In June, The US Congress published 5 discussion bills which could serious impact Amazon’s ability to sell products on their own platform. One bill in particular, The Ending Platform Monopolies Act aims to stop a marketplace from selling products on their own marketplace. Other bills address promoting your own products on your marketplace, mergers for big tech companies, making it easier to migrate your personal data from one social media company to another and increasing filing fees for mergers to raise cash.
Amazon have recently emailed some sellers warning them of the intentions of the US Congress:
“We’re reaching out to a small group of our sellers to make them aware of a package of legislative proposals, currently in Congress, that is aimed at regulating Amazon and other large technology companies. It is early in the process and the bills are subject to change, but we are concerned that they could potentially have significant negative effects on small and medium-sized businesses like yours that sell in our store.”
– Amazon email
Now, Amazon are stepping up their campaign with a website encouraging Amazon merchants to “stay informed and involved on legislation that could impact your business“. The introduction to the website reads:
“Congress recently introduced a package of regulatory legislative proposals targeted at a few large technology companies, including Amazon. While it is early in the legislative process, if enacted, these bills would jeopardize Amazon’s ability to operate a marketplace for sellers, potentially resulting in hundreds of thousands of American small and medium-sized businesses losing access to Amazon’s customers and services. This would obviously hurt small businesses’ ability to generate the revenue they do today, and hurt hundreds of millions of consumers who appreciate the broad selection and lower prices that our selling partners provide.”
– Amazon Support Small Sellers website
The ramifications of the bill could result in removing the ability to sell as a third party merchant on Amazon meaning that only 1st party Amazon vendor relations would survive. The alternate would be that Amazon would be prohibited from selling on their own marketplace and have to spin off Amazon Retail to then operate as a merchant.
If you would like to stay informed as Amazon gets more information about what this legislation could mean for you and have the opportunity to have your voice heard then sign up to the mailing list here.
