> Business practices, such as any reduction or elimination of shipping charges on an order, or of any other order-related fees and expenses
"Other order-related fees and expenses" is what would be considered the Amazon commission.
This isn't something worth debating... it's a fact that most things on Amazon are more expensive than if you found the seller's own website... I've been doing this for a long time. You are free to throw your money away based on some sense of "trust" you feel at Amazon.
Do some due diligence the next time you go to make a purchase on Amazon; I'd say 9 times out of 10, you will find a better deal elsewhere.
As a consumer, I'm aware that Amazon is often more expensive. It's often less expensive as well. It varies wildly based on product, merchant, category, etc. But I never debated any of that nor made any claims along those lines. I simply quoted Amazon's own Terms for merchants. Merchants are required to make the lowest price available in their Amazon listings and can have their product or account pulled if they do not. As a consumer (or competitor), feel free to report any merchants who refuse to comply. As a merchant myself, these terms are actually the reason we don't sell on Amazon at all at present.
Like I pointed out, that policy clearly allows you to "bake in" the commission rate.
Nobody would sell on Amazon if they had to sell it at the same price as their own website but take an additional 10%-30% loss (sometimes that 30% is the entire margin on a sale). This isn't "App Store" sales where the cost of the product can be fudged a bit... these are physical products that have a fixed cost of acquisition plus a lot of overhead (manpower, stock space, packaging, etc).
Majority of people who shop on Amazon do not price shop. They either feel everything is cheaper always (I hear this from friends and family all the time even though it's provable otherwise), or they feel some sort of "trust" with the website (not understanding majority of products sold on Amazon are from 3rd party sellers).
Amazon's products sold by Amazon are often cheaper than found elsewhere in my experience, usually due to them being willing to lose a lot of money on a particular product line to either gain long-term market-share or bolster some tertiary service of theirs.
3rd party sellers cannot compete with someone who is literally willing to lose millions of dollars for several years at a time just to snuff out a market.
When it comes to 3rd party sellers vs. 3rd party sellers, it's a more even playing field, but you will more often find the product listed on their site for cheaper since they are baking in the commission rate.
"Other order-related fees and expenses" is what would be considered the Amazon commission.
This isn't something worth debating... it's a fact that most things on Amazon are more expensive than if you found the seller's own website... I've been doing this for a long time. You are free to throw your money away based on some sense of "trust" you feel at Amazon.
Do some due diligence the next time you go to make a purchase on Amazon; I'd say 9 times out of 10, you will find a better deal elsewhere.