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eSellerCafe featured Adjunct Law Professor Paul Rafelson in "Online Merchants Guild Blasts States’ Attorneys For Failing to Hold Amazon Accountable on Price Gouging"
As OMG’s Executive Director, attorney and adjunct law professor at Pace University in New York, Paul Rafelson, explained:
Despite what Amazon claims to avoid liability, Amazon is a national store, and its merchants are its suppliers.
Amazon is the only party to the transaction that can control prices on a state by state basis, taking into account each state’s price gouging law, and imposing the appropriate price ceilings, so it’s Amazon’s responsibility as the world’s largest ecommerce store to ensure the laws are being followed, not to earn 15%-30% from each high-priced sale, cause panic in the marketplace, claim willful blindness, and turn their sellers into scapegoats.
Amazon even admitted under oath to a House Antitrust Subcommittee last year, it’s their store, it’s not a marketplace, so it makes sense they should be held accountable as the store, and The Supreme Court made quick work of marketplaces like Amazon claiming otherwise in the 2019 case Apple v. Pepper.
