So, Amazon wants low prices on its site. If you’re selling elsewhere cheaper, then you don’t get access to the goodies – promotion, good siting etc – on Amazon. Seems OK to me.
CA claims this means Amazon is forcing higher prices everywhere else. Well, no, not really.
Hundreds of previously redacted records reveal how Amazon has put pressure on independent sellers using its platform into raising their prices on the sites of competitors such as Walmart and Target, so that Amazon can appear to have lower prices, California authorities allege.
Not wholly – the pressure was to lower their prices on Amazon, surely?
I’d hate to have to do business with any of these crooks.
The retail stores employ the same tricks to get preferential prices. “You want an eye level shelf ? Give us 10% more discount. ”
Amazon just employs the same tactics but in a cyber environment.
ps I have largely stopped using Amazon. I find it very expensive these days.
I checked. I have made 17 Amazon orders in the past three months! Although 15 were kindle books and two were orders for my mother.
I still find it very useful. My Amazon Prime account is shared with my mother and sister, so ends up being worth the fee, especially around Christmas time.
Ditto. It’s a godsend if you live in the sticks and don’t want to pop in to town, fight for a parking space and mix with the Morlocks when you need stuff.
or the Eloi
I went onto the Amazon website for the first time recently. I thought it pathetically amateurish. To my astonishment there wasn’t a large red button to press meaning “That’s it, that’s my order, now tell me how to pay.”
So fuck ’em, I bought nowt.
“go to cart”/”Checkout”
I went through such a rigmarole. It responded by sending me in a circle. I still say fuck ’em. Life’s too short to work out what was intended by some software chump who reckons himself very clever but is in fact at most modestly clever.
A clever chap would install a large, red button.
A clever chap wouldn’t need one.
No… I’m with PiP here…..
I’m not exactly a dullard, but I *hate* the average online shopping experience.
The whole point about website design for point-of-use and shopping is about the ease with which you should be able to do it.
Account setup is uasually already a hassle with 100 questions/tickboxes about Agreements in Legalese , Newsletters, Promotions and other Guff.
This usually is already putting me off, but you generally only have go through the ordeal *once* . In Theory….
If I also have to hunt down where I can actually confirm any orders I placed, pay, and be done with it, because of Advertisements, popups with Special Offers, and other Promotional Trickery, I’m Out.
Never to return.
Amazon et. al. currently are about the worst of the 90’s/noughties popup scam sites, and *they* at least kept it relatively simple, because they *wanted* you to click on the Banner of Doom…
Maybe it’s different if you’ve got a “Premium” account, but paying a monthly fee to get rid of stuff that shouldn’t be there in the first place….
There’s a Name for that….
Shop. Cash. Walk out with your purchase, anonymous. I like that.
Recently used a Polish website selling military cutlery (stabby, slashy, bashy stuff, that in the UK is a more entertaining way to clear brambles. Always did want a tomahawk…)
Quick, simple, “I want that one”, “where do we deliver to?” “pay here”, and “click here to see where your order is progressing.
Got exactly what I wanted, at a decent price. No hassle during the process, haven’t been bothered since.
The brambles wish I hadn’t.
Outfits like that are likely to do all right; because that’s what customers want.
Suppliers who try to make it difficult to find what you actually want, and sell you some dodgy foreign knock-off (Amazon are heading that way, where a Blu-Ray of a US movie they’re pitching to a British customer turns out to be in German with no alternative soundtrack or subtitles…) may lose business to those more attentive to what their customers want.
In the sense that he wouldn’t use Amazon? You may be right.
My account has just that, buy it now with a 1-click purchase. Bizarrely my wife’s doesn’t and we use the same browser.
I rarely use Amazon nowadays, it seems expensive compared to other online vendors. Amazon are now just rooking the customers who have paid for Prime and feel tied in. Its also confusing as to who is selling you the item, and what the delivery cost will be. Repeatedly I’ve clicked on items that seem to say ‘Free Delivery’ only to find a postage fee added later on. So I abandon that purchase.
I find Ebay far better. You can filter by cost incl postage for example. You can buy single items pretty easily.
And I agree with PiP Cl, the Amazon website is a mess. Not easy to navigate or see what’s what at all.
Amazon listings are full of Chinese drop-shipped rubbish these days, may as well go to Alibaba.
We use the expensive flea treatment from the vet because it works, the cheaper over the counter treatments don’t. However there should be a choice obviously.
I don’t know how that happened, I was commenting on the post about flea treatments obviously.
I just spray the cat in Vapona.
Makes her sneeze a bit.
Some options charge less than Amazon, but vendors cannot pass the savings on. Their rules are simply abusing their dominant position to prevent fair competition.
They also are in a position of being able to see what everyone is selling and what price they are selling at – and are thus able to spot things they could sell themselves. It’s a bit like having a large retail park, where every shop has to use the park’s EPOS systems, and the park has it’s own shop right where everyone will pass it where they can put their own specials based on what they find their tenants are selling.
As as in the article, can prevent anyone also selling a bit cheaper down the road where the rent (and hence costs) is cheaper.
I make a point of not using Amazon other than as a last resort.
The way they treat staff (well documented abusive working conditions, illegal anti-union activities, and so on) also means I’m not prepared to support them. They screw over EVERYONE.
Yeah, and Bezos looks like a circumcised penis. Fuck ’em.
You’re right, he does.
While Amazon are clearly sailing very close to the wind here, I think they’re right. This policy means that if I go to Amazon and see the Buy Box I can be reasonably confident that it’s not worth further searching for a better price elsewhere. A bit like “Never knowingly undersold”, except unlike NNU, the product is still available on Amazon if I couldn’t be bothered to look elsewhere.
I haven’t read the actual claim, but it seems that Amazon did not pressure vendors into increasing their prices on other sites – the vendors could have instead lowered the price on Amazon. And while I would have some sympathy for vendors if this made the sale unprofitable, one of the instances was an item for $19.99 which differed in price by only one cent.