Amazon sellers seek clout with ‘merchants guild’
The millions of merchants who sell products on Amazon have long craved more leverage over their powerful platform. Now some are creating a trade association in the hopes that a unified voice will force Amazon to take them more seriously.
Organizers began pitching fellow merchants on the Online Merchants Guild last week at the Prosper Show, an annual Las Vegas conference that drew 1,900 Amazon sellers. The group is only just getting started but has big ambitions, which include negotiating better terms with Amazon, pushing the company to respond more effectively to sellers’ complaints and lobbying government officials to make sure merchants’ viewpoints are being heard.
Chris McCabe, a former Amazon employee and owner of the consulting firm Ecommercechris.com is organizing the guild with Paul Rafelson, a Pace University law professor. They plan to promote the group at Amazon merchant events in New York and Seattle next month. It’s early days, and only about 100 merchants have expressed interest in joining the association, which levies an annual fee from $100 to $25,000, depending on the size of the business.
Merchants have mulled such a group for years but now have an issue to rally around. In recent months, states have been warning that they plan to levy back taxes on years worth of past sales. Merchants fear they’ll be easier targets than Amazon and hope a guild will give them lobbying clout.
“There has not been one single issue to galvanize Amazon sellers like the sales tax issue,” McCabe says.
Merchants’ complaints about Amazon are numerous and long-standing. With 300 million customers around the globe, including its big-spending Prime subscribers, the world’s biggest online retailer wields tremendous leverage over the people who keep its web store stocked with an abundance of goods.
Still, Amazon offers small businesses an easy way to access customers through its web store and vast distribution network. Amazon added more than 300,000 new small businesses as merchant partners in 2017 and over 140,000 of its merchants have annual sales exceeding $100,000.
“We have large teams dedicated to helping sellers, many of them small businesses,” Amazon said in an emailed statement. “We interact with sellers thousands of times a day through a variety of channels and will continue to make sure we maintain that open dialogue.”
Even with an organized group, merchants could find it difficult to negotiate with Amazon, which typically resists collective bargaining. The e-commerce giant has had long-running disputes with the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers over online book sales. And the company has managed to keep unions out of its U.S. warehouses.
Merchants are also contending with Amazon’s growing political influence. The company has a big lobbying presence in Washington and relationships with state lawmakers who doled out tax breaks in exchange for building new warehouses that create jobs. Amazon’s proposed second headquarters, which the company says will generate 50,000 new jobs over 15 years, has given politicians yet another reason to make nice with the online retailer.
Amazon merchants fear their voices are drowned out by the company when policy decisions are made that affect their livelihoods and the future of e-commerce.
They think an association will help them lobby more effectively. In addition to sales taxes, the merchants want to advocate for better protections against counterfeit goods that run rampant on online marketplaces, as well as trade issues like international postal rates that make it cheap for Chinese merchants to ship goods directly to U.S. shoppers. Merchants fear lawmakers don’t understand their business and the complexities of how Amazon operates.