California Unseals Evidence Supporting Price-Fixing Allegations Against Amazon

Topline

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is seeking a preliminary injunction against Amazon to halt alleged illegal price-fixing practices as his office released evidence showing Amazon pressured vendors to raise prices across competitors’ platforms, according to the AG’s office and the court filing.

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Key Facts

The evidence presented to the court involved products from Levi’s, Hanes, Newell Brands, Allergan, SkullCandy, Westinghouse, pet supplier GlobalOne, Agrothrive, BabyVision, Maxi-Matic, Songmic and others.

The filing claimed Amazon exerted pressure on first-party vendors to raise product prices—or remove listings entirely—on Walmart, Target, Chewy, Best Buy, Home Depot and Wayfair, warning their Amazon listings could be suppressed unless they complied.

The filing cites an example in which Amazon sent Hanes links to Target.com and Walmart.com showing lower prices than were on Amazon, and Hanes confirmed that it “reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased.”

The state requests an injunction to prohibit Amazon from agreeing with its vendors “to set, fix, control, maintain, stabilize, and/or tamper with retail prices for the vendor’s products at any non-Amazon retailer” and asks for a court-appointed monitor to oversee and enforce Amazon’s compliance with the injunction.

A hearing on the preliminary injunction motion is scheduled for July 23 in the San Francisco Superior Court before Judge Ethan Schulman.

Crucial Quote

“Amazon doesn’t have cheap prices because of its good business sense. Amazon’s ‘cheap’ prices are the result of intimidation and illegality that drove up prices for consumers across the marketplace,” AG Bonta said in a statement. “My office has uncovered evidence that Amazon bullied vendors to hike the price of their products sold at other shops, or secured the removal of these products altogether, to ensure Amazon was the cheapest place consumers could find products.”

Key Background

This motion is part of a 2022 lawsuit filed against Amazon for anticompetitive practices under California’s Unfair Competition Law and Cartwright Act. The suit alleged that Amazon employed anticompetitive pricing practices that caused higher prices for consumers—on and off Amazon. Specifically, it claimed that Amazon used its marketplace dominance to coerce vendors not to offer lower prices elsewhere—including competing sites such as Walmart, Target and eBay, and in some cases, even on their own websites—or risk losing the “Buy Box” advantage on Amazon, among other penalties. The case is set for trial on January 19, 2027.

Chief Critics

During a March hearing, Judge Schulman questioned the timeliness—or lack thereof—of the price-fixing examples, which date from 2019 through 2021. “Is there a good faith basis to believe that whatever this alleged conduct was that occurred several years ago is still ongoing such that there’s a need for a preliminary injunction?” he asked, according to Hey SoCal. Amazon did not respond to my request for comment. However, a spokesperson told the outlet in an emailed statement, “The Attorney General’s motion is a transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case coming more than three years after filing its complaint and based on supposedly ‘new’ evidence that it has had for years.”

Big Number

87% of consumers are more likely to buy products from Amazon than other e-commerce sites, according to FeedAdvisor.

Tangent

The Amazon Marketplace platform is losing active sellers, falling from 584,000 in January 2025 to 500,000 in March 2026, according to Marketplace Pulse data. Rising sellers fees and advertising costs are driving some away. At the same time, the Amazon seller base is concentrating. Currently, fewer than 8,000 sellers accounted for about half of Amazon’s U.S. third-party GMV—three years ago, 15,000 sellers generated that much. Amazon’s scale keeps remaining sellers locked-in. However, Marketplace Pulse’s Ben Donovan warned that as Amazon squeezes more revenue from sellers, