Amazon is sued by 200,000 sellers for 24.8 billion yuan

Not long ago ( early June), the British Independent Retailers Association (Bira) took the lead in launching a class action lawsuit against Amazon. A total of 35,000 sellers participated in this class action lawsuit. They accused Amazon of abusing data and claimed 1 billion pounds (currently about 9.2 billion yuan) from it.

As a result, news broke last week (June 27th, UK time ) that Amazon will face another class action lawsuit in the UK - this lawsuit was initiated by Andreas Stephan, professor of competition law and dean of the law school at the University of East Anglia, on behalf of more than 200,000 Amazon's third-party sellers in the UK, demanding Amazon to pay 2.7 billion pounds in compensation (currently approximately 24.88 billion yuan) .

The lawsuit states that Amazon uses its dominant position in the UK e-commerce market to support its own brand of retail goods and logistics services ( FBA ), and uses FBA as a condition for being preferred by Prime members. The lawsuit also states that Amazon relies on its own algorithms to prevent third-party sellers from selling at lower prices on other platforms.

The plaintiffs also wrote in the press release: As a result of these abuses, third-party sellers lost sales, faced increased costs, and paid Amazon higher fees than under normal conditions.

  In recent years, competition authorities in many countries have been investigating complaints about Amazon's "use of third-party data" and "violation of antitrust laws" and have filed lawsuits (last year, 17 state attorneys general in the United States alone filed lawsuits against Amazon). At the same time, they are also studying the various components of Amazon's operating market, including FBA and Prime . Therefore, relevant lawsuits should not be unfamiliar to everyone, but the scale of this class action lawsuit is rare.

According to UK legal policy, class actions in the UK are "opt-out", so eligible sellers will be automatically included unless they indicate that they do not want to participate in the lawsuit. If there is no opt-out, and the lawsuit is successful, then the participating sellers are entitled to receive corresponding compensation or settlement funds.

Any British individual or company that used a professional account to sell goods to British consumers on Amazon between June 2018 and June 2024 is a party to this class action lawsuit. It is worth mentioning that Amazon reached an antitrust settlement with the UK Competition and Markets Authority in November last year.

In response to this class action lawsuit involving more than 200,000 British sellers, Amazon said that the allegations were groundless and would be disclosed in the legal process; there are more than 100,000 small and medium-sized businesses in the UK selling goods on Amazon, and more than half of the goods sold come from third-party sellers. Only if they succeed can Amazon succeed.

Coincidentally, on the same day ( June 27th, US time), the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry announced that Amazon's Shakopee warehouse had violated two new state laws due to worker safety hazards and was fined US$10,500 (currently approximately RMB 76,000).

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