BeepAmazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products, making Amazon richer
brucethemooseI’ve pointed out Valve doing basically the same thing; games can’t be priced lower than Steam on competing game storefronts (not Steam key resellers), or Valve will threaten to delist your game. Which would be essentially kill it. And they obviously do this to protect their chunky store fee.
But personal loyalty goes a long way.
I’m trying to reframe the perspective here, not drag into an argument about Valve. A whole lot of people feel good about finding “deals” on Amazon, about Amazon services that have helped them, and especially about the value and convenience the whole platform provides. It’s easy for Lemmy to hate on Amazon, but for the average person, I think this is a harder sell than most of us realize. They’ll dismiss it as the “market working” or California sensationalism or, more likely, just filter it out as noise in their feed, just like most PC gamers would when they read something bad about Valve.
The Valve example sounds similar, but I think Amazon is comparably more nefarious:
- Valve chargers developers $100 per title, and a revenue sharing fee that starts at 30%
- in exchange, devs must follow Valve’s content and pricing policies (which requires developers not to undercut Steam’s prices
Amazon has a few different tiers for sellers, but in general, they charge:
- Monthly fees ($39.99 / mo)
- Referral fees (8-15%)
- Fulfillment and refund fees, which includes additional storage fees
- Advertising fees (for keyword bids or sponsored products)
Valve is kind enough to offer free promotion on the home page (if your game is popular, or has a sale), and digital games are much easier to scale, versus manufacturing and holding physical inventory. They also do a lot of nefarious shit, but I’d argue at least their partners aren’t being squeezed quite as much.
This is exactly my point; it’s easy to jump in and defend Valve for their good points when, at the end of the day, they take a third of all profits for themselves and have a pseudo monopoly with their platform, just to start.
One can make similar positive points about Amazon, about how much they can save retailers and consumers, especially before they enshittified so significantly.