Quote:
Originally Posted by Dopedangel
I think you are not getting what Amazon is doing and how it is anticompetitive. Lets say your book is being sold for $10 where $7 is for you $3 for the sellers. Now lets say a seller is willing to make less money and sell for $9 now where you still get your $7 but the seller get $2. But Amazon says that you have to relist with them at $9 meaning you get $6.7 and Amazon gets $2.3...
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Unfortunately that is nothing to do with the question I asked.
You had claimed that
Amazon forcing suppliers to give it the cheapest price... and I asked
Would you point me to a trusted source where that claim is made. That because as far as the Bloomberg link [which you posted when making the claim]
says Amazon requires in its purchase contracts terms as good as is offered to others i.e. Amazon does not require to be the "cheapest", just that it wants to “ensure that Amazon is offered terms at least as good as those for its competitors.”.
So I am waiting for a trusted source which validates your claim that Amazon requires to be offered the cheapest selling price by its suppliers i.e. terms and conditions in which Amazon requires the price of the supply to it to be lower than the same supply to the seller's other customers.
I am not saying that they don't, just that your Bloomberg link makes no such claim and I am just seeking validation of your claim.
In your example you actually have Amazon's buying price as being the same as its competitors, whereas your claim is that they force
suppliers to give it the cheapest price (i.e. give it a price cheaper than its competitors get). So your example does not address my question.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dopedangel
Amazon is not the only ebook distribution channel to discount books without the prior consent of the author – and price drops are fine if they help you sell more books without denting your profit, but only Amazon insists on being the cheapest supplier as part of their terms and conditions
only Amazon will drop your book if it’s cheaper on a different store
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I think what is being forgotten is that Amazon is a customer, it seems a strange claim that a customer has to get the author's approval of the price that the customer on sells at. That would, in fact be anticompetitive because the author is then preventing competition among the retailers.
Furthermore you seem to be saying that Amazon has to sell an author's books even if Amazon does not want to. For example, you seem to be saying that if another retailer sells a title at a lower price than Amazon wishes to sell at, then Amazon has to keep listing the book at its higher selling price even if Amazon considers it not worth its while to do so and would rather drop it rather than meet the competition of the lower price offered by other retailers.
None of this stuff is new, it happens and is accepted in all sorts of markets. A very visible, but just one of many examples, is supermarkets where the supermarket as a customer may require its suppliers to offer them prices which are no higher than those the supplier sells at to the supermarket's competitors, and if they don't they drop the line. Furthermore, going further, arrangements where supermarkets "sell" prime shelf space to a supplier's line, for example, are common (e.g. I will put your line in prime shelf space, or promotional space, but you will have to take some of the risk of my giving up that space from another proven performing product by cutting your price of supply to me or by crediting me back any lessening of profit that may eventuate from my reallocating that space to you from the previous performing shelf holding product).
Maybe authors and publishers think they have some precious place in the business world making them immune from competitive business practices common in other markets. If Amazon are dragging them into the real world by demanding their rights as their customer to not be disadvantaged insofar as the price and terms that they have to buy titles in at, and that their own selling price is their own business not the author's, and if they do not get those they then dump the title, then, in my view, that is an excellent thing.