Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

Looking at Amazon's filings, the argument they made is the following:

>Given the unprecedented size of the proposed class consisting of 288 million members, the individualized issues on which their claims depend, and the overwhelming evidence that the challenged conduct resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store, Plaintiffs have not—and cannot demonstrate that a class action would be manageable.

The "individualized issues" references arguments presented earlier in the filing. They also cite prior cases where class lawsuits have been denied certification because the class was too big to be manageable. You might disagree with Amazon's lawyers here, but it's unfair to characterize it as "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable". It's an "wild" argument because it's a strawman.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29...

> Sorry, we've wronged too many people to be held accountable! What a wild argument.

Class actions, as an alternative to the normal direct action lawsuits, are an accommodation in the legal system for economy of justice; a class that is too diverse in how they are situated with respect to the issues raised (which is a more accurate summary than the article’s “too large” for Amazon’s argument) negate that function.

I’m not saying the court ruled incorrectly on Amazon’s argument, just that the article is misleading on what the argument actually is.

Unfortunately this approach seems to fly all the time for large businesses.

Plucky startup takes the 'ask forgiveness rather than permission' approach and ignores a bunch of regulations, legal system doesn't care because they're just a plucky startup.

10 or so years later plucky startup is a massive corpo, another 5 or so years later the legal system catches up but they're a massive corpo making piles of cash and the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change compared to the piles of cash they made while ignoring those regulations.

Manageable isn't just from Amazon's side, it is also an argument from the side of the plaintiffs. e.g. "This class is too diverse. It will be like herding 300 million cats, which decreases the likelihood of arriving at a suitable settlement. Better to split this into multiple classes with more specific grievances".

Everyone benefits from the class being manageable (except maybe the plaintiffs' attorneys, who just want the biggest class they can possibly find).

I laughed at this line too, effectively “Our scale is so big we should only be allowed to profit from it”

Pardon me, I am looking forward to my future $0.03 cheque

Too big to fine?

Too big to fail.

No not easily.

Also, amazon straight up steals successful products from 3rd party sellers, rebrands them as Amazon basics, and then undercuts until the 3rd party seller goes out of business

That can easily be perceived as violating the ToS and get you kicked off the marketplace. Big risk to take if that's where you're making most of your $.

That savvy reality in which we all spin fucking discount prize wheels every time we buy something just because someone managed to monopolize a market.

I immediately just click the back button when some spin wheel discount thing pops up, I just figured it was temu leaking. Thank you for explaining why they are doing this, tho I still wonder why it has to be gamified and not just, click here for a coupon, is it because the agreement with Amazon precludes them from offering coupons, but neglects to forbid casino games?

It’s also technically illegal, in many jurisdictions, for something to be “on sale” permanently. Though lots of retailers get away with it.

Neither here nor there, but about 15 years ago while I was a fresh grad/hire at Amazon, I realized that the crawler that was supposed to enforce this had not been running for multiple years. I went out and fixed it and got it running again, and I showed about $8M/month revenue increase from this.

What did I get? From my skip level manager: "Great job, but too bad about that bug. Next time if it's perfect we can talk about promo" (the crawler went down for a day from an edge case that was preexisting, I fixed it same day)

I'm not sure it's really even enforced? For example

Republic of Tea blackberry sage tea, 50 count - $11 on their site, $13 on Amazon with Republic of Tea as the seller.

https://www.republicoftea.com/blackberry-sage-black/p/v00590...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0024SDYLI

And that's not really a super obscure product, since it's ranked #69 best selling for the "black tea" category.

The argument is that it is too large for the court to handle, not too large for Amazon to handle.

Class actions work by grouping many plaintiffs who have been harmed in the same way and whose damages if they win can be addressed in the same way (e.g., everyone gets a fixed amount of money, or a fixed percentage of what they spent, or something like that).

Then the cases of a small number of representatives of the class can be addressed at the actual trial, and the outcome applied to the whole class.

The larger the proposed class the more likely the variation in the harms to the members and in how to redress those harms, which can mean you need a larger number of representatives of the class at the actual trial.

Get large enough and it becomes difficult for the court to manage. In that case the class needs to be shrunk down to a set of plaintiffs with more uniform harms that can be addressed more uniformly. The people removed from the class might form another class or classes for separate suits, or sue as individuals, or some mixture of those options.

"I'm sorry your honor. We're breaking the law at such an extent it is impossible for us to be held responsible for it."

Why are the incentivised reviews always positive? And usually gushing also.

That's what a do-nothing Congress gets you.

Valve does not do this. Best I can tell, the idea that they do was created either maliciously or incompetently by the law firm suing them on antitrust grounds. What Valve does is assert that you may not offer Steam keys for your game at lower prices on other platforms, permanently. This is only possible because Steam lets game makers sell Steam licenses to their games on other platforms, cutting Valve out of the platform fees altogether. If you list your game on both the Epic Games store and Steam, you're just fine setting different prices on the two. If you sell Steam products keys to your users directly, who can then go and use those keys to claim your game on Steam, you can't undercut your Steam store listing on a permanent basis. You are even allowed to do temporary promotions on other platforms where you sell your Steam keys that you don't on Steam.

Elden Ring is currently $15 cheaper on GameBillet compared to Steam[0] - it even comes with a Steam activation key. If Valve did the same thing, sites like isthereanydeal.com wouldn't really have as much of a purpose.

[0]: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/elden-ring/info/

Every single major retailer does this. It's not collusion, it's just smart policy. Shelf space is insanely valuable. Retailers have customers walking around their stores (or making searches in Amazon's case) at the final step in the sales funnel. No retailer wants to get a customer that close to buying (often at considerable expense) then lose them because the brand either has weak channel price control or is trying to divert customers to their own website by offering a discount.

They do not. You are free to sell your game anywhere online for less. You simply cannot use the ability to generate steam keys to sell steam games externally and then proceed to undercut steam.

You are leveraging their infrastructure for that transaction and sale, they are free to set the rules there. They do not otherwise charge you for the infrastructure costs related to purchasing the game, supplying continued redownload, supplying update infrastructure and so on.

You can otherwise take your game and sell it on the Epic store or GOG or run your own download infrastructure and foot the thousands in bandwidth bills. And charge whatever you want