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Exclusive: A trove of previously redacted documents was filed as part of the tech giant’s anti-trust battle with the state of California. Amazon denies it engages in price-fixingHundreds of previously redacted records reveal how Amazon has pressured independent sellers using its platform into raising their prices on the sites of competitors like Walmart and Target, so that Amazon can appear to have lower prices, California authorities allege.The global conglomerate became concerned even if a competitor was selling an item for as little as a penny less, according to one segment of the newly unredacted evidence.

Hundreds of previously redacted records reveal how Amazon has pressured independent sellers using its platform into raising their prices on the sites of competitors like Walmart and Target, so that Amazon can appear to have lower prices, California authorities allege.

The global conglomerate became concerned even if a competitor was selling an item for as little as a penny less, according to one segment of the newly unredacted evidence.

The documents – which have never previously been reported on – include internal emails, deposition testimony and confidential corporate presentations that the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, obtained as part of a civil case his office launched in 2022 accusing Amazon of large-scale price-fixing.

The Guardian obtained and reviewed the cache of evidence, which has been filed in San Francisco county superior court but has not yet become publicly available. Within the documents, lawyers for the state of California have unmasked key details, paragraphs and sometimes whole pages that had previously been blacked out. A judge permitted some redactions to remain at Amazon’s request.

In a statement, Bonta said the newly unveiled evidence reinforced his office’s claims that Amazon’s actions “unlawfully punishes sellers whose products are sold at lower prices by other online retailers”.

“Especially while consumers face an affordability crisis, there is no room for illegal practices that impede competition and raise prices,” Bonta said. “California looks forward to our trial in January 2027.”

Amazon has called the claims in the lawsuit “entirely false and misguided”.

For years, the state alleges, Amazon has used automated tools to track how independent vendors on its platform price their goods on competitor sites, then leveraged its dominant position in e-commerce to ensure that those prices do not fall below those on Amazon, even though Amazon often charges vendors far more in fees.

The state’s lawsuit claims that Amazon punishes vendors that dare to offer discounts on their own sites or competitor sites like Walmart, suppressing their sales on Amazon by taking away the vendors’ access to critical features, like its site’s “Buy Box” – the panel on the right side of the site where customers see buttons like “add to cart” and “buy now”.

In one previously redacted deposition, marked “highly confidential”, Mayer Handler, owner of a clothing company called Leveret, testified that he received an email in October 2022 from Amazon notifying him that one of his products was “no longer eligible to be a featured offer” through Amazon’s Buy Box.

The tech giant, he testified, had suppressed the item, a tiger-themed, toddler’s pajama set, because his company was selling it for $19.99 on Amazon, a single cent higher than what his company was offering it for on Walmart.

double quotation markA. That Amazon -- the price on Amazon was higher than the price was on Walmart.
Q. And how much higher?
A. One penny.

Afterwards, Handler testified, his company “changed pricing on Walmart to match or exceed Amazon’s price” or changed the item’s product code to try to throw off Amazon’s price tracking system.

double quotation markWe changed pricing on Walmart to match or exceed Amazon’s price. Or we changed the code.

In response to a question from the Guardian, Handler criticized Amazon for tracking prices across the internet and “shadow” blocking his company’s products – tactics which he said were depriving consumers of “lower prices”.

“Maybe that’s capitalism,” he wrote. “Or that’s a monopoly causing price hikes on the consumer.”

In another unsealed deposition, Terry Esbenshade, a Pennsylvania garden store supplier, testified in October 2024 that whenever his products lost Amazon’s Buy Box because of lower prices elsewhere on the internet, his sales on Amazon would plummet by about 80%. This financial reality forced him to try and raise his products’ prices with other retailers elsewhere, he said.

In one instance, Esbenshade testified, he discovered that one of his company’s better-selling patio tables had “become suppressed” on Amazon.

Esbenshade wasn’t sure why, he recalled, until someone at Amazon suggested he look at Wayfair, another online retailer that happened to be selling his patio table below Amazon’s price.

The businessman went online and set up a new minimum advertised price for the table on Wayfair to ensure it was higher than Amazon’s.

“So that raised the price up, and, voila, my product came back” on Amazon, he said, thanks to the reinstatement of the Buy Box.

Amazon has argued that its practices actually promote, incentivize and reward competition. The company said it works “to ensure its customers see offers with low, competitive prices” and provide “the best possible” customer experience for online shoppers.

The company also denied that it had ever tried to shield itself from competition through its agreements with independent sellers.

“Amazon denies that the intent or effect of any agreement it has entered into with third-party sellers or vendors is to insulate itself from price competition” or “entrench any position of ‘dominance’”, the company asserted in an answer to the state’s lawsuit.

But Bonta’s office said that the newly unredacted exhibits show Amazon employees have proactively sought to undermine market competition and were aware of the effects of their actions on prices.

In one example, the state alleged, an Amazon engineer described the company’s use of Buy Box suppression and an internal program, known as SC-FOD, to undermine vendors’ willingness to sell products on Temu, a competing e-commerce site.

double quotation markmap them, FOD them, and they move out of Temu
But ye hua hai toh its a huge success for us
😄

In another example, a senior Amazon employee sent an internal email in August 2023 describing how the company’s Buy Box suppressions were causing an Indiana-based home goods and furniture seller to regularly raise his prices on other sites.

“When this happens, they claim they search for the lower price, and when they find it, they raise it to match the price on Amazon,” the employee wrote, which was read aloud in a confidential deposition last year.

Amazon, which recently overtook Walmart to become the world’s largest company by revenue, is America’s No 1 online retailer by a huge margin.

By the end of 2022, Amazon accounted for nearly half of US e-commerce retail spending, compared with less than 8% for Walmart, its nearest competitor, according to numbers

Amazon did not immediately provide answers to questions from the Guardian ahead of publication. The Guardian will update this article when it receives a response.

The trial in the California attorney general’s lawsuit against Amazon is currently scheduled to begin on 19 January 2027.