EC begins new anti-trust investigation into Amazon for use of Buy Box criteria
The European Commission starts an investigation into Amazon. That would violate competition rules by favoring proprietary services in the Buy Box and Prime program. The EC has also filed a formal complaint against Amazon in a previous investigation.
With the new investigation, the European Commission is looking specifically at the Buy Box and Prime labels that are placed with some products. Sellers can get a Buy Box label with their product if it sells well, or a Prime label if they participate in a special Amazon program. The Commission wants to investigate which criteria are used to display the Buy Box label to users. According to the Commission, that Buy Box label would be a label sought after by sellers, because a large proportion of sales are generated by that label. The Commission suspects, on the basis of a preliminary investigation, that Amazon favors sellers who receive such a label if they use Amazon’s logistics environment and delivery services.
The EC also wants to look at the use of a Prime label. The Commission is examining the criteria that sellers must meet before they can participate in the Prime program. That Prime label would be valuable to sellers as there are more and more Prime members they can sell to. The EC wants to know which rules those sellers must comply with and whether they are not in conflict with European rules on trade competition.
The Commission has also filed a formal complaint with Amazon in the context of a previous investigation it started last year. In that investigation, the Commission looks at the use of data that Amazon collects by offering a platform to external sellers. “As a marketplace provider, Amazon has access to non-public data from third parties, such as number of products sold, sales of sellers, number of visitors, data related to shipments, past seller behavior and data on warranties,” the Commission said. An exploratory study would have shown that employees of Amazon’s own sales platform have access to large amounts of such data. Amazon’s systems would aggregate that data and use it to improve its own sales. That would give Amazon an unfair advantage over competing services.
The official investigation into this started as early as July. Now the EC has sent its statement of objections to Amazon, an official step through which the Commission is notifying the company of findings from the investigation. Amazon can then review all of the collected documents, file an appeal and request an interrogation.
Amazon says in a response to Reuters that it does not agree with the charges, but the company does not provide further details. It is not the first time that Amazon has been accused of abusing its market position. In the US, the government concluded last month that Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook were abusing their monopoly positions. That is why there is now also an investigation into the companies.