In recent days, a US senator running for presidential elections in the United States has started an anti-GAFA media offensive, believing that the giants of the Web and technology are too powerful. According to her, they take advantage of their dominant position to stifle competition and prevent small businesses from emerging. This is the moment that Amazon chose to withdraw a highly criticized clause from its partnership with vendors in the Marketplace.
Amazon: sellers are free of a binding condition
Due to a "tariff parity" clause in Amazon's terms of use, sellers were forced to market their products at prices lower than those they posted on competing platforms. This practice gave it a real competitive advantage.
In December 2018, another US senator, Richard Blumenthal, wrote to the FTC, a government agency that oversees the control of anti-competitive business practices, to complain about Amazon's conditions that he says are "stifling competition and increasing artificially prices ".
Amazon is all the more criticized that sellers who failed to comply with this clause were systematically dereferenced or less visible on the platform. Faced with pressure from both senators, the company was pushed to abandon this coercive condition in the United States where he still practiced.
As for Europe, the e-commerce giant has stopped imposing this tariff parity on sellers since 2013, following an investigation launched by the British and German authorities.
