Today's Amazon (8/9/2026)
‘We were at their mercy’: inside the Amazon tactics that hiked prices across the internet
In some internal emails, Amazon employees have flagged low product prices on rival retailers’ sites as threats to Amazon’s own profitability, and informed the products’ suppliers that their sales on Amazon.com have been cut – or might soon be cut – going forward.
Other emails describe Amazon slashing its product prices to match retail rivals like Walmart and Home Depot, then pushing suppliers to compensate it for the revenue lost due to these lower prices.
The former customer success manager told the Guardian that higher-ups instructed Amazon employees to have certain conversations with suppliers over the phone in order to avoid a digital trail of potential price-fixing allegations.
Harnessing this knowledge of pricing data across the internet, Amazon adopted what one executive called a “game theory” approach to pricing which could help it evade the costs of a “perfectly competitive market”, according to the FTC’s lawsuit.
“Whatever euphemism it is, whether it be ‘update pricing’ or ‘resolve an issue’ or ‘address a concern’ in the market, all that means is: ‘Fix prices. Get your lower price up to Amazon’s higher price or suffer the consequences,’ and that’s illegal.”