Amazon is yet again facing a competition lawsuit in the UK, with £2.7 billion in damages being sought on behalf of 200,000 third-party sellers on the platform.
The lawsuit, raised by Prof Andreas Stephan of the University of East Anglia, will come before the UK’s Competition Appeals Tribunal.
The claim argues that tech giant Amazon is abusing its market dominance, putting third-party sellers at a disadvantage.
Third-party sellers claim that Amazon has favoured its own products and logistics services, and have unfairly placed a condition of Prime membership on the use of Amazon’s own logistics services over competitors.
Further, claimants argue that Amazon meddles with inter-platform completion, making it more difficult for third-party vendors to sell their products for less on other platforms.
The opt-out collective lawsuit means that eligible sellers automatically are included in the claim unless they opt-out, and there is no cost to the sellers included.
The allegations are nothing Amazon has not faced before – regulators have long investigated how they use of third-party data to their advantage on the marketplace.
“As a result of these abuses, third-party sellers have lost sales, faced increased costs and paid higher fees to Amazon for its services than they would have under normal conditions of competition,” the complainant wrote in a press release.
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TechCruch contacted Amazon for comment, and the company emailed a response: “We are confident that these claims are baseless and that this will be exposed in the legal process.
Over 100,000 small and medium sized businesses in the UK sell on Amazon’s store, more than half of all physical product sales on our UK store are from independent selling partners, and the fact is that we only succeed when the businesses we work with succeed.”
Amazon has faced a similar lawsuit earlier this month, which was filed by the British Independent Retailers Association, with similar allegations seeking £1.1bn.
The lawsuits from third-party sellers and retailers follows years of anti-trust investigations from EU and UK authorities, with the e-commerce titan opting in for settlements with the UK Competition and Markets Authority and the EU’s competition watchdog.





