Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet

I find that 20 years ago I shopped at Amazon for the low prices, but 2020s+ I shop at Amazon due to their logistics.

The problem for everyone else is not simply that Amazon ships quickly, I almost don't even care about that. The thing is that Amazon ships & delivers on a reliable predicted schedule. When I click an item on Amazon and it says "arrives by Tuesday" then 95/100 times it does. I shop at specific competitors who can do similar (B&H, Sweetwater, etc).

Many online stores big & small in the year 2026 will still take days to even send shipment info, followed by using unreliable carriers that miss ETAs.

I would even be OK with these stores giving a narrow range or probability "90% of the time this arrives between Tuesday & Wednesday".. But I am not in the mood to order stuff that may arrive in 2-10 days with very little clarity on which end of the range.

Amazon searches for anything that isn't a known brand such as Apple & co turn out >90% Chinese products of highly questionable quality for me these days. And you can buy those cheaper by going straight to the source. The sole point of their retail business seems to be providing a support for the inevitable issues with these sellers, but I suspect that increasingly customers won't think it justifies the massive premium they're paying for what's essentially Taobao with an American address.

I use Amazon to buy cheap stuff like zip ties, printing paper and ink and some cleaning products. Almost every single major purchase I go directly to the manufacturer website or a specialized store. For example, I would never buy photography gear on Amazon. I go to Adorama or BH. For my favorite brands in say hiking or running gear I go to REI or RunningWarehouse or visit my local brick and mortar store. Amazon has truly become the convenience store for me, my average purchase is under $10. Almost everyone today offer free or inexpensive quick shipping and easy returns. They also have better customer service.

Amazon allows you to make returns and makes it convenient, quick, and easy. I made two purchases through independent sellers' websites in the last year, both with big banners guaranteeing satisfaction and easy returns for 100 days or something. And yet, when I found that the product didn't meet my needs, they would not accept my return. They wouldn't even issue a return label. Both of these sellers used Shop. Shop requires you to fill out an application for a refund and then the seller can drag their feet on processing it. In both cases they let the application sit there for days before rejecting it. In one of the cases my credit card company ruled in favor of the small business when I issued a chargeback.

On Amazon it's easy to request a return and get a return label all on the same day that you discover you have a subpar product. The long and short of it is that consumers do not want to be ripped off, and centralized sellers like Amazon and AliExpress make it easy to not be ripped off. If this raises prices across the board, so be it. It's worth it for the time saved and the accountability that comes along with it.

I don't get the Amazon bashing. My experience is nothing like that:

Kitchen scale, $20 bucks, looks and operates exactly as described; three years later, it still works fine.

Bed sheets, $16, two days later delivered, better than I thought - at least for the price that is. Best price/quality ratio I could get.

If I don't like something, returning is super convenient; I drop it off at Kohl's over the weekend. Time and again I am stupefied of how is it possible that in small town USA, I can get something shipped by next day while paying a one time yearly fee.

I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.

At the employee side, the minimum pay at Amazon is $20 per hour. Walmart is $14, AliExpress ... we can be only guessing at that

> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.

This kind of abusive practice needs to be banned in whichever countries it's still legal.

You can't really aspire to improve the situation if such things continue to be legal.

Amazon Fair Price Policy doesn't apply in the UK and EU (it's illegal)

The EU are currently running an investigation into how this affects market dynamics, which will be interesting to see

Noticed a big surge in pricing on Amazon for mundane crap. End up checking eBay and AliExpress for the same and both always cheaper, and sometimes in multiple. Things like blow up pool toys, > $20 on Amazon, easily half and lower on the others, and really not even worth a dollar in the scheme of things.

I've been boycotting Amazon since early 2025. It's not hard once you get reacquainted with things taking several days or weeks to arrive. Plan a little and it all works out. The delay in gratification may even help you avoid impulse purchases.

The notion that, if more people did this, prices might come down everywhere only stiffens my resolve.

A few years ago I looked at the finances of a company that sells on Amazon (FBA). It was pretty astounding the number of fees they charge. They were paying to show up in sponsored results which obviously increased the fees but from what I remember between all the fees roughly 50% of the sale price of their products was just going directly to Amazon.

Seems like a relatively simple fix, Amazon shouldn't be allowed to tell suppliers what price they can set on their site. No one should be able to tell a supplier what price they can charge to others.

A factor I don't see mentioned that I think is relevant: Repricers

Google "FBA repricer" and you'll find companies like https://goaura.com/ and https://sellersnap.io/.

