Comment by SilverElfin
5 days ago
> Vendors, cowed by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, comply—agreeing to raise prices on competitors’ websites (often with the awareness and cooperation of the competing retailer) or to remove products from competing websites altogether
Amazon has been openly doing this for years. They scrape other competitor websites, even though it’s against their terms of service, and if you sell for less elsewhere they find out and punish you. It’s blatantly anti competitive.
This process can actually be exploited to work against amazon itself.
How? It seems constructed so that despite the high costs of doing business on Amazon (seller fees), you have to not charge more there. If you raise prices everywhere, your sales elsewhere drop. What’s the loophole?
How?
By giving their scrapers false signals using dummy ecomemrce stores with artificial/dummy prices. If done constantly, it might render their scrapers useless or less reliable for buy-box algorithms.
tbh I thought it was explicitly stated somewhere. literally every seller I've talked to has mentioned it at some point.