Amazon reaches agreement to close two Brussels investigations

The American online sales giant Amazon has reached an agreement to close two investigations by Brussels. The European Commission accused it of breaches of competition, particularly in the use of data from independent retailers selling on its site.

In July, the American group had proposed changes to its practices to meet the concerns of Brussels. “The Commission has accepted the commitments offered by Amazon,” EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager announced at a press conference on Tuesday. “Now Amazon will have six months, until June 2023” to comply, she said.

“We are satisfied to have responded to the concerns of the European Commission and to have resolved these questions,” reacted a spokesperson for the distributor. ‘Although we still disagree with several of the European Commission’s preliminary conclusions, we are committed to a constructive approach,’ he said.

The American platform has a dual role: it provides independent sellers with a marketplace on which they can sell products directly to consumers, and it sells products itself as a retailer, in competition with these sellers. The European Commission had opened an investigation in July 2019, accusing Amazon of relying on commercial data from independent retailers to calibrate its offer, considering that this distorts competition.

Preferential treatment

It had opened a second investigation in November 2020 for suspicion of preferential treatment of sellers using its logistics and delivery services. To close the first file, Amazon notably committed ‘to refrain from using non-public data relating to the activities of independent sellers on its marketplace, or drawn from them, for its retail activities who are in competition with these sellers’.

Regarding the second investigation, he notably promised, as part of his Prime program, to allow sellers “to freely choose any carrier for their logistics and delivery services”. Amazon was also suspected of bias in granting sellers access to the ‘Buy Box’, a button that allows customers to place items directly into their cart and which highlights the offer from a seller for a chosen product.

The platform has pledged to provide ‘equal treatment to all sellers when ranking their offers for the purposes of selecting the winner of the +Buy Box+’ and ‘to display a second offer competing with that of the winner s’ there is a second offer sufficiently differentiated from the first as regards price or delivery’. These commitments were the subject of negotiations with the Commission, which obtained some improvements from Amazon.

The group has undertaken, in particular, to introduce a centralized complaint system open to all sellers and carriers who wish to report non-compliance with certain competition rules.

/ATS