1、By Stacy MitchellDecember 2021Amazons Toll Road How the Tech Giant Funds Its Monopoly Empire by Exploiting Small Businesses2Amazons Toll Road WWW.ILSR.ORGAbout the Institute for Local Self-RelianceThe Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) is a national research and advocacy organization that part

2、ners with allies across the country to build an American economy driven by local priorities and accountable to people and the planet. Whether its ghting back against the outsize power of monopolies like Amazon, ensuring high-quality locally driven broadband service for all, or advocating to keep loc

3、al renewable energy in the community that produced it, ILSR advocates for solutions that harness the power of citizens and communities. More at www.ilsr.org .About the AuthorStacy Mitchell is co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and directs its Independent Business Initiative, which

4、produces research and analysis, and partners with a broad range of allies to design and implement policies to reverse corporate concentration and strengthen local economies. Shes written several inuential reports and articles about Amazons power. Find her on Twitter stacyfmitchell .AcknowledgmentsMa

5、ny thanks to Ron Knox for research help and thoughtful feedback. Thanks also to Susan Holmberg for shepherding this along, and to Katy Milani, Hal Singer, and Kennedy Smith for their comments on the draft. And, nally, Im grateful to the many independent retailers, product-makers, and online sellers

6、who have shared their experiences with me and informed this analysis.For monthly updates on our work, sign up for the Hometown Advantage Bulletin: http:/hometownadvantage.org This report is licensed under a Creative Commons license. You are free to replicate and distribute it, as long as you attribu

7、te it to ILSR and do not use it for commercial purposes.3Amazons Toll Road WWW.ILSR.ORGTable of ContentsKey Findings . 4Introduction & Executive Summary . 5PART ONEHow Amazon Price-Gouges Sellers . 10Amazons Baseline Toll: Referral Fees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11Demanding a Bigge

8、r Cut: Advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11Building a Logistics Empire: Fulllment Fees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12Blocking Competition and Driving Up Consumer Prices . . . . . 14PART TWO Seller Fees are the Linchpin in Amazons Monopolization Strategy . 15Marketplace is Likel

9、y a Bigger Source of Prot than AWS . . . . 16How Seller Fees Spin Amazons Monopoly Flywheel . . . . . . . . . 19Sellers Fund Amazons Expansion into New Markets . . . . . . . . . 19CONCLUSION How Lawmakers Must Respond . 21Notes . 224Amazons Toll Road WWW.ILSR.ORGKey FindingsAmazons dominance of onli

10、ne retail means that small businesses have little choice but to rely on its site to reach consumers. This report nds that Amazon is exploiting its gatekeeper power to pocket a growing cut of the revenue earned by these independent sellers. Its doing this by imposing ever-larger fees on them. These e

11、xorbitant fees make it nearly impossible for sellers to sustain a viable business online. Most fail.Operating an unregulated, monopoly tollbooth that sits between businesses and consumers is wildly lucrative. Amazons revenue from the tolls it imposes on sellers has soared, growing much faster than e

12、very other major revenue stream, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), its vast cloud division. These fees generate huge prots for Amazon, a fact that the tech giant conceals in its nancial reports.Amazons ability to extract such steep tolls from businesses selling online is a striking illustration o

13、f its monopoly power. These fees also play a crucial role in how Amazon maintains that power. As this report details, Amazon depends on prots from seller fees to fund massive losses in other areas of its operations losses that serve to entrench and expand its dominance.Policymakers must act to end A

14、mazons exploitation and create an open, dynamic, and competitive online market. Key Finding: Amazons fees have grown sharply and are harming independent businesses. Amazon pockets an average of 34 percent of each sale made by independent businesses on its site. Thats up from 30 percent in 2018, and

15、19 percent in 2014. In just two years, Amazons revenue from seller fees has more than doubled, rising from $60 billion in 2019, to $90 billion in 2020, to a projected $121 billion in 2021. Seller fees have grown much faster than every other major revenue stream at Amazon, including AWS. At a Congres

16、sional hearing last year, Jeff Bezos testied that Amazon was taking a larger cut of sellers revenue because sellers had opted to buy more of its services. In fact, the average price sellers pay simply to list and sell a product has risen by 28 percent since 2015. Amazon penalizes sellers that offer