These are a must for any mid-size seller. Their goal is to pretty self-explanatory; reprice your ASIN, live, to hit maximum sales. If your competitor is selling the same mug for $10.00, the repricer sees that and immediately reprices your mug for $9.99.

Its one of those "Well, if I don't use one, others will" situations.

Not being allowed to sell your product elsewhere for cheaper seems downright anticompetitive and if our government was functioning government that would be illegal. The whole point of the ideal free market is that fees are supposed to approach zero with increasing competition.

One thing that pushes prices up is the expectation that "free" shipping is offered on all products. The shipping cost gets rolled in to the price of the product, and the Fair Pricing Policy prevents selling the product cheaper elsewhere, even if you charge for shipping there.

It sucks that sellers cannot offer their products for cheaper elsewhere, but I've also often seen sellers sell their products for a much higher price on their own website than Amazon, and in that case why wouldn't I buy it on Amazon instead?

In that sense having one big marketplace with all kinds of competing products together also seems to motivate sellers more to compete on price rather than relying on lazy consumers.

Recently some big billion sale. Since i run low on funds i use to add things to cart, not buy though.

I added an item for its cost was 48$.

Now during sale, i revisited same product, they say original price is 80$ and on sale 13% off, so 70$ around

I try to avoid Amazon as much as possible. 95% of the products are throwaway junk brands. It's tiring to shop there. I think Amazon is a great example of why competition, while good in most cases, has its limits when the information asymmetry due to overwhelming and opaque choices. I wish those junk, throwaway brands were banned...

I love Amazon. I'm unbothered by voluntary contracts between individuals.

I understand logistics is an insanely hard problem, but can't sellers create a co-op? Not on Amazon's scale, but start on a much smaller scale (gotta start somewhere). Maybe at a city level - if a bunch of sellers in Chicago (for example) rent a warehouse and serve only within Chicago, it is worth a try, no? Or is this a stupid question?

I remember hearing about a Uber like app (I might have seen it on More Perfect Union channel, I think). So I guess at least some people are thinking along the same lines, maybe?

As an individual, I guess the only thing I can do is shop as little as possible on Amazon (which I am already doing). Not sure what else I can do to help

Could you sell a box of 10x Item A on amazon, and a box of 15x Item A on your own website for cheaper per unit? Without triggering the amazon Fair Pricing Policy?

Stopped using Amazon a while ago because I want to support smaller (and less controversial) businesses. But recently I went back there to look for a phone protector as for some reason that's the only time Amazon has been cheaper for something.

I was amazed at how janky the app experience was having been away for a couple of years. It felt a really dated and ad-bloated experience. Considering Amazon pioneered so many advances in e-commerce, I was surprised I don't miss it at all.

Interesting article. But I wish it explained which fees made the share that Amazon takes go from 19% to 46%. The fulfilment fee is evidently necessary, it takes people to do that, and doing it yourself may cost more. The advertisement is also evidently necessary, but could have risen. The referral fee alone can't explain the increase.

And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.

never buy from third party sellers and you won't have an issue

Aside from the whole amazon problem:

I really love how the (flow-)chart in this article has two starting points and both flow perfectly into the vicious circle loops without any awkward gap no matter from which direction you start reading the chart.

US can just legislate that one marketplace cannot force how vendors use other marketplaces. This is not about free spech but rather about price fixing (in indirect/perverse ways).

Why is this legal?

More generally, the unprecedented levels of market concentration and pricing power in the US, a consequence of the gutting of antitrust enforcement from the inside by Robert Bork and the Chicago School, have led to much higher inflation in the US.

But to put it into perspective, a retail shop would also expect to take at least 50% of the sale price. Often much more.

I usually don’t care for the price.

I care for the return policy and warranty being attached to an entity that will still exist in 6 month.

It just keeps on going

In the UK Amazon have now raised the price of general shipping to be 2/3 the price of a months prime subscription. Before prime, delivery regularly used to be £1.99 or £2.99. Now if you dont have prime everything is £4.99 to be delivered. It makes it seem silly to pay that when you could pay £8.99 for a months subscription of free deliveries, which is their whole game.

I hate that they have done this with a passion.

Maybe the time has come to stop cheering for quasi-monopolies as some success story. They hurt everybody besides their shareholders.

boycott, but nobody does

The greatest catalogue of consumer goods with the greatest logistics to back it up of all time. And the thread complain complaining about it. What a time to be alive.

