Amazon class action claims Buy Box ‘tricks’ customers into paying more

Amazon Buy Box class action lawsuit overview: 

• Who: Consumer advocate Julie Hunter filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon. 
• Why: Hunter claims Amazon sways customers using its “Buy Box” feature to make purchases that aren’t the best deal they can get. 
• Where: The class action lawsuit is to be filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal. 

Amazon compels its customers to make purchase decisions that are not good deals for them but that benefit the company financially, a new $900 million class action lawsuit alleges. 

Plaintiff Julie Hunter, who is also a consumer advocate, claims Amazon’s “Buy Box” feature works to artificially promote and boost certain items when a consumer searches, The Guardian reports. 

The Amazon Buy Box feature does not boost items based on their price or quality but rather ones that are sold by Amazon itself or by a company that has paid Amazon to handle its logistics, according to the Amazon class action.

Amazon pushes other sellers’ products to the bottom of the search results regardless of “however good their offers might be,” the Amazon class action claims. 

Hunter argues that Amazon is able to secure higher fees by allegedly pushing consumers to make the purchase decisions that may not be the best financial option. 

Amazon class action alleges company out of compliance with competition requirements

Hunter claims Amazon’s alleged actions make it noncompliant with competition requirements it must abide by as a “dominant marketplace,” The Guardian reports. 

An estimated 82% to 90% of Amazon customers use the Amazon Buy Box feature when purchasing products from the company, according to the class action, which argues that millions of consumers may have paid too much for an item. 

Hunter seeks to represent a class of Amazon customers who have used its Amazon Buy Box feature when making a purchase and thus paid too much for a product and were denied a proper choice. 

Last December, Amazon escaped an $844,000 per day fine levied against it by the European Union’s privacy enforcement agency after a judge at the Luxembourg administrative tribunal suspended the order. 

Have you used the Amazon Buy Box feature to make a purchase? Let us know in the comments! 

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