17、lower prices on other, less expensive shopping sites. This thwarts competition by ensuring that Amazons steep fees inate consumer prices across the web and not just on its own site. The crushing weight of these fees makes it almost impossible for sellers to operate a protable business. Most fail. Ye

18、t Amazon faces no risk of running out of sellers. A growing share of those on its U.S. site are based in China. fees to fund its monopolization and expansion strategies. Marketplace is almost certainly a bigger source of prot than AWS. Although Amazons nancials conceal the prots it makes from seller

19、 fees, we estimate that Amazon may have generated $24 billion in prots from Marketplace in 2020, compared to $13.5 billion from AWS. Prots from seller fees form the linchpin in Amazons market domination strategy. For one, these prots allow Amazon to sustain huge losses on Prime. By providing free sh

20、ipping for an annual fee that doesnt come close to covering the cost, Amazon has induced more than two-thirds of U.S. households to join Prime and made its platform the rst, and often only, shopping site they visit. Amazon also relies on prots from seller fees to prop up its own retail division, ena

21、bling it to offer prices on household staples that are on par with big chains like Walmart. This is essential to blocking competition. With revenue from seller fees pouring in over the last two years, Amazon spent heavily to buy other companies and expand its U.S. logistics footprint by 70 percent.K

22、ey Finding: To end Amazons exploitation of small business, policymakers must focus on structural solutions. While regulating Amazons fees is one option, a more market-oriented solution would be to split up Amazon, separating its major divisions into stand-alone companies. This would remove both the

23、incentive and the ability for Amazon to exploit sellers and use the proceeds to fund its monopoly-maintenance strategies. 5Amazons Toll Road WWW.ILSR.ORGIntroduction & Executive SummaryOne of the most striking measures of Amazons monopoly power is the extraordinary amount of money that its able to e

24、xtract from the independent businesses that rely on its site to reach customers. In this report, we nd that, over the last two years, Amazons revenue from the fees it levies on third-party sellers has more than doubled. In 2019, Amazon pocketed $60 billion in seller fees. This year, its take will so

25、ar to $121 billion, our analysis nds. To put that in perspective, had Amazons third-party marketplace been a stand-alone company in 2020, when it took in $90 billion in seller fees, it would have ranked 31st on the Fortune 500 list of the worlds largest corporations bigger than Citigroup, Facebook,

26、and General Electric. This year, with its revenue from seller fees expected to swell by an additional $31 billion, Amazon Marketplace may end up large enough to qualify for a spot in the top 25 (if it were a stand-alone company).Operating an unregulated, monopoly tollbooth that sits between business

27、es and consumers is wildly lucrative.The staggering scale of these fees provide evidence of Amazons monopolization of the online market and the high costs that come with it. Businesses that make or sell consumer goods and want to reach shoppers online have little choice but to sell on Amazons site.

28、Thats because more than 60 percent of Americans looking to buy something online start their product search on Amazon, rather than a search engine.1 In 15 of 23 major product categories, the tech giant captures more than 70 percent of online transactions.2 Companies large and small must either sell o

29、n Amazon or forfeit access to much of the market. As we detail in this report, Amazon is exploiting its position as a gatekeeper to impose increasingly steep tolls on these businesses. Using a variety of fees, Amazon now pockets a 34 percent cut of the revenue earned by independent sellers on its si

30、te, our analysis found. Thats up from 30 percent in 2018, and 19 percent in 2014. Operating an unregulated, monopoly tollbooth that sits between businesses and consumers is wildly lucrative. Over the last few years, seller fees grew much faster than every other major revenue stream at Amazon. They g

31、rew faster than Amazons own retail sales and faster than its Prime membership program. They even outpaced Amazon Web Services (AWS), the companys massive cloud-computing division. AWS is on track to post about $61 billion in sales this year a vast sum, but still only half the revenue Amazon will gen

32、erate from seller fees. The rst part of this report looks at the size and growth of Amazons tolls and the crushing burden they place on independent businesses. The second part examines the pivotal role these fees play in the architecture of Amazons monopoly power, and how the company tries to hide t

33、hat fact. The nal section outlines what policymakers must do to restore an open, fair, and competitive online market. WHEN AMAZON founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos was questioned about Amazons soaring fees at a Congressional hearing last year, he insisted that sellers were simply opting to buy more

