Is it abuse for Amazon to compete with their sellers? I don't think so, it's just like Best Buy selling their own brand of TV mounts & HDMI cables and prioritizing them over other brands they carry.

There should be rules in place to stop them from effectively defrauding sellers (e.g. terminating accounts / promotions / offers without contract-backed cause, canceling wholesale orders outside of contract).

Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day).

> Even outside of the ethics of it, anyone else that wants to can offer a competing product on Amazon even if Amazon doesn't (and this happens like a dozen times a day).

this is not the problem that people are grappling with, though! the problem is that amazon can see that your product is doing well by looking at "their own" platform data and then competing with you based on your own sales data. I would hope that anyone entering in to a market that Amazon, or any big player, is in would already be aware of their competition.

Amazon can choose at any time to peek at the data and simply flood a market that they know they can dominate on their own marketplace -- does that not seem unfair to people? It seems to me that as long as Amazon is able and willing to profit off of sellers' and services' data on their platforms, they will incentive their employees to take advantage of that in the name of ~Consumer Value~, all else be damned.

>I would hope that anyone entering in to a market that Amazon, or any big player, is in would already be aware of their competition.

Who isn't aware of it though? Every major retailer has their own store brand, and it's been like that since before any of us were born.

At least Amazon clearly marks their brand, unlike some companies create brands like "Open Nature" which is clearly meant to disguise their origin.

I don’t really have a problem with this (as you mention, stores have had their own brands forever), but you may be interested to know that not all Amazon brands are clearly marked and there are a lot of them: https://qz.com/1039381/amazon-owns-a-whole-collection-of-sec...

Wow, I didn't know that. Thanks for the info.

Oh wow, that is just evil.

Same reason regular companies cannot be banks in many countries , you would be able to give loans unfairly to your other business even if they are not credit worthy. It is wrong whether it is Best Buy or Amazon to be both marketplace and seller.

Even if the controls were somewhat weak in practice, his inability to commit to that even on paper is damning.

To be frank that bank policy sounds a lot like a pretense for protectionism to banks more than an antitrust measure so they don't have to worry about being disrupted by others winning big on bets they didn't take.

I recognize there may be very different values in play but I find calling that wrong bizzare and arbitrary.

Similar protections existed for ibanks not to do retail till a while before in the U.S.

It is to prevent a conflict of interest , the banking division can refuse to finance a competitor , give very cheap financing ignore the risk of the non finance business etc,

to put it in monopoly terms , you wouldn’t the player being banker to give cheap loans to himself while refusing to give you money right ?

I mean it’s like an impossible thing to commit to even if he wanted to, no?

Congress held this hearing as part of their looking at what changes to make to the law / changes to force the companies to make, so maybe they'll look at legislation that would change the situation (for example, some way of forcing Amazon to split "platform provider" and "product creator" into separate companies).

I've no idea if anything at all will come of it, or whether anything that does will be good or bad, but this hearing wasn't just about getting verbal commitments of being good from the CEOs (despite there being several questions did ask for verbal commitments in various areas).

I am seriously struggling to see why I need to feel better or worse about this situation in the first place.

How is this different than every other brick and mortar store that offers store brand items? This is a practice society has been completely happy with for decades.

Amazon's third party seller fees aren't trivial even for their FBM service. Amazon labels don't incur this cost just like B&M retailers don't have to pay slotting fees to to get their products on their own shelves. However other retailers charge this fee because shelf space is a scarce resource. Amazon doesn't lose this revenue when adding their items to the product listing.

Amazon also has 50% of e-commerce marketshare and nearly double Walmart's share of all retail sales.