Amazon is sued by its US e-commerce peers!

After announcing last week that it would lay off more than 800 employees, Zulily, an e-commerce platform based in Seattle, said yesterday (US time) that it would file a lawsuit against Amazon because its strategy made it impossible for it to compete on price without jeopardizing its relationship with important suppliers.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, cites in part allegations from an antitrust lawsuit the Federal Trade Commission is bringing against Amazon.

In the full version of the FTC's complaint released last month, there is a section detailing Amazon's anticompetitive tactics against Zulily and its suppliers.

Zulily did not explicitly link the turmoil it was experiencing to “strategies” taken by Amazon. But the lawsuit alleges that Amazon’s actions caused traffic to Zully’s website to drop, significantly reduced revenue, and deprived Zully of its ability to compete in the market by hindering price competition.

The lawsuit cited earlier FTC prosecution materials stating that Amazon's actions against Zulily can be traced back to around 2019, when Zulily displayed Amazon's prices next to its own product prices to show consumers that its prices were lower.

Zulily said in the lawsuit that Amazon did not fight for the above situation, but began to "destroy" itself - forcing third-party sellers and wholesale suppliers to agree to keep the prices of the two platforms consistent, that is, artificially raising the prices of Zulily products to even higher than Amazon, and punishing sellers who did not do so.

Zulily also alleges in the lawsuit that these penalties on third-party sellers and wholesale suppliers range from disqualifying them from Amazon’s “Buy Box” to kicking sellers off the Amazon marketplace entirely.

Zulily will close offices in three states: Washington, Nevada and Ohio, according to a notice released last week . The company's FAQ page also mentioned a "bankruptcy" sale last weekend, but deleted the reference after foreign media published reports on the matter.

Zulily was founded in Seattle in 2009 by former Blue Nile executives Mark Vadon and Darrell Cavens. It initially specialized in maternal and child products and later expanded to other product categories. In 2014, Zulily was sold to QVC parent company Qurate (then known as Liberty Interactive) for $2.4 billion and was acquired by Regent in May this year.

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