Some of the products on Amazon’s Marketplace are supplied through its own retail business. However, a large proportion are supplied by third-party sellers. Amazon provides services to these sellers, including those that are essential to make sales, such as matching sellers with consumers. It also offers optional services that incur additional fees, such as Amazon’s ‘Fulfilment by Amazon’ service. This handles some aspects of the sales process, including storage, packaging, and delivery.
The investigation will consider if Amazon has a dominant position in the UK and whether it is abusing that position and distorting competition by giving an unfair advantage to its own retail business or sellers that use its services, compared to other third-party sellers on the Amazon UK Marketplace.
The investigation will focus on three main areas:
- How Amazon collects and uses third-party seller data, including if this gives Amazon an unfair advantage in relation to business decisions made by its retail arm.
- How Amazon sets criteria for allocation of suppliers to be the preferred/first choice in the ‘Buy Box’. The Buy Box is displayed prominently on Amazon’s product pages and provides customers with one-click options to ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Add to Basket’ in relation to items from a specific seller.
- How Amazon sets the eligibility criteria for selling under the Prime label. Offers under the Prime label are eligible for certain benefits, such as free and fast delivery, that are only available to Prime users under Amazon’s Prime loyalty programme.
The CMA has not reached any conclusions at this stage about whether competition law has been infringed.
The European Commission has previously opened two investigations covering the same areas. The CMA will seek to liaise with the European Commission as its own investigation in the UK progresses.
Alongside this case, the CMA also has an open investigation into Amazon and Google, under consumer protection laws, over concerns that they have not been doing enough to combat fake reviews on their sites.