Any seller charges 50%+ margin on anything.

wish they would push up their delivery speed

classic aggregation theory to create a monopoly.

the only way to prevent such things from happening is e-commerce is spread across non-platform channels but independent ones e.g woo commerce etc where a seller runs and hosts their own shop, then maybe go to semi-platforms such as shopify etc that don't aggregate everything on one storefront.

because sellers are reliant on amazon bringing in shoppers, unlike say woo commerce & shopify - then yeah amazon feels rightly so that they need to take 50% margins on a seller's item.

the same thing plays out everywhere where some producer is reliant on someone bringing in the buyers - uber, Spotify, apple App Store.

How you spend your cash has always been a better democratic tool than a vote.

If you buy Amazon, then that's what you get in society and politics. Every Amazon purchase is a vote for monopolistic behaviour, the destruction of local services/industry, and for yet another America tax.

I do everything possible to avoid them, buy locally-made, etc, but it's becoming harder and harder. It's so ironic that people will complain about a declining economy, no jobs, etc, then will joyfully donate money to promote foreign jobs and enrich middlemen on a weekly basis.

wish they delivered faster

> Because Amazon is where the shoppers are: it accounts for about 40% of all US online retail sales.

A lot of the competition is gone, so now it's time for the "price hike" step of the VC playbook - enter markets with insane amounts of cash, slowly boil the competition alive until it goes away and/or the users are hooked, raise prices.

> Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy lets it remove the Buy Box (the "Add to Cart" button), or even suspend a seller, if they're offering their item cheaper elsewhere.

IIRC that kind of shit is at least illegal in the EU. Bookingcom and other sites have had their "best price" enforcement invalidated here in the past.

The bad thing is, due to the sheer scale Amazon has, it is all but impossible to compete with it. You won't get the scale deals that Amazon gets at shippers (USPS, DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD, whatever). You won't get the money to construct warehouses across the world that make Amazon's fast shipping work in the first place. You won't have the insane amounts of money coming in from customers that allow for its extremely generous return policies. And you won't have some sort of cash cow like AWS that allows you to run your business at near zero profit or even loss.

The only way you can compete is if you are in a market where you can provide a better experience for the customer and the customer is willing to pay a premium.

I hate Amazon and I still shop there. It's not about price, I will pay more for a product to buy it directly and not via Amazon /if/ I can find an original. The issue for me is threefold:

1. Discoverability: Many products are so rapidly and thoroughly cloned that it is difficult to impossible to identify the original maker, find their site, and purchase through them. The insane proliferation of counterfeits, clones, and sometimes outright scam products means that Amazon at least gives me an opportunity to buy a clone/counterfeit and return it if its not meeting my expectations. Sometimes the original is notably higher quality but no longer produced/sold, as well. Recently I wanted to buy a Polar Magnetic Pen as a gift. The website is up and the shopping cart works, but checkout is disabled. They're out of stock everywhere. There's hundreds of random worded Chinese clones on Amazon that are 25% of the price and 30% of the quality, so I bought a clone and risked it.

2. Logistical Certainty: I work a lot and have little free time after basic households tasks, other than the weekends. So if I want to do a project or something, I plan it for a following weekend and order things. If I can't order on a Tuesday or Wednesday and /know/ that I will get it by Friday, it's basically pointless. Sometimes I'll just roll the dice, but generally I prefer logistical certainty. I actually have gone back to buying at brick and mortar stores if possible to really cement this (I use Best Buy now a lot more than in the past, although selection is poor). There's a few other online retailers I strictly prefer to Amazon that can also deliver this like B&H Photo.

3. Breadth of Catalog / Access: There's basically nothing I can't acquire via Amazon. If I need, let's say 6 things, to do some sort of hobby project my options are generally either: A) go to 2-4 different stores, either physically and waste a day of my life or online and hope the shipments all arrive in time or B) order on Amazon everything at once delivered as one.

These things are way more important than price. I still hate Amazon PRIMARILY because of commingling of SKUs meaning there's no real quality indicators and I cannot do anything as a consumer to ensure I receive legitimate, actual, quality products. If they hadn't fucked that up, I'd probably still like Amazon despite everything else. I used to love Amazon back in the day, now I hate it, because of how often I've received counterfeits and fraudulent products and the proliferation of Chinese dropshipper fly-by-nights.

Big Tech always becomes Big Enshittification; it is the only way the scaling economics work for the massive returns expected by VC.

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