I fail to see how third pary sellers, of which Amazon take a cut, are significantly different that suppliers if traditional retail outlets. The primary difference is less risk for Amazon, but otherwise they seem to have a very similar relationship of traditional retail <-> supplier. Not the same, no, but similar enough not to split hairs on the topic when discussing Amazon's market influence.
According to Amazon, they are very different. A supplier supplies stuff that you sell. When convenient, Amazon asserts that they are mere conduits to the sellers’ inventory.
Add FBA, and suppliers are sort of like consigners, except Amazon claims to be at arms length, so as to avoid liability.
So what? Thats a given. The question posed is how it is functionally different, not what legal relationships have been used to circumvent standard supply chain regulation.
Agreed. Recently Amazon stopped showing addresses to sellers for FBA orders. If you don't even know who your customer is, it's hard to argue you are the retailer.
Emails and phones have been gone a while. Essentially all you get is a generic amazon hosted forwarding email address if you want to talk to your customers.
Phone removal happened in waves. The most recent wave was about 6 months ago. Fba phone numbers went to amazon owned phone numbers with giant extensions
Iirc, FBA phones hadn't been available for two years, it's MF phone numbers that got proxied to Amazon phone numbers six months back. Then 1-2 months ago FBA addresses vanished.
If some other party did have your contact info and marketed to you based on your purchases, controlled the entire transaction, shipped the product to you, etc, each detail makes them more the retailer and the third party "seller" more of a supplier than a retailer.
Except Amazon has a much more tightly ingrained relationship with 3rd part sellers than just collecting rent. They can directly influence pricing, decide which products can and cannot be sold, and take a margin of each purchase, not just a flat fee for space used (although they also take that for FBA items). I can't really think of an aspect of the retailer <-> supplier relationship that isn't in effect between Amazon and its sellers.