34、services. Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon, referencing data from our rst report on this topic, Amazons Monopoly Tollbooth (July 2020) , asked him, “Doesnt Amazons ability to hike those fees so steeply suggests that Amazon enjoys market power over those sellers?” Bezos replied, “I think what youre see

35、ing there when you see these fees going up, whats really happening is that sellers are choosing to use more of our services that we make available.”3In fact, as we show in this report, Amazon has sharply increased the base price it charges sellers simply to list and sell a product. A few years ago,

36、the base price was Amazons referral fee, which, for most items, is a 15 percent cut of the 6Amazons Toll Road WWW.ILSR.ORGsale. But since then Amazon has turned over much of the space on its search results pages to sponsored product ads.4 Sellers used to be able to rely on good customer ratings to l

37、and their products on the crucial rst page of search results. But today they must pay for ads to get their products in front of customers. This year, sellers will give Amazon an average of 4.6 percent of their sales revenue to pay for ad space, we estimate. Thats up from 3.4 percent in 2020, and 1.1

38、 percent in 2016. This additional cost is not, as Bezos claims, a service; its a way to extract more from sellers. Its price-gouging. In a similar fashion, Amazon has compelled sellers to buy its warehousing and shipping service, Fulllment By Amazon (FBA). Amazons algorithms heavily favor sellers wh

39、o do so, making FBA all but required in order to generate sales on the site.5 As a result, the share of sellers who have left other carriers and signed on to FBA has soared in recent years.6 By compelling this captive base of businesses to use its shipping service, Amazon has grown into a major logi

40、stics provider almost overnight. Its parcel delivery operation now rivals that of the U.S. Postal Service in scale.7 And, over the last few years, Amazon has steadily raised its storage and shipping fees, using FBA as yet another way to squeeze revenue from sellers.The crushing weight of these fees

41、is capsizing many businesses. When his startup began selling its unique sports apparel on Amazon in 2016, it was a viable business, says Steve, who asked not to be identied for fear that Amazon would retaliate against his company. But then Amazon increased its referral fee for clothing, from 15 perc

42、ent to 17 percent, and devoted a growing share of the space on its search results pages to sponsored product ads. To sell $10,000 worth of clothing today, Steve explains, he must pay Amazon $1,700 in referral fees and spend another $1,500 to $2,000 on ads, not to mention a host of smaller fees. “Ama

43、zon is now taking more of the pie than I am. And you cannot run a sustainable business like that,” he says.8 Steve has tried to escape Amazons grip by selling on other platforms. But hes had no luck generating more than a trickle of orders on these sites. It would help if he could lower his prices o

44、n these sites, he says, but Amazon effectively blocks him from doing so under its “fair pricing policy.” Even though some competing platforms charge much lower fees, if Steve lowers his prices on another shopping site, Amazons algorithms punish him by demoting his products in its search results or m

45、aking them ineligible for the buy-box, which causes his sales to plummet.9 He cant afford that, and so he inates his prices on other sites to match those on Amazon. Many other sellers do the same. As we noted in our 2020 report, this means that Americans are paying higher prices across the web becau

46、se of Amazons steep tolls and its power to compel sellers to inate their prices elsewhere. Earlier this year Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, D.C., led an antitrust case against Amazon alleging that its pricing policy functions as an “anticompetitive restraint” that has “articially r

47、aised the price of goods to consumers across online marketplaces” and “insulated Amazons dominance.”10 By blocking sellers from offering lower prices on other sites, Amazon has ensured that its own prices appear competitive. This has kept Americans locked into their Amazon shopping habits, which, in

48、 turn, has allowed the tech giant to impose ever-steeper tolls on sellers.THESE TOLLS are highly protable. In one of the more eye-opening ndings of this report, we conclude that seller fees likely generate more prot than AWS. This contradicts conventional wisdom about the company; news stories Amazons Cut of Sellers Revenue For every $100 sellers earn in sales, Amazon is taking $34 in fees, up from $19 in 2014.201931%202032%2021*34%201830%201726%201623%201521%201419%* Projected for the full year Notes: Seller fees include advertising revenue from sellers.Sources: Amazons 10-K lings; eMarketer