Amazon Resolves EU Antitrust Concerns: Won't Matter Much

Amazon Resolves EU Antitrust Concerns: Won't Matter Much

Last week, Amazon agreed to a settlement with the EU about its investigations in 2019 and 2020 regarding these topics:

1 - Preventing them from using internal information against competitors obtained in their role as an operator but used in their role as a seller.

2 - Sellers will, in theory, be able to use Prime without Amazon logistics, and Amazon must set non-discriminatory conditions and criteria for the qualification of marketplace sellers and offers to Prime. Amazon must also add a second Buy Box if offers are unique enough in price or other characteristics. (which Amazon can set! so... ??)

Amazon will also not be able to send third-party logistics data to its carrier business.

My take:

* The first thing the cynic in me thought about was why can't Amazon can't just sign up for JungleScout or Helium10 like the rest of us ;-) Amazon is well-known to scrape the web for price discovery reasons, which isn't this non-privileged information?

* Smart sellers believe that even without using its internal marketplace data, Amazon still knows about its competition that is not on Amazon.

* Notice that it talks about which offers can "qualify" for Prime and now how they are ranked. My cynical view is this gives Amazon significant wiggle room in terms of actually implementing this policy. i.e. they are qualified, but without advertising, they may not appear ;-)

* Furthermore, this gives Amazon a license to finally enforce and promote standards on its FBM providers, which may, in other ways, end up consolidating the market around Amazon.

Look, many third-party logistics providers are just struggling to keep up with their own customers, and very few of them are in a position to challenge Amazon. I have long thought that instead of certifying the "seller" as part of its Fulfilled by Merchant criteria, Amazon should certify the logistics provider instead.

What's to prevent Amazon from being ruthless with this criteria and exploiting its competitive advantage in the market, built up with billions of dollars of investment in excellence?

Safe to say, if any European 3PLs benefit from this decision, it will be very few of them, and only after Amazon sorts out implementing its rankings and other factors, which could take some time.

* Lastly, the EU has acted on all sorts of things the US is not close at all to acting on. If the US won't act on a 92% Google search monopoly, what is the hope that they will act on Amazon?

Very little.