[femto113]

I'm guessing the critical issue is this assertion in the original blog post

If we sell our products for less on channels outside Amazon and Amazon detects this, our products will not appear as prominently in search and, if you do find them, they will lose their prime check mark and with that, their sales.

Everything else seems pretty straightforward facts or opinions, but that bit attributes some significant behavior to Amazon without providing any sort of evidence that it happens.

[mtlynch]

I don't think this is even in dispute. I'm a seller on Amazon and they'll suppress my listings (hide from search results, hide the buy button on listings) if I offer a lower price on my own website.

They have some details about it here:

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...

[femto113]

I'm not sold that it's reasonable to equate "losing Featured Offer status because of violating objective criteria" with "Amazon is suppressing my listings". Amazon does look at off-Amazon prices to decide whether to feature an offer, but abstractly that's entirely justifiable from a consumer-friendly perspective: if Amazon knows something is available for less elsewhere but still promotes the sale they are setting up the buyer for a negative experience and themselves & the seller for excess returns and/or customer service hassles. If Amazon doesn't look at external prices at all then they have no way to protect against price gouging on platform. It seems like what's implicitly being asked for here is a special carve out to sell for less "on your own website", but that feels like a really slippery slope: what qualifies as "your own"--e.g. would an Etsy store? a drop shipper storefront?

[mtlynch]

>I'm not sold that it's reasonable to equate "losing Featured Offer status because of violating objective criteria" with "Amazon is suppressing my listings".

In my experience (again, I'm just one data point), they do more than just deny featured offer status. They bury my product in searches and then when the customer finds my listing, Amazon hides the "Buy" button and shows a more subtle "See All Buying Options" button. [0]

>It seems like what's implicitly being asked for here is a special carve out to sell for less "on your own website", but that feels like a really slippery slope: what qualifies as "your own"--e.g. would an Etsy store? a drop shipper storefront?

I don't think there should be a carve out for sellers' own sites. I don't think Amazon should be suppressing any products that have lower prices elsewhere.

>if Amazon knows something is available for less elsewhere but still promotes the sale they are setting up the buyer for a negative experience and themselves & the seller for excess returns and/or customer service hassles

They shift this burden onto the merchants anyway. When a customer has a support request or complaint, it goes directly to me. I eat all the costs of returns and refunds.

That is to say, I don't think Amazon is suppressing these listings because they're just so darned committed to only offer the best deals to their customers. It seems much more likely that Amazon's practice is designed to preserve their dominance by preventing any other merchants from offering lower pricing. They'd never have the gall or leverage to do this if they didn't have such a stranglehold on the entire ecommerce ecosystem.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2023/01/#adapting-to-the-s...

[femto113]

I understand that this sucks for specific merchants like you (or OP's Viahart), but if you consider it holistically (across all merchants and products in a category) I think it's a lot less sinister. Imagine some vendor sources a cheap POE KVM from Alibaba, lists it on Amazon for $250, and advertises against your brand keyword, hoping some people looking for your stuff will think "hm might not be as good but it costs half as much, I'll give it a try". If Amazon knows that same item is available on Bestbuy for $50 it's obviously not a good deal for consumers, but also wouldn't you want them to "suppress" that listing? Now scale that across millions of products--there's no longer people making decisions, it's just algorithms looking for signals. Is there a better or more objective criterion they can use than "this is for sale elsewhere for a lower price"?

[mtlynch]

Honestly, no. I don't want merchants refusing to sell items just because they discover that they're not the lowest price.

I'm willing to pay a premium with certain merchants due to my confidence in their delivery speed and counterfeit protection (e.g., B&H). I wouldn't want B&H to refuse to sell items to me if they noticed other vendors undercutting them on price.

If Amazon was really trying to prevent the user from getting a bad deal, then instead of making the buy button harder to find, they should be saying, "Hey, you can buy from this other website at a lower price."

Also, I'm not talking about anything close to 5x pricing. I was charging a 15% premium on Amazon to offset their fees and higher return rate, and that got my listings suppressed.

[elliekelly]

But wouldn’t Amazon be in the best position to have the evidence they do or do not engage in this behavior? Surely if anyone knows whether Amazon reduces product search visibility and the product’s prime checkmark it’s Amazon.