Amazon Hides Cheaper Items With Faster Delivery, Lawsuit Alleges (arstechnica.com) 23
A class-action lawsuit alleges (PDF) that Amazon manipulates its platform through a biased algorithm to favor the "Buy Box" for items that generate higher fees for Amazon, often leading consumers to overpay for products that could be obtained cheaper and just as quickly from other sellers on the platform. Ars Technica reports: The lawsuit claims that a biased algorithm drives Amazon's "Buy Box," which appears on an item's page and prompts shoppers to "Buy Now" or "Add to Cart." According to customers suing, nearly 98 percent of Amazon sales are of items featured in the Buy Box, because customers allegedly "reasonably" believe that featured items offer the best deal on the platform.
"But they are often wrong," the complaint said, claiming that instead, Amazon features items from its own retailers and sellers that participate in Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), both of which pay Amazon higher fees and gain secret perks like appearing in the Buy Box. "The result is that consumers routinely overpay for items that are available at lower prices from other sellers on Amazonâ"not because consumers don't care about price, or because they're making informed purchasing decisions, but because Amazon has chosen to display the offers for which it will earn the highest fees," the complaint said.
Authorities in the US and the European Union have investigated Amazon's allegedly anticompetitive Buy Box algorithm, confirming that it's "favored FBA sellers since at least 2016," the complaint said. In 2021, Amazon was fined more than $1 billion by the Italian Competition Authority over these unfair practices, and in 2022, the European Commission ordered Amazon to "apply equal treatment to all sellers when deciding what to feature in the Buy Box." These investigations served as the first public notice that Amazon's Buy Box couldn't be trusted, customers suing said. Amazon claimed that the algorithm was fixed in 2020, but so far, Amazon does not appear to have addressed all concerns over its Buy Box algorithm. As of 2023, European regulators have continued pushing Amazon "to take further action to remedy its Buy Box bias in their respective jurisdictions," the customers' complaint said.
"But they are often wrong," the complaint said, claiming that instead, Amazon features items from its own retailers and sellers that participate in Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), both of which pay Amazon higher fees and gain secret perks like appearing in the Buy Box. "The result is that consumers routinely overpay for items that are available at lower prices from other sellers on Amazonâ"not because consumers don't care about price, or because they're making informed purchasing decisions, but because Amazon has chosen to display the offers for which it will earn the highest fees," the complaint said.
Authorities in the US and the European Union have investigated Amazon's allegedly anticompetitive Buy Box algorithm, confirming that it's "favored FBA sellers since at least 2016," the complaint said. In 2021, Amazon was fined more than $1 billion by the Italian Competition Authority over these unfair practices, and in 2022, the European Commission ordered Amazon to "apply equal treatment to all sellers when deciding what to feature in the Buy Box." These investigations served as the first public notice that Amazon's Buy Box couldn't be trusted, customers suing said. Amazon claimed that the algorithm was fixed in 2020, but so far, Amazon does not appear to have addressed all concerns over its Buy Box algorithm. As of 2023, European regulators have continued pushing Amazon "to take further action to remedy its Buy Box bias in their respective jurisdictions," the customers' complaint said.
Why Wouldn't They? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me introduce you to capitalism. See, the goal is to make as much money as you can. That is it. No restrictions. Ethics and reason and love do not enter the conversation. OK. School is over. Now get at there and make as much as you can because you can't get into Heaven without it.
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So is all that talk of efficiency just another con job?
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Everything is a con job. And also, sometimes, they are actually sort of telling you what they are doing by accident. Let me give you an example. They are using the word 'efficiency' as getting more efficient at relieving you of your money. So there is truth there. How they operate their backend isn't going to be exposed to the public anyway so they put out what they want to make everyone feel good. Lying is OK for the greater good of making money.
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...but eventually we get there, every now and then.
As the quote goes: You can always count on nations to do the right thing after exhausting all other options.
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The actual quote references Americans, not nations.
Amazon looks out for Amazon Profits (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, Amazon appears to favor methods and vendors that comply with their goal of being profitable.
