California’s Attorney General Bonta Accuses Amazon of Price Fixing that Secretly Drove up Online Prices

How the Alleged Scheme Worked According to the motion, discovery in California’s 2022 lawsuit has produced countless interactions in which Amazon, its vendors, and rival retailers allegedly agreed to raise prices or pull lower priced listings from competing sites.

Investigators say that, time and again, Amazon contacted vendors after spotting lower prices elsewhere and, under threat of dire consequences, pushed them either to raise prices on competitors’ websites, temporarily remove cheaper offers, or delist products entirely so that Amazon could maintain higher price points without losing sales.​ There are three main patterns in the motion.

First, when Amazon and a rival were price matching in ways that pushed prices down, either Amazon or the competitor, working through a shared vendor, would agree to increase the retail price or make the product temporarily unavailable, allowing the other to match a new, higher market price and increase what consumers paid.

Second, when a competing retailer discounted a product, that rival would later raise its price at Amazon’s request, communicated via the vendor, so that Amazon could follow the increase and again raise the price shoppers…