If you sell on Amazon, Amazon already sets the price on your own website

If you sell physical goods on Amazon, Amazon is quietly setting the price on your own website. It does this through its fee stack and a parity rule that polices every other shop that stocks you.

I went into this week's reading expecting the referral fee to be the villain. The 15% commission turns out to be ordinary: in most categories it matches what eBay and Walmart charge. The money is in everything bolted on afterwards. Marketplace Pulse, working from sellers' own P&Ls, counts 20-35% for Fulfillment by Amazon, including storage, and up to 15% more for advertising. Its estimate of Amazon's total take has climbed from about 40% to more than 50% of seller revenue over five years, and it puts the bill for a typical private-label seller at 50-60% of sales. Not-Ship, a consumer newsletter that has been picking this apart, says the figure was about 19% in 2014.

Sellers can't absorb that, so they raise prices. Because the referral fee is a percentage, every price rise pays Amazon a little more. Then the Fair Pricing Policy closes the loop. Offer the same item cheaper elsewhere, including on your own site, and Amazon can strip your Buy Box or suspend your account. Sellers told CNBC in 2024 they lost the Buy Box after Target put their goods on sale. More Perfect Union found a seller suspended over a one-cent gap with Target. California's attorney general, Rob Bonta, alleges worse: documents unsealed on 20 April 2026 show, he says, Amazon leaning on vendors including Levi Strauss & Co. and Hanes to get Walmart, Target and Home Depot to raise their prices. Amazon has denied breaking antitrust law.

Put those pieces together and I think Amazon has become the price-setter for a large slice of the web. A brand's direct site, its wholesale partners and its distributors all end up anchored to a number built to cover a marketplace cut of half or more. Your own store, which costs you a fraction of that to run, carries Amazon's margin anyway, and you keep none of the difference. Operators who sell to retailers and run a direct channel are effectively subsidising Amazon's fee growth twice.

Amazon's answer, since California first sued in 2022, is that sellers set their own prices and that, like any store, it simply declines to highlight offers that aren't competitive. It says FBA costs 30% less than standard shipping, and it points to a similar case in the District of Columbia that was dismissed. I can follow that logic for about a sentence. On Amazon the Buy Box is where the sale happens, so hiding it is a sales penalty with a politer name. In April the San Francisco Superior Court denied Amazon summary judgment on a key crossclaim, and according to Bonta's office it found Amazon could not show that removing the "Add to Cart" and "Buy Now" buttons was legal or procompetitive. Germany's Bundeskartellamt went further on 5 February, prohibiting Amazon's price control mechanisms and ordering it to disgorge an initial 59 million euros. Its president, Andreas Mundt, rejected the low-prices defence and said Amazon could motivate sellers by "reducing the fees and commissions they have to pay". That decision is not yet final, and Amazon keeps room to intervene in cases of excessive pricing.

So stop pricing your own channels in sympathy with Amazon and start pricing them against it. Build your direct price from your own cost to serve. Run each SKU's Amazon P&L at a 50-60% take and see which products only survive because prices are inflated everywhere else. Where parity bites, stop listing identical offers: put different pack sizes, bundles or SKUs on Amazon and on your own site, so there is no like-for-like price for a monitoring system to flag. Ask your retail partners, in writing, whether anyone has asked them to move a price.

Do not wait for the courts. California's trial is set for 19 January 2027. On 9 October Judge John Chun refused Amazon's request to push the FTC case, brought with state attorneys general, back to June 2027, so it opens on 29 March. Appeals will follow whatever happens. Before your next quarterly pricing review, pull every SKU where you lost the Buy Box in the past twelve months and line the dates up against price cuts at Target, Walmart and your own store. Every match is a sale where you priced to protect Amazon's fees, and a candidate for repricing this quarter rather than after a verdict in 2027.

Prompted by How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet, Not-Ship.