WHEN AMAZON founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos was questioned about Amazon’s soaring fees at a Congressional hearing last year, he insisted that sellers were simply opting to buy more services. The final section outlines what policymakers must do to restore an open, fair, and competitive online market. The second part examines the pivotal role these fees play in the architecture of Amazon’s monopoly power, and how the company tries to hide that fact. The first part of this report looks at the size and growth of Amazon’s tolls and the crushing burden they place on independent businesses. AWS is on track to post about $61 billion in sales this year - a vast sum, but still only half the revenue Amazon will generate from seller fees. They even outpaced Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s massive cloud-computing division. They grew faster than Amazon’s own retail sales and faster than its Prime membership program. Over the last few years, seller fees grew much faster than every other major revenue stream at Amazon. Operating an unregulated, monopoly tollbooth that sits between businesses and consumers is wildly lucrative. That’s up from 30 percent in 2018, and 19 percent in 2014. Using a variety of fees, Amazon now pockets a 34 percent cut of the revenue earned by independent sellers on its site, our analysis found. Companies large and small must either sell on Amazon or forfeit access to much of the market.Īs we detail in this report, Amazon is exploiting its position as a gatekeeper to impose increasingly steep tolls on these businesses. In 15 of 23 major product categories, the tech giant captures more than 70 percent of online transactions. That’s because more than 60 percent of Americans looking to buy something online start their product search on Amazon, rather than a search engine. Businesses that make or sell consumer goods and want to reach shoppers online have little choice but to sell on Amazon’s site. The staggering scale of these fees provide evidence of Amazon’s monopolization of the online market and the high costs that come with it. This year, with its revenue from seller fees expected to swell by an additional $31 billion, Amazon Marketplace may end up large enough to qualify for a spot in the top 25 (if it were a stand-alone company). To put that in perspective, had Amazon’s third-party marketplace been a stand-alone company in 2020, when it took in $90 billion in seller fees, it would have ranked 31st on the Fortune 500 list of the world’s largest corporations - bigger than Citigroup, Facebook, and General Electric. In 2019, Amazon pocketed $60 billion in seller fees.This year, its take will soar to $121 billion, our new research finds. In this report, we find that, over the last two years, Amazon’s revenue from the fees it levies on third-party sellers has more than doubled. One of the most striking measures of Amazon’s monopoly power is the extraordinary amount of money that it’s able to extract from the independent businesses that rely on its site to reach customers. They are the essential fuel that feeds its market-domination strategies, enabling it to absorb massive, predatory losses designed to lock-in market control and fund breakneck expansion.ĭownload the Full Report | Download the Key Findings | Download the German Translation Introduction & Executive Summary These profits are not only the spoils of Amazon’s monopoly power. Even as these exorbitant fees bankrupt sellers, they are generating huge profits for Amazon, a fact that the tech giant conceals in its financial reports. This report finds that Amazon is exploiting its position as a gatekeeper to impose steep and growing fees on third-party sellers. Amazon’s dominance of online retail means that small businesses have little choice but to rely on its site to reach consumers.
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