[ravel-bar-foo]

Amazon is in such a monopoly position that it is able to force sellers to cover the price of prime shipping (incorporating the shipping price into the display price) and then penalizes their display rank when they list lower prices on websites where shipping is separate from product price. Forcing suppliers to raise prices on unrelated sales is a classic monopoly move, like when MSFT forced OEMs to pay for Windows licenses on computers sold without operating systems.

[lotsofpulp]

And those sellers cannot go to Target or Walmart or Home Depot or advertise their own website?

We have Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal making it very simple to pay for things with a simple click, just like Amazon. Amazon has inertia, but it’s not exactly in a high barrier business. Walmart supplanted Kmart, and Amazon was able to gain share from Walmart.

The switching cost is visiting a different website. If you have a good product at a price people we willing to pay, the internet makes it very possible to survive without any big retailer’s help.

The bigger problem is probably someone cloning it but with 50% cheaper materials and selling it for 70% of your price, one that I’m sure many sellers on Amazon’s flea market are aware of.

[ravel-bar-foo]

They can advertise and sell on other websites, but if they advertise below the prices they advertise for on Amazon, then Amazon pushes them out of the search results box. Something like 90% of Amazon sales happen due to products being put in that box.