Noah Smith schreibt auf Bloomberg über die Private-Label-Strategie von Amazon:
Amazon makes its own private-label products that compete with the offerings of independent merchants on its platform. A recent paper by economists Feng Zhu and Qihong Liu observed Amazon’s behavior over time, and found that it tends to introduce proprietary products in niches that smaller merchants did the work of discovering by finding out what consumers like. Amazon then piggybacks on their efforts. 1
Nichts neues, Hausmarken kann man hierzulande in jedem Supermarkt und Drogeriegeschäft sehen. Aber Amazon (und Onlinehändler grundsätzlich) haben mehr Möglichkeiten für Markteinblicke:
One of these tools is search. Customers look for products using Amazon’s internal search function. Independent sellers can try to take sales from rivals by buying placements in the search results for a rival’s brand-name product — for example, when a customer searches for Purina dog food, she might see a promoted result for Kibbles ‘n Bits. But Amazon doesn’t allow other sellers to compete with its private-label products this way — if you search for an Amazon product, you’re going to see an Amazon product first and nothing else. But if you search for the other company’s product, you might see an Amazon product promoted at the top of the list. Amazon now is experimenting with a feature that automatically includes Amazon products in every search. And search isn’t the only advantage a platform has in the digital age; Amazon also collects potentially crucial sales and marketing data that it can choose not to share with third-party merchants.
Kombiniert mit Zentralisierungstendenzen im Onlinehandel, ist das durchaus problematisch was die Wettbewerbssituation angeht. Smith über mögliche Regulierungsansätze:
So if Amazon is chewing up the small-business world — and the e-commerce world in general — what’s to be done? One approach is to identify and ban Amazon’s specific anticompetitive practices, as European authorities are trying to do in the case of data sharing. Another approach is to try to introduce competition into the e-commerce platform space by banning MFNs and other anticompetitive practices. But these efforts may be inadequate, since the former involves a continuous cat-and-mouse game between regulators and Amazon, and the latter probably won’t be enough to overcome the strong network effect driving the concentration of online retail.
Another alternative, of course, is simply to break up Amazon. But before such a drastic step is taken, economist Hal Singer argues, antitrust authorities should consider a gentler alternative — a nondiscrimination regime. This would basically allow any third-party merchant to lodge a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission or another independent tribunal. Although only larger merchants would have the resources to lodge such complaints, any victories they won would benefit smaller businesses as well, by curbing Amazon’s anticompetitive stratagems.
MFNs sind „most-favored nation“-Klauseln, also Verpflichtungen der Verkäufer, ihre Waren nirgendwo zu einem günstigeren Preis anzubieten. In Verbindung mit einem hohen Marktanteil eines Marktplatzes lässt sich hier leicht erkennen, wie solche Klauseln dem Wettbewerb weitere Spielräume geben und den Graben um’s Geschäftsmodell stärken. Solche Vertragsklauseln zu verbieten wäre sinnvoll.
Im Grunde ist regulatorisch alles abzuschwächen oder zu verbieten, was die Nachfrageseite von Marktplätzen und Plattformen indirekt durch Vertragsklauseln mit Lieferanten weiter stärkt. Ein Fall davon sind Exklusivitätsklauseln, die ich hier bereits angesprochen hatte. MFNs und vergleichbare wettbewerbsverzerrende Massnahmen zählen ebenfalls eindeutig dazu.
Vertikale Plattformintegration, in diesem Fall Amazons Hausmarken, ist allerdings nochmal ein anderer, komplizierterer Fall..
