Internal emails show how Amazon raises prices across the Internet, lawsuit says

Some of the price increases Amazon requested were higher than others. Whereas emails showed Amazon pushed Walmart and Levi’s to raise the price of khaki pants by about a $1.50, another vendor, All the Rages, got Walmart to increase prices of two different lamps by about $15 each. Even man’s best friend has been targeted by the alleged price-fixing. Emails showed one vendor, GlobalOne, used a “happy face emoji” after Chewy agreed to increase prices on 13 kinds of Canine Naturals pet treats. In that example, Amazon immediately took steps to increase prices even more after Chewy agreed to the initial request to price match, Bonta alleged. “Overall this looks like it’s working!” GlobalOne’s spokesperson reported to Amazon when the higher prices popped up on both platforms. Some requests for price increases were permanent, Bonta alleged. Other times, Amazon sought temporary price increases ahead of some of the biggest sales days on its platform in a seeming bid to coerce vendors at key moments when they couldn’t afford to push back. As a result, Amazon seemingly set a higher base price before enacting significant price drops that were intended to surge sales. For example, the e-commerce giant threatened to remove four products sold by a furniture company called Armen Living “immediately” before the “critical sales days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday,” if “drastically” lower prices weren’t increased on rival sites, including Home Depot’s website. That pressure campaign sought to mark up a barstool from $156.58 to $172.97 and a dining chair from $103.56 to $119.99, emails showed. Similarly, Amazon pushed a lawn/garden vendor, Scotts, to request a price increase “even if it is just for the three days leading up to” Prime Day, an email showed. “Amazon is consistently identified as America’s lowest-priced online retailer, and we’re proud of the low prices customers find when shopping in our store,” Blafkin said. However, Bonta argued that the examples surfaced in the lawsuit are substantial evidence of explicit price-fixing. They “are not outliers” but “illustrative of countless interactions—spanning years and many different employees and product lines—in which Amazon, vendors, and Amazon’s competitors agree to increase and ‘fix’ the prices of products on other retail websites,” he alleged. “Amazon’s goal is to insulate itself from price competition by preventing lower retail prices in the market,” Bonta alleged. To achieve this, he noted that “coercive exchanges with vendors abound in Amazon documents.” He alleged that additional discovery has shown that Amazon trains its employees to use vague language in emails or, better yet, to avoid having such discussions by email. As best practice, Amazon workers are told to request that vendors schedule calls to negotiate what Amazon deems “problematic” pricing on rival sites due to the “delicate” nature of the requests. Bonta is hoping this evidence will help California secure a preliminary injunction blocking Amazon from any price-fixing while the trial proceeds. A hearing on the request for the preliminary injunction is scheduled for July 23, while the case is scheduled to go to trial in January 2027, the press release said. “Amazon’s price fixing is taking money out of the pockets of millions of California consumers every day and reducing available product selection/choice,” Bonta alleged, arguing that California had shown that it was likely to prevail in proving Amazon fixed prices. To fight the request, Amazon will need to demonstrate that it “would suffer grave or irreparable harm from the issuance of the preliminary injunction,” Bonta said. And he expects that “Amazon cannot meet this burden,” since the price-fixing is allegedly “explicit.” “The price-fixing is not driven by the vendors,” Bonta told the court. “Rather, Amazon tells vendors what prices it wants to see to maintain its own profitability.” “Amazon cannot show that any harm arises from a prohibition against illegal acts,” and financial loss does not “suffice to show grave or irreparable harm,” Bonta argued. “You don’t see price-fixing so explicitly and egregiously in writing like this,” Bonta told the NYT.