Online trade: abuse with price specifications? Cartel office warns Amazon

The Bundeskartellamt suspects that the Amazon trade giant is unlawful in the pricing of other companies on the Amazon marketplace trading platform. A corresponding warning and preliminary assessment of the facts published the competitive keepers in Bonn. Amazon rejects the allegations.

The company now has the opportunity to comment on the cartel office. After that, the competitive guard could force the company to do a different approach. In turn, Amazon could complain.

“The competition in online trading in Germany is largely determined by Amazon’s rules for the trading platform,” emphasized Cartel Office chief Andreas Mundt. Since Amazon competes in direct competition on the platform on the other dealers, influencing the pricing of competitors is fundamentally questionable, for example through price tops for marketplace providers. “This applies in particular if the dealers concerned can no longer cover their own costs and the trading platform is used in anti -antitrust rights to disability the rest of the online trade.”

Criticism of non -transparency

Amazon is a large distance from the market leader, and his website is according to the information about 60 percent of sales in German online trade. Amazon sells goods itself, opens its website via the marketplace function but also for third-party providers-if you want to buy sports shoes, electronics and other products, you get something directly from Amazon or other dealers who use the Amazon website and pay money to the big competitor.

However, according to the cartel office, the marketplace providers cannot freely determine the prices because there are Amazon price control mechanisms. If a price is too high, the offer is either removed from the marketplace, or it is no longer visually highlighted in the purchase box (“Buy Box”), but disappears to a certain extent in insignificance. In addition, according to the cartel office, it can happen that a product can still be seen, but also no longer appears. Amazon calls on the providers for price reduction and refer to allegedly appropriate reference prices.

In Germany’s competitive keepers, such a procedure causes strong legal abdominal pain. They criticize that frequently changing price limits could limit competition on the Amazon marketplace. Such restrictions are non -transparent, they followed “no objective, verifiable principles”. Dealers could be displaced.

In addition, the cartel office fears that Amazon could take advantage of its strong position in such a way that other external online retailers shouted from price reductions. This would do this online retailer on the assumption that Amazon quickly followed up and that they would not have a price advantage at all. That would have consequences for online trading as a whole. According to the cartel office, this Amazon business practice would also be illegal. Germany’s top competitive guardian has been critical of Amazon for a long time. In 2022, the federal authority created the basics so that the company falls under an extended abuse supervision.

Amazon sees itself in law

An Amazon spokeswoman said that the cartel office’s assessment was in no way agreed. More than 47,500 German sales partners are supported “by clear and fair guidelines that apply to all offers in our store”. Small and medium -sized companies that sell through Amazon offer customers a large selection of products – and they set their prices freely and independently.

The spokeswoman added that Amazon did not want to promote prices that were not competitive. “This would affect our customers’ trust in the shopping experience and the success of our sales partners.” Amazon to force to offer customers on Amazon.de “overpriced goods” would question, among other things, established retail practices, from which millions of customers have benefited to date.