News at eleven. Fiddlesticks... Probably gave away my geopolitical location right there.
Search engines are better (Score:4, Informative)
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Thing is, even when you go to the product page, they often don't show you the cheapest option. They show you the one with faster shipping, and then a tiny line of text buried in a busy page that says it might be available cheaper from sellers who don't ship from Amazon's warehouse.
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Which is EXACTLY what I want! If I'm on Amazon, I want to get it quickly, with minimal hassle, and be able to return easily if there's an issue. The other options are sometimes a little cheaper, a few cents. But do not include shipping and take weeks to get here. I know I'm paying a little extra, but it's part of the price for the fast shipping. I use that link to check other vendors sometimes. It's almost always like this.
That said, I avoid them for anything with a lot of fakes being sold on there. I'd muc
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If they were interested in making a usable UI, they would let you pick between fastest or cheapest option shown first, or maybe show both the fastest and cheapest so that you can choose.
They try to screw you when you buy Amazon delivered stuff too, by defaulting to fast shipping. You have to change it manually to free shipping every time, after dismissing at least two attempts to get you to subscribe to Prime.
If it wasn't for their good return policy, I'd avoid Amazon on principle.
That is why you look in more than one place (Score:3)
There is more than one shopping platform out there. If you are going to spend enough money to justify it, look at several offers before you decide.
Good (Score:4, Interesting)
So Amazon makes it harder to sell stuff there if Amazon isn't handling the fulfillment. As a consumer, that's generally to my benefit. If I have to return something, it's really easy for stuff that Amazon handles fulfillment on, but can be more complicated in other cases. And if Amazon handles fulfillment, that generally means I get my Prime shipping, so I don't have to worry about that, either. Maybe if you're not a Prime member, don't care about return hassles, and aren't batching your purchases to avoid shipping costs, then you could get things cheaper by looking at the other options when buying, but that's a minority of customers, so they're optimizing for the common case.
Amazon certainly does some stupid things that they should get smacked down on, but this isn't one of them.
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Agree with that. In addition i don't think i've ever seen a lower price (when including shipping) available when looking for other sellers from their product page anyway. Maybe it's different without Prime ?
I'm drifting away from amazon because of the poor search, sponsored results, questionable recommendations, near infinite clones of products of made-up brands, questionable product descriptions and specs, batching of unrelated products on the same page, poor curation of reviews, poor review and interacti
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Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But without disclosure, the consumer doesn't even have the information to make that call.
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Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But without disclosure, the consumer doesn't even have the information to make that call.
What do you mean "without disclosure"? It's disclosed on every product page that there may be other sellers with cheaper prices. Then, if you can read, you can read and click on the link. Usually what you find is sellers with the same thing at higher prices new and sealed, or lower prices with open boxes and/or openly used. And then you have to trust that "open box" doesn't actually mean "used and then put back in the box", which is not a safe bet.
There are lots of things wrong with Amazon, mostly the way t
Dupe (Score:2)
Does BeauHD get paid to do this?
So I look at the other sellers a lot (Score:3)
Any time an item isn't really cheap I look at the other sellers.
Yes, sometimes some of them are cheaper. But they are also usually some little crap shack whose very name is a put off, and if you look into their details they are a PITA to deal with.
The whole reason I use Amazon, to the extent that I do (I prefer eBay or even aliexpress) is that I'm buying something I fear will have issues and I want Amazon to be in charge of return or replacement.
MOST of the time, Amazon returns the best deal right up front. IME, almost always.
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Let the buyer beware. (Score:2)
This is usually given as the Latin, caveat emptor because it has been a recognised chunk of wisdom for a long time.
The logic is obvious:
Amazon exists to make as much profit as it can.
Amazon will therefore promote whatever yields the best profit.
The intelligent shopper will therefore look at whatever Amazon tries not to show you - stuff further down the page, stuff hidden behind tiny links, stuff on other websites - before parting with hard-earned dollars, pounds, euros.
And yes, as has been pointed out, buyi