The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of America has sued Amazon, alleging that their most popular features may turn out to be illegal.

If you’re on the Amazon website, you’ll probably find many unbelievable deals with next-day delivery - enticing customers to buy these products are two bright buttons, labelled ‘Buy it Now,’ and ‘Add to basket.’ These buttons encourage buyers to purchase items at the very moment they see them, boosting sales for many external sellers, which most of the products listed on Amazon are sold by.

However, this is not always the case - sometimes, Amazon will remove these buttons on some items. Amazon regularly scrutinizes the web using advanced robotic programs, and if they find an item on their website is even a few pennies more expensive than the price the supplier is selling it for on a different site, Amazon will punish that seller by removing those large buttons (Buy Now and Add to Basket), causing major drops in sales for the suppliers. Instead, Amazon will write in small black text ‘see all buying options,’ which makes it seem like that item is out of stock or will take a long time to ship.

At this point, sellers essentially have three options. Firstly, they could lower the price on Amazon until it equals their other selling price - however, this may cause a loss of money for the seller, so the minority of people choose this. More common choices are the other two options: raising the price on the other site or eliminating the listing on the other site altogether. Since sales on Amazon are so important for sellers, this sudden button removal is fatal to them, and it’s likely they’ll sacrifice all other means of profit to boost the Amazon listings. This basically means Amazon is forcing sellers to list products only on Amazon - this is allegedly illegal, as it may be under the category of ‘monopolistic tactics.’

As well as this, the FTC is also claiming that Amazon’s Prime Delivery services may also be illegal - this is also because this limit’s the seller’s choice. If sellers want to list their product under the ‘Prime’ category, they have to use the Amazon logistics program - this means their warehouse, their packaging, their delivery staff - which costs extra. About 170 million people are enrolled with the Prime subscription in America, which is about half the population - including kids. This essentially means sellers are forced to use Prime, as otherwise their sales will plummet.

In contradiction to these two main points, and to the larger allegation that Amazon is being monopolistic and anti-competitive, Amazon and their lawyers have had many statements to make. They say that it would be wrong to knowingly show customers bad deals, and that they serve customers, so they want to do it right. For the Prime argument, they simply say it’s actually a benefit towards sellers as they can use warehouses and delivery services easily, without having to have a supply chain or a system that requires many people. They’ve also said they’re the most ‘customer obsessed’ company in the world, and that they’re doing these things to support sellers and buyers in different ways.

From the NTS NEWS reporters’ perspective, we’ve come to the conclusion that the button removal is completely unfair, as it restricts sellers’ ability to sell elsewhere, but offering a fast-delivery service shouldn’t be punished.