European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager (Competition) has filed an official complaint against Amazon online store on Tuesday. According to Vestager, Amazon is abusing its dual role as a provider of a sales platform on which it also sells products in order to compete with independent sellers.
According to Vestager, Amazon plays a dual role as a provider of a sales platform, on which it also sells products itself. “We need to make sure that these types of platforms don’t get in the way of competition,” says Vestager. “Data from independent sellers should not be used by Amazon if Amazon itself is a competitor.”
As a provider of a marketplace, Amazon has access to business data from companies that is not publicly available, according to the European Commission. This concerns, for example, the number of products ordered and the number of online visitors that sellers have had on their offers. This would mainly happen in Germany and France.
Amazon has been given a few weeks by the European Commission to respond to the complaint. An Amazon spokesman says against Engadget that the company does not recognize itself in the findings of Brussels. Amazon says it will do everything it can to make sure the European Commission understands the facts. The company says it plays a minor role in the global retail market, adding that “more than 150,000 European companies sell through Amazon stores, generating tens of billions of euros and hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
Second investigation started
The Commission has also launched a second investigation looking into the possible preferential treatment of Amazon’s own products. It is also being investigated whether stores that use Amazon’s logistics systems will also play a pioneering role.
Amazon’s approach has long been viewed with suspicion by authorities in various countries. In 2018, the German competition authority started an investigation into Amazon’s dual role as a sales platform and seller of its own products. This issue is also being investigated in the US.
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