and how to apply to be pre-approved.

To be generous to Amazon (for once) it could be to do with money laundering?

But why allow people to buy thousands of egift cards for restaurants, hotels and food delivery then? They seem to have conflicting policy to their product offering. Support won’t even let me apply to become pre-approved so it’s discriminating towards small companies and brands in favour of big ones.

Those are established businesses with actual physical presences. You are a web site doing basic GenAI images. Do you really not see that you might not be in the same category?

What is the cited policy?

What is the mechanism under which products like this are listed? https://www.amazon.com/Darden-Restaurants-1_DARDEN_standard-...

What exactly makes this illegal?

" Please be informed that you cannot list the e-gift card listing as it falls under prohibited listing as per the Amazon policy as mentioned in the following help page. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/G2001644... "

The URL is not accessible to anyone without a seller account

Prohibited items: 'Cash or cash equivalent instruments, including money orders, checks that can be customized (including blank checks), traveler's checks, stored value products like retail or open loop gift cards or electronic stored-value redemption codes (except for retail gift cards listed by pre-approved sellers) Gift cards, including: Gift cards, except retail gift cards listed by pre-approved sellers'

But restaurants, delivery apps, Abnb, Hotels.com and even Chewy have ecards:

1. https://www.amazon.com/Hotels-com-Red-Gift-Cards-mail/dp/B01... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Bath-Body-Works-Snowflake-Email/dp/B0... 3. https://www.amazon.com/Dominos-Pizza-Gift-Cards-mail/dp/B00M...

4. https://www.amazon.com/DoorDash-Gift-Cards-Email-Delivery/dp...

5. https://www.amazon.com/Instacart-Gift-Card-Email-Delivery/dp...

6. https://www.amazon.com/Chewy-eGift-Card-Delivery-Standard/dp...

> electronic stored-value redemption codes (except for retail gift cards listed by pre-approved sellers)

You're not an approved seller. Seems pretty clear here.

Retail gift cards are supposedly physical cards, not eGift cards?

And the fact big name retailers notionally competing with Amazon can secure approval to issue gift cards on Amazon.com is a pretty clear indication that it's not an anti-competitive policy, it's a why would we invest compliance resources in proving that startups selling gift cards for digital goods aren't money laundering operations when it'd be more cost effective to just ban them from the platform policy.

Yeah sure, "invest compliance resources" when they don't even let you know what the application procedure is? Sure. The anti-competitive behaviour is shown as it's not possible to for small companies to even apply! If large companies can deploy resources towards compliance small can too, but without knowing the rules it's impossible.

I hate to break it to you, but you're not Amazon's competition, and it's not "anticompetitive behaviour" that they don't want to spend thousands of man hours reviewing hundreds of applications from small businesses or fake business making gift cards, only a tiny fraction of which will generate more profit than chargebacks and legal trouble.

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