Keep it shut amazon7/31/2023 “It underscores the problem with Amazon’s market power in the first place.”Īmazon’s communications highlight a suite of bills introduced by a bipartisan group of House members in June that would, among other things, prohibit so-called “self-preferencing” on digital platforms, in which the platform’s own products are put forward ahead of rivals.Īmazon has been accused recently of copying competitor products and preferring their own in-house copycat brands in search results on their marketplace in India. “When a company like Amazon is allowed to occupy this dominant gatekeeper position, it opens them up to holding small businesses hostage and misinforming them,” said Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly group. This amounts to building a large lobbying army out of its seller partners, by asserting that their livelihoods are at grave risk from the legislative effort. The website asks for emails and physical addresses from sellers, and says that signing up will “afford you opportunities to communicate directly with your elected officials.” With physical addresses, Amazon could target messages from potentially thousands of seller constituents directly to their own members of Congress. The Online Merchants Guild, a trade association representing thousands of digital marketplace sellers, says that the emails started going out to a core group of sellers who have worked in the past with Amazon’s public-policy team, and then progressed to “almost everyone.” The emails pushed sellers to register at an in-house website,, to “stay informed and involved on legislation that could impact your business.” Third-party sellers represented 58 percent of all sales on the Amazon website in 2018, according to the company.Īmazon has warned hundreds of thousands of its third-party sellers through direct email communications that it may be forced to shut down its online marketplace if Congress passes bills regulating the conduct of digital platforms, according to a seller advocacy group.
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