How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet
- ID
- 35413
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 14 Oct 2026, 5:28 PM
- Fetched
- 15 Oct 2026, 8:45 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.not-ship.com/how-amazon-pushes-up-prices-all-across-the-internet/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.5
- Created
- 15 Oct 2026, 8:46 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- saas_startup_foundersdevelopers
What happened
Not-Ship's Amanda Shendruk argues that Amazon's stacked seller fees — not just the 15% referral commission that matches eBay and Walmart, but fulfillment, storage, returns and ads — now take close to half of many sellers' sale proceeds, up from about 19% in 2014. Only the referral fee is formally mandatory, but the piece says Prime eligibility and ad visibility make Fulfillment by Amazon and sponsored placements effectively required, and the FTC's upcoming antitrust case calls Prime eligibility 'a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon.' Because the referral fee is a percentage of price, higher prices raise Amazon's cut too; the article's next section, on sellers being unable to charge less elsewhere, is cut off in the excerpt. The Hacker News thread drew 701 points and 590 comments.
Why it matters
If you sell or plan to sell on Amazon — including cross-border from Malaysia — model the take rate at roughly 50% of sale price, not the headline 15%, and treat FBA and ad spend as fixed costs rather than options, since the piece's claim is that opting out means not selling. For founders building or benchmarking marketplace software, the useful comparison is take-rate composition: a 15% commission plus fulfillment, storage, returns and ad fees is a different business than a flat 15%, and that gap is what the FTC case will argue about. The excerpt cuts off before the 'can't charge less elsewhere' argument, so don't repeat that claim as fact without reading the full post.
Discussion angle
Pull up the take-rate breakdown for an apparel seller using FBA plus ads and compare it against what Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop charge Malaysian sellers — if local take rates are climbing the same way, which parts are mandatory in practice versus on paper?