A modern leather table lamp climbed from $24.99 to $39 at Walmart. An air fryer jumped from $84.99 to $149.99 at Newegg. An electric ice-cream maker vanished from Best Buy, then reappeared on Amazon at nearly four times its original price.
These were not natural market shifts. According to court documents and internal Amazon emails obtained by California authorities, they were engineered by the company through systematic pressure on suppliers to either raise prices at competing retailers or stop selling there entirely.
California's attorney general has filed a lawsuit alleging that Amazon deployed a range of coercive tactics over the past decade that forced suppliers into arrangements to control product prices across the retail landscape. The tactics included delisting products, cutting supplier sales on Amazon.com, threatening to stop placing orders, and demanding financial compensation when Amazon's competitors offered lower prices.
In one striking example, Amazon temporarily removed an ice-cream maker from its platform, prompting the manufacturer Maxi-Matic to pull its inventory from Best Buy to eliminate price competition. Within a single day, Amazon restored the product and more than tripled its price.
The air fryer case reveals a clear sequence of leverage. Amazon suppressed sales of the Chefman product on its platform and told the supplier it would stop ordering from them unless they reimbursed the company for revenue lost due to Amazon's price-matching practices. Facing this pressure, Chefman negotiated price increases at Target and Newegg while agreeing to pay Amazon $500,000 in total compensation.
One supplier executive, Ryan Turano of the fertilizer company AgroThrive, described how an Amazon vendor manager would contact him whenever competitors like Home Depot undercut Amazon's prices. The manager would sometimes directly suggest which retailers Turano should approach about raising their prices.
"He'd go, 'Home Depot is probably causing the problem, talk to your vendor manager there to see what you could do,'" Turano recalled. "It seemed like he knew what was happening." After Turano had a meeting with Home Depot's manager, he reported back to Amazon that the retailer had agreed to raise prices. Turano told investigators that Amazon left suppliers with no choice. "We were at their mercy," he said. "Because we didn't have the resources to push back."
Internal communications show Amazon staff were aware of the price-raising consequences and took steps to hide the strategy. A former Amazon customer success manager said employees received explicit instructions to discuss these arrangements over the phone rather than in writing to avoid leaving a digital record. "The only rule was, 'Do not have this in writing,'" he recalled.
Amazon emails and presentations reviewed by California's attorney general reinforced this approach. One 2022 message reminded staff to "not use email" for certain supplier conversations, while another from 2020 advised that "it is often best to have these conversations over the phone."
The case of a leather lamp from New Jersey supplier All The Rages shows how these dynamics played out. After Amazon negotiated lower costs from the supplier, a company representative named Joseph Martin told Amazon that his firm had "contacted" retailers "to fix the retail" prices and had already seen increases "for a lot of the items." Two days later, Martin reported the Walmart lamp price had jumped from $24.99 to $39. "We should be good now," he wrote.
Martin later claimed the price change represented a correction of a pricing error and said any decisions about retail pricing came from Walmart and Amazon themselves. Walmart and Amazon declined to discuss the specific incident.
Amazon faces multiple legal threats over these practices. The company is battling price-fixing lawsuits from California's attorney general, the Federal Trade Commission, Washington D.C.'s attorney general, and a private class action in federal court in Seattle. The California and FTC cases are scheduled for trial in early 2027.
In response, Amazon denies the allegations and contends it negotiates aggressively to lower prices for its own customers. The company says California's lawsuit misrepresents isolated emails from millions of vendor communications and claims its practices are standard retail negotiation that benefits consumers through lower prices and greater selection.
The company did settle a 2022 complaint from Washington state's attorney general for $2.25 million over claims it forced merchants in its "Sold by Amazon" program to raise prices on third-party platforms, though Amazon made no admission of liability.
Author James Rodriguez: "Amazon's legal defense rests on the idea that extracting price concessions from suppliers helps customers, but the evidence suggests the company was systematically using its market power to prevent true price competition across retail."
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