Amazon And Apple Fined $218 Million For Elbowing Out Small Retailers In Spain::Regulators said the tech giants colluded to box out competitors by favoring sales of Apple products directly from the online retail giant.
This is a strange lawsuit. Is Spain suing BestBuy for not allowing third party sellers to hock Apple equipment in their store? I mean, Amazon is a retailer, they can choose to sell or not sell whomever’s goods they want to.
Amazon had a real problem with counterfeit and used Apple products flooding their site, so they did something about it. Now Spain wants to make sure you can buy cheap crap that doesn’t work and isn’t the real thing?
Amazon is a retailer, they can choose to sell or not sell whomever’s goods they want to.
Amazon is also platform operator. This is about Amazon being the direct seller on the selling platform operated by this company called Amazon vs third party seller selling Apple products on the platform operated by this company called Amazon.
Meaning stuff like Amazon placing their own direct sell offer higher on results or as said how prominently they featured advertising by their party sellers.
This is the danger of trying to operate both as the retailer and as the platform operator on same market place. Competition authority will very carefully scrutinise ones operating of the market platform on benefit of ones retail sales.
Direct single party retail webshops don’t have this problem. Neither do pure marketplace platform, where they just run the marketplace and don’t offer any first party product sales.
They could choose to not do third party sellers and be pure first party retailer. However then their selection would be smaller. Since third party sellers cover much of the niches not lucrative enough for amazon itself to cover. Then Amazon wouldn’t be the “buy everything” store, which would also hurt their retail business. Since the default move wouldn’t be “well lets first look on amazon, they have everything there”.
Amazon is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Competition authority is saying “hold on there now, you either eat it or keep it. No cheating and double dipping.” If you are to be both market place and retailer, there needs to be firewall between those two divisions and fair dealing with the other retailers on your marketplace.
That’s interesting, but I would think if that was the problem it would apply to more than just Apple.
Amazon and Apple reached agreements in 2018 that limited the free competition of third-party sellers who hawk Apple goods through Amazon’s platform for smaller retailers, according to Spain’s National Markets and Competition Commission, which oversees Spanish markets for antitrust violations.
“The investigated behaviors could be restricting competition in the sectors of the Internet sale of electronic products, and the provision of marketing services to third-party retailers through online platforms (Marketplace) in Spain,” the regulator said.
The tech giants also limited the capacity for third parties to advertise Apple products on Amazon, according to Spanish regulators. In addition, the companies are accused of reaching a deal that limited Amazon’s ability to direct advertising toward customers of Apple products or offer them products of competing electronics makers.
Sounds like it was because Apple and Amazon worked together for this specific outcome.
Yeah, at first I figured this was about how Amazon takes out successful, smaller retailers on its site by offering the same product at a slightly lower price/de-prioritizing their search results, which is fucked, but this seems to be only about Apple products? Very bizarre…
