After about 8 years of helping my mom grow her business on Amazon, I can tell you for a fact, when that company sees something it wants, and can get it for free, they just take it from you.
She created a unique product offering on Amazon and sold it well, about 500 units per month. The product was not hard to knock off, as it is a simple manufacturing process, and now Amazon sells their own version of it, with better search placement to boot. Contrast that with another product she purchases on the open market, similar unit sales with better margins, and has sustained that for several years. Amazon can't identify the source, so they don't sell their version of it.
With Amazon, if you're not the customer, you're the product. The only exception: AWS customers are sometimes both, Dropbox is an example.
One opinion I've see is that they use third party sellers to identify valuable product niches to get into. I've read many accounts of Amazon launching their own version of a product and sometimes going as far as suspending or ejecting the seller or sellers with the product that inspired them.
My guess is that there are too many sellers making money on Amazon who take the abuse. To speak up would mean to risk losing your business. So people don't. I see one massive class action lawsuit in the making.
The other Amazon scam has to do with sales tax. Rather than collecting sales tax on every sale they've somehow managed to pass this on to third party sellers. It's as if Walmart had their suppliers become responsible for collecting and paying sales tax at every Walmart location. Which makes no sense.
Amazon should collect and pay sales taxes in every state where they have a warehouse. States are getting cheated out of tax revenue because Amazon plays lose with this and sellers have no clue they are tasked with collecting taxes. A secondary effect is that sellers get into massive trouble with authorities because Amazon doesn't collect taxes for them and does not submit the funds to the sellers. When sellers discover they were made responsible for sales tax they often end-up with a huge bill that nearly ruins them.
She created a unique product offering on Amazon and sold it well, about 500 units per month. The product was not hard to knock off, as it is a simple manufacturing process, and now Amazon sells their own version of it, with better search placement to boot. Contrast that with another product she purchases on the open market, similar unit sales with better margins, and has sustained that for several years. Amazon can't identify the source, so they don't sell their version of it.
With Amazon, if you're not the customer, you're the product. The only exception: AWS customers are sometimes both, Dropbox is an example.