This week, the European Commission informed Amazon of its preliminary view that the etailer breached EU antitrust rules by leveraging data from its third-party Marketplace sellers to gain dominance in the market.

Initial findings from a review that began in July last year suggest that ”very large quantities of non-public seller data” feed into Amazon’s retail business and that is ”used to calibrate Amazon’s own offers and strategic business decisions to the detriment of other sellers”.

A second investigation is now under way by the commission to uncover whether Amazon gives preferential treatment to sellers that use its Fulfilment by Amazon logistics services and to understand the criteria that Amazon sets to select the winner of the ’Buy Box’ on its site.