German Federal Cartel Office accuses Amazon of anti-competitive practices

The German Federal Cartel Office considers Amazon's influence on pricing on its Marketplace retail platform to be "competitively questionable". This is the result of a preliminary legal assessment that the cartel office sent to the e-commerce giant on Monday, according to a statement.

According to the assessment, retailers on the Marketplace should not exceed certain price limits set by Amazon. The authority believes that this could be an abuse of competition law and is now giving the company the opportunity to comment on the allegations.

47,500 retailers

The Amazon.de trading platform accounts for around 60 percent of sales in German online retail, according to the Cartel Office's statement. In addition to trading on its own account, Amazon maintains the marketplace with 47,500 German sales partners, according to its own information.

The Cartel Office explains that Amazon uses various algorithms to check the prices of retailers on its marketplace. If the prices are deemed too high, they are either removed from the marketplace entirely or displayed less prominently. In addition, there are further restrictions on the display, for example in the search results list.

The Cartel Office complains that these automatic mechanisms reduce the visibility of retailers' offers and interfere with sellers' pricing freedom in a non-transparent manner. According to the current assessment, the restrictions are "inappropriate and objectively unjustified".

The President of the Bonn authority, Andreas Mundt, considers this to be particularly risky for competition in e-commerce in Germany "if the affected retailers can no longer cover their own costs and the trading platform is used to hinder the rest of the online trade in a way that violates antitrust law".

Amazon rejects the accusations

Amazon firmly rejects the accusations. A company spokesperson emphasized that the company "in no way" agrees with the assessment. Companies on the Marketplace can set their prices freely and independently. If Amazon could not help its customers to find cheap offers, this would lead to a "poor shopping experience". Amazon would then have to "encourage uncompetitive or even abusive prices".

The Cartel Office has classified Amazon as a company with paramount cross-market significance for competition and is also relying on the means of the associated "extended abuse control" in the case. The group complained against this. However, the Federal Court of Justice supported the view of the cartel watchdog in 2024.

(wpl)