Did you know that Amazon wants to prevent you from selling your books elsewhere at lower prices? Amazon has rarely enforced this policy with U.S. sellers, but the issue is coming to a head overseas. Booksellers on Amazon’s United Kingdom, French and German marketplaces are objecting to Amazon’s “price parity” policy, which prevents them from selling new or used books at lower prices, even at their own Web sites.
Many booksellers add 15 percent to their regular prices when selling on Marketplace, to account for Amazon’s fees. But the company wants to outlaw this.
“Customers trust that they’ll find consistently low prices and other favorable terms on Amazon, and we think this is an important step to preserve that trust,” Amazon’s policy says.
In a letter by the Independent Online Booksellers Association, the policy is described as “dangerously anti-competitive, designed to use [Amazon's] market dominance to undermine smaller competitors and independent booksellers, and will inevitably lead to a worse deal for book buyers. The costs for booksellers selling via Amazon are greater than selling from their own sites or aggregators such as Alibris and Biblio, and Amazon wants to prevent those costs from being reflected in the price, the IOBA says.
Amazon argues that “price parity” has applied to the U.S. marketplace for “several years” because there’s a clause in the Pro-Merchant participation agreement. But can Amazon realistically check a seller’s prices on eBay, ABE, and other sites, and boot sellers who offer better deals elsewhere? Or is the company just threatening to do so?
“Margins on Amazon are fast disappearing with the race to the bottom by many sellers,” complained one bookseller at Tamebay, a U.K. auction site. “Amazon usually matches the lowest price, so monopolize the buy box.”
Specifically, Amazon’s “price parity” policy requires sellers to set their prices on Amazon (including shipping fees but excluding taxes) the same or lower than “other non-physical sales channels.” Presumably booksellers who operate a brick-and-mortar store could have lower prices for walk-in customers.
Adding to the consternation among European booksellers: some have misinterpreted Amazon’s price-party policy as requiring them to match prices by all online competitors — essentially, to have the lowest price anywhere on the Internet. Actually, the policy requires sellers to match their Amazon prices with their own prices on other sites — they don’t want booksellers to charge more on Amazon than the bookseller charges for the same items elsewhere.
Amazon allows sellers using Fulfillment by Amazon to price items slightly higher than other online channels — as long as the total price, assuming free delivery, doesn’t exceed the lowest total price on other online channels.
In the U.S., Amazon has made an issue of “price parity” mainly among larger, brand-name retailers. The issue is written into their contracts and is routinely policed by account reps at Amazon. Since April, the company has been asking booksellers in its European markets to remove listings that don’t match prices on other sites.
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7 Comments
That is old – unenforceable and unprovable
As I stated in past postings
The majority of AZ Sellers are “hobby” sellers.
They do not have business or enterpreneurial backgrounds or knowledge.
Such knowledge is a smattering of Business Law and your States Laws.
Look up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_Fixing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion
Collusion is an agreement, usually illegal and therefore secretive, which occurs between two or more persons to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading, or defrauding others of their legal rights, or to obtain an objective forbidden by law typically by defrauding or gaining an unfair advantage[citation needed]. It is an agreement among firms to divide the market, set prices, or limit production. [1] It can involve “wage fixing, kickbacks, or misrepresenting the independence of the relationship between the colluding parties.”[2] In legal terms, all acts affected by collusion are considered void.[3]
The same is true of Collectible Books being set at LIST PRICE OR ABOVE with $10 Minimum
1. What is the List goes Higher?
2. What id the List is $3 and FAIR MARKET PRICE IS $6 not$10
As I expect this Post will not be re-echoed to the AZ boards – it will be over the heads of the mass of Sellers. I had brough this up ages ago online.
It is DOJ* worthy
*Department of Justice
Forgot BINGO!
Price fixing is an agreement between participants on the same side in a market to buy or sell a product, service, or commodity only at a fixed price, or maintain the market conditions such that the price is maintained at a given level by controlling supply and demand. The group of market makers involved in price fixing is sometimes referred to as a cartel.
Price fixing may be intended to push the price of a product as high as possible, leading to profits for all sellers, but it may also have the goal to fix, peg, discount, or stabilize prices. The defining characteristic of price fixing is any agreement regarding price, whether expressed or implied.
Price fixing requires a conspiracy between two or more sellers or buyers; the purpose is to coordinate pricing for mutual benefit of the traders. Sellers might agree to sell at a common target price; set a common minimum price; buy the product from a supplier at a specified maximum price; adhere to a price book or list price; engage in cooperative price advertising; standardize financial credit terms offered to purchasers; use uniform trade-in allowances; limit discounts; discontinue a free service or fix the price of one component of an overall service; adhere uniformly to previously-announced prices and terms of sale; establish uniform costs and markups; impose mandatory surcharges; purposefully reduce output or sales in order to charge higher prices; or purposefully share or pool markets, territories, or customers.
Price fixing is permitted in some markets but not others; where allowed it is often known as resale price maintenance or retail price maintenance.
In neo-classical economics, price fixing is inefficient. The anti-competitive agreement by producers to fix prices above the market price transfers some of the consumer surplus to those producers and also results in a deadweight loss.
However, like Wal-mart, slowly Amazon is devaluing items that once had a collectible value. As guardians of antique books, this often has rare and out of print items tossed by un-informed sellers (and there are many individuals who sell books online because it is an easy and inexpensive way to obtain their inventories). IF this continues, there may not be as many copies of Firsts by once-valued authors. I have already seen books that were valued in the 1980s into the hundreds well under $50.00.
I understand supply and demand, but IF uninformed sellers see that a First of say a Faulkner isn’t worth much, they may toss their fine copy not understanding that all the others are ‘compromised.’
This saddens me. The era of the Kindle may not last, then what will happen when there aren’t any of these richly produced copies out there.
I sigh. I guess I am an old-timer. I remember when books were a worthy collectible, and actually enhanced your standing as an intelligent person. Now, I guess it is based only on your…car…
Debbie
Makes you wonder what kind of monster we’re feeding our commissions to.
I don’t really see what the big deal is. I make more money with Amazon than I can anywhere else with my books – they get me the traffic that I can’t get on my own… if they don’t want me to sell my books at lower prices elsewhere, that is fine with me!
Mike is under the impression that this is only about AZ not wanting us to sell for less elsewhere as only being an AZ RULE!
AZ is stepping into our business and is TELLING US WHAT TO CHARGE ELSEWHERE!
How would you like your employer [if you had one] telling you who to Marry or Date?
I gave links to Wikipedia on what laws are being broke and they are indeed being broken.
Following the Collectible and “not to be sold cheaper elsewhere” is “Restraint of Trade” and a violation of our “Free Market System”.
Mike is typical of Hobby or part-time Sellers with no Industry knowledge, love of books or Media and lack of Business Knowledge and Enterpreneurial Spirit.
Amazom GREED has hit the US by Enforcing Price Parity. Anti-competitive and is designed to put the little guy out of business.
One Amazon store was warned, they are called Policy Violations, for one item with only a price difference of $1.43 USD. Obviously it was another large seller that reported them to the Amazon police. But the small seller must either abide or be kicked off Amazom. No deep pockets to hire $500 per hour attorneys to stop this injustice.
SHOP the SMALL Stores and DO NOT BUY on Amazon. There are plenty of deals better than what’s on Amazon because of the commisions Amazon collects.
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