The column knows. It won't say.

Happy Friday,

Amazon has ended price parity twice. Once in Europe in 2013, once in America in 2019, both times to applause, which is once more than most things get ended.

Last week the European Commission started sending sellers questionnaires about it. Apparently it wants to know how it is going.

Here is the history, in order, and it is short.

A price parity clause is a line in a contract that says you will not sell your product cheaper anywhere else. Amazon had one. In 2013 the German and British competition authorities took an interest and Amazon dropped it for European sellers. In 2019 a US senator wrote a letter and Amazon dropped it for American sellers within months. The senator got a reply. Sellers got a help page.

The help page is called the Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy, and it lists the pricing practices that "harm customer trust." One of them, quoted in full because it is the entire issue: setting a price on a product or service that is significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off Amazon.

On or off Amazon.

I want to be fair to those three words. They have been sitting on a help page for six years, in plain view, doing exactly what the clause used to do, and nobody wrote them a letter. The clause got a senator. The policy got a paragraph break.

The consequences are on the same page: the Featured Offer goes, the listing can go, and in the serious cases the account. So read the before and the after side by side. The clause said do not sell cheaper elsewhere, or you are in breach. The policy says if you are more expensive here than elsewhere, you lose the box. One is a promise you made. The other is weather.

And the weather has a name in Seller Central. It is a column called Competitive External Price, and it works like this: it tells you the number it found somewhere else, and then it does not tell you where. No retailer. No page. No date. Sellers report losing the Featured Offer three times over a price they could not find on Walmart, Target or eBay; another reports around 120 products flagged in one pass; and one — this is a forum report, so hold it loosely — says he is the sole distributor of his own product, was undercut by nobody, and was asked to drop his price by 80 percent to fix it.

It is the only witness in commerce that will testify to a price but not to where it was standing.

Then last week the Commission started asking sellers about it, under a law — the Digital Markets Act — that bans a gatekeeper from stopping business users offering better prices through other channels, their own included. One seller, the inventor of the Bed Scrunchie, told Bloomberg that selling cheaper on his own site could get his Amazon offer suppressed.

Amazon's reply, in full: it "does not employ parity clauses that are incompatible with the DMA."

I have now read that sentence several times and it improves on every pass. It is not wrong. It is not even misleading. It is just a sentence that had to survive a lot of meetings, and incompatible is the survivor.

The clause got a senator. The policy got a paragraph break.

Now follow the money, because the District of Columbia already did and wrote it down.

DC sued in May 2021. Its complaint says Amazon "quickly and quietly replaced" the parity clause with a Fair Pricing Policy that does the same job, and it puts a number on why that matters: Amazon's fees run to as much as 40 percent of a product's price, and a seller who cannot be cheaper anywhere else carries that 40 percent into every price on the internet — including the one on a website Amazon has never visited, except, apparently, to read the price. The case was dismissed in 2022. The DC Court of Appeals revived it in August 2024. It is back in the trial court. The FTC's 2023 case files the same idea under "anti-discounting," with a trial scheduled for 2027.

So the sequence, read straight. Parity is ended in 2013. Parity is ended again in 2019. A policy with the same effect stays on a help page with the words on or off Amazon in it. A column enforces it without saying where it looked. Two American cases say the policy is the clause with the name changed. And when Brussels asks, Amazon answers about the clause.

Amazon did not stop reading your other prices in 2019. It stopped putting it in writing, and then it put it on a help page.

Nobody in this story is a villain, which is what makes it funny instead of infuriating. A marketplace not wanting to be the expensive place to buy something is a normal, defensible thing to want. The senator did his job. The help page did its job. The column does its job every day with great consistency and no citations. That is not malice. That is a policy.

Now the ninety seconds where I stop being amusing, because you may act on this.

The Commission's questionnaires are early-stage: no formal proceeding, no finding, and there may never be one. Neither American case has been tried, and Amazon has denied the allegations in both. The Bed Scrunchie account is one seller's; the 80-percent story is one forum post. And a large share of Competitive External Price flags are simply correct — the brand really is cheaper on its own site, almost always because a coupon code from March is still live and nobody turned it off. The column is unfair in how it explains itself. It is not always unfair in what it finds, and the Quick Win below is built to tell those two apart before you argue with anybody.

Accelerate ran Tuesday to Thursday in Seattle. Everything announced there ships over Q1, which is the polite way of saying that nothing you heard this week changes a Q4 decision, and the impolite way of saying it too.

Amazon is running a 10 percent reorder discount that deal blogs found before sellers did. Since August, Prime shoppers who reorder five qualifying items get 10 percent off at checkout, automatically. No Seller Central post, no seller blog entry, and — the part worth a second look — nothing anywhere that says who funds the 10 percent. If your ASINs carry the label, somebody is paying for it. It would be nice if that somebody found out from Amazon rather than from a coupon site, but here we are. Find out before Q4 volume makes the answer expensive.

Walmart's marketplace reportedly passed 200,000 active sellers, with marketplace sales up 17 percent in its fiscal second quarter. Relevant today because it is the channel you would be punished for pricing lower on, and it is the one growing fastest. Amazon's policy does not say you cannot sell on Walmart. It just reads the price there and forms a view.

Twenty minutes, for whoever runs your Prime Big Deal Days plan. You're not changing a price. You're changing what you point at.

Pull your ten biggest deals. Seller Central → Advertising → Deals, or Prime Exclusive Discounts. Write the deal price next to each.

Open each one as a shopper. Go to the product page, tap Price history beside the price, and switch to the one-year view. No link means the listing isn't eligible — skip it. About two minutes each.

Ask the witness question. Is the deal price lower than every low point on that chart, including last October and late November? Yes: chart agrees. No: chart argues.

Skip shared listings where another seller did most of the selling (the chart shows their price) and anything out of stock for weeks (gaps make the line lie). Don't check against your spreadsheet — the chart is what the shopper sees, so the chart is the test.

Then move the spotlight. Whatever you were going to lead with — your Store hero, the first product in your Sponsored Brands ad, the top of your email — goes to a chart-agrees ASIN. Store and Sponsored Brands edits go through review, so do it this week. Nothing in column one? Lead with the deal closest to its low. No Store, ads or email? Send the columns to whoever sets event budgets: extra money goes to column one first.

Chart-argues deals still run. They just stop being what you point at.

Two things not to do. Don't touch a price before October 7 — any nudge gets drawn onto the chart the shopper is about to read, and can cause trouble for the deal itself. And don't cancel a deal because its chart argues. That's a reason to stop featuring it, not to pull it.

Artifact: two columns, and a spotlight pointed at the first one.

Amazon spent Tuesday announcing a sale and teaching your customer how to cross-examine it.

That isn't a contradiction.

That's a store very sure of its own receipts.

See you Tuesday.

P.S. Forward this to whoever picks your hero product for October. It's twenty minutes, and it's the only fix on the list that doesn't touch a price.

See you Tuesday.

Any questions? Book a meeting with me here.

Dan Head

Founder, AMZ Elite