That's literally the meaning of being a monopoly: There are no other distribution channels that can compete with Amazon. They are a distribution monopoly.
There is no monopoly in distribution. The vast majority of items are bought offline. Walmart, Costco, Target, Kroger and on and on and on and on.
The world wide web + google and facebook make finding eyeballs open for all. Fedex, UPS and USPS make shipping products open to all. Stripe makes accepting payments open to all. Cheap 3rd party manufacturing makes making things open to all.
We've probably never been further from a monopoly in any of the areas in question. The reason it's so damn hard to make any money selling random products is that there is just so much competition.
Most things aren't bought on Amazon, but if you're a middleman droppshipping stuff from China, Amazon is an easy way to get in front of a lot of eyeballs.
It's not clear to me why droppshippers deserve special care and treatment by the FTC.
The chair of the FTC is Lina Khan. As a law student, she wrote this article [1] for the Yale Law Journal. It attracted so much attention in the antitrust law community that it led to her becoming the youngest FTC chair in history.
She has literally been building this case against Amazon since she was a student. It’s not just about dropshippers. It’s also about how Amazon uses automated price controls, guided by scraping of competitors, to engage in dumping [2] and predatory pricing [3] to wipe out competing e-commerce sites. Since everything is automated, prices can change in a matter of seconds, so once competitors are destroyed, prices go back up automatically.
From what I recall, the reason why her argument was recognized is because it solved a thorny problem of US anti trust law, proving harm.
Currently, in the US what matters is showing that consumer welfare was harmed. AINAL but proving harm is not easy - Amazon in particular reduces prices to the end customer, increases choices and makes sales easier.
This is where most arguments died, however her approach had enough merit to pursue.
However, it seems her approach and argument has changed, and is more couched in terms of current legalese - more focused on showing consumer harm than applying a new legal approach.
Distribution channels are endless, and as large as Amazon is, they are only one amongst many, albeit with plenty of vertically integrated advantages.
In the case of a firepit, local consumer channels would likely be speciality shops, hardware and big box with probably a couple of layers of distribution and logistics in between. That market however is more likely to offer $500-$1000 firepits, because that's the way it WAS before Amazon, ALi, etc etc opened up new digital channels to drive down volume, manufacturing and up quantity (which eventually results in either greater margins or lower prices).
Those same non Amazon channels will also sell Joe FBA's $200 firepit as well, perhaps for $400 using those other channels.
To access and operate a business around those traditional / other channels however is nowhere near as simple as "order 50 of these on Ali" + "sell these as FBA on Amazon" = $profit.
It's a lot of work. I wouldn't necessary call Amazon a shortcut, but it's a path to market that is easier, but at a cost.
The world wide web + google and facebook make finding eyeballs open for all. Fedex, UPS and USPS make shipping products open to all. Stripe makes accepting payments open to all. Cheap 3rd party manufacturing makes making things open to all.
We've probably never been further from a monopoly in any of the areas in question. The reason it's so damn hard to make any money selling random products is that there is just so much competition.