Competition law: British retailers sue Amazon
British retailers have filed a competition lawsuit against Amazon over allegations of data misuse.
(Image: Nikita Burdenkov/Shutterstock.com)
The British Independent Retailers Association (BIRA) has filed a class action lawsuit against the online retailer Amazon at the CAT Competition Tribunal in London on behalf of around 35,000 retailers. They have cited data misuse as the reason for their lawsuit. Since October 2015, Amazon has allegedly been using non-public data from retailers on its Marketplace platform to sell cheaper competitor products itself.
Amazon Buy Box
The highly competitive "Amazon Buy Box", which accounts for 60 to 90 percent of total sales depending on the product category, was manipulated. The seller with the best price-performance ratio ends up in the box. A study has shown that the price in the box changes more than 14 times a day for half of the products. This is also known as dynamic pricing.
Amazon rejects the allegations
Amazon has rejected the allegations as unfounded. An Amazon spokeswoman told Reuters that her company was not aware of the lawsuit, but emphasized: "The fact is that we are only successful if the businesses we work with are too." The legal proceedings will show whether the allegations against Amazon are valid.
Many complaints, various reasons
Customers recently launched a class action lawsuit against Amazon Prime Video. Previously, Amazon was ordered to pay more than half a billion US dollars by a court in the US state of Illinois. The cloud subsidiary Amazon Web Services had infringed several patents held by the US company Kove. The patents are essential for Amazon Web Services to store and retrieve large amounts of data in the cloud. Amazon had also rejected these accusations and wanted to appeal.
(mack)
