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3 Responses to “Local knife business banned at Amazon”

1. countertop Says:
   August 27th, 2010 at 10:41 am

   Seems to me Amazon had no other choice, as he engaged in a practice – conspiracy to fix pricing – that has sent many other folks to jail over the years.

   He may have been pissed at his competitor for underselling him (if the guy was in violation of Amazon’s policies, he should have addressed it via Amazon’s internal process), or Amazon for charging too much (then do business elsewhere), but it’s not Amazon’s fault that he seemingly engaged in a pretty serious violation of federal law.

2. Les Jones Says:
   August 27th, 2010 at 1:26 pm

   I read the guy’s email and there are a couple of ways to interpret this part:

   I was hoping we could all just keep the same price and let the customers choose who they want to purchase from, but this guy just keeps going lower and lower and killing the profit margin.

   By “the same price” he could mean “keep the same prices we always have” or he could mean “we all set our prices to be the same as one another.”

   If it’s the latter, then yeah, that’s collusion/price-fixing and that’s both wrong and against the law.

3. David Says:
   August 27th, 2010 at 9:55 pm

   I had sent out the email to 2 other knife stores back in March of this year. It addressed one item, not several as Amazon had suggested. I added the training butterfly knife to Amazon’s inventory last year.

   I sold several hundred for around $17.99, later to remain competitive I lowered them to $14.99. I kept a good profit margin so that if I ever had a complaint about that particular item I could refund or exchange it for the customer with no questions asked and not break the bank.`I also had to keep it marked up so that I would make money after Amazon got their commission. The same knife I was selling on Amazon for $14.99 I was selling on my site for $7.99.

   The other stores and I would have price wars and we would drop ten cents at a time and try to beat the other guy. When the other guy would run out of his inventory I would go right back up to where I had started at – $14.99 and we’d start over again.

   All of a sudden this other store comes on and starts selling them $1 less. So we dropped our prices, then he went $2 less. Then so on and so on. The price drops were so large it wasn’t even making sense. Finally it got down to about $7 and the profit was only 25 cents. That’s when we were emailing about lowering the prices.

   See, we made enough to where we had some extra money to throw around and we made our prices so low that the other guy had to drop out. But what pissed me off even more was that he had a lot of negative reviews for drop shipping. Customers were leaving negative reviews saying it was taking over 2 weeks to get their orders from that store. And drop shipping is strictly against Amazon’s policy, but they kept letting them do that.

   So after the guy stopped selling those, we went back up and started doing our price war again. Why I took 5 months to ban me for it I have no idea, but I suspect it was because I was speaking out about Amazon and Victorinox’s deal.

   I really don’t care anymore though. I’m just gonna use that anger as fuel to make my website better and keep all my prices lower than Amazon’s.

   I will probably be getting a letter from their lawyers for my post sometime soon though.

   Thanks for allowing me to rant.

Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.

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