German Watchdog Curbs Amazon’s Grip on Seller Pricing, Orders €59 Million Disgorgement

Key Takeaways

• Amazon’s Price Controls Curbed: Germany’s competition authority has banned Amazon from broadly influencing third-party seller prices on amazon.de, limiting such interventions to rare cases like excessive pricing.
• €59 Million Disgorgement Ordered: The Bundeskartellamt ordered Amazon to disgorge around €59 million in economic benefits, marking the first use of this power since Germany’s 2023 competition law reform.
• Dual Role Under Scrutiny: Regulators highlighted the conflict created by Amazon acting both as marketplace operator and direct competitor to third-party sellers.
• Transparency Failures Flagged: Sellers were left unable to predict when their offers would lose visibility or be removed, with pricing rules and thresholds deemed insufficiently transparent.

Deep Dive

German competition regulators have taken one of their strongest steps yet against Amazon’s marketplace practices, curbing how the company can influence seller pricing and ordering it to hand back an estimated €59 million in gains tied to the conduct.

The decision, issued by the Bundeskartellamt, targets how Amazon polices prices on its German marketplace, where it plays the unusual role of both platform operator and direct competitor to the sellers it hosts. While Amazon will not be barred entirely from intervening on prices, the authority made clear that such interventions must become the exception rather than the rule and only under tightly defined conditions.

At the centre of the case is amazon.de’s outsized role in German e-commerce. The platform accounts for roughly 60 percent of online retail sales in the country, with a majority of products sold by independent third-party merchants rather than Amazon’s own retail arm. Those sellers set their own prices and shoulder the commercial risk of their business. According to the Bundeskartellamt, Amazon’s internal price controls blurred that line by effectively steering what sellers could charge.

Regulators found that Amazon routinely reviewed marketplace prices and penalised offers it deemed too expensive by stripping them of visibility or removing them altogether. Losing access to the Buy Box, the prominent placement that captures most customer clicks, can sharply reduce sales, a pressure point the authority says Amazon used to bring prices into line.

That practice is particularly sensitive, the authority argued, because Amazon is not a neutral referee. “Amazon competes directly with these sellers,” Bundeskartellamt President Andreas Mundt said, warning that unchecked price interventions risk allowing the company to shape price levels not just on its own platform, but across the wider online retail market.

The ruling is careful to draw a distinction between price outcomes and pricing power. Regulators emphasised that they are not challenging Amazon’s push to keep consumer prices low. Instead, they focused on how that goal is pursued. In their view, suppressing legally compliant offers because they do not fit Amazon’s internal pricing models crosses a line, particularly when sellers are left guessing how those models work.

Transparency was a recurring theme in the authority’s findings. Sellers, it said, could not clearly determine when a price might trigger sanctions or why visibility suddenly disappeared. That lack of predictability, combined with Amazon’s market position, amounted to an unlawful constraint on sellers’ freedom to price their own goods.

Legally, the Bundeskartellamt treated the conduct as an abuse under Germany’s special competition rules for large digital firms, alongside traditional abuse-of-dominance provisions under German and EU law. As a result, Amazon has been ordered to stop using its current price control mechanisms and to limit any future interventions to narrowly defined cases such as genuine excessive pricing, backed by clear rules and explanations to sellers.

The financial remedy is just as notable. For the first time since Germany overhauled its competition law in 2023, the authority has ordered the disgorgement of economic benefits rather than relying solely on behavioural remedies. Because the conduct is considered ongoing, regulators set a provisional disgorgement amount of around €59 million as a first step.

The case was coordinated with the European Commission, which enforces the Digital Markets Act, and with Germany’s telecommunications regulator on platform transparency requirements, showing how national and EU oversight of large digital platforms is increasingly converging.

The decision is not yet final. Amazon has one month to challenge it before Germany’s Federal Court of Justice, setting the stage for what could become a closely watched test of how far competition authorities can go in policing marketplace power in Europe’s digital economy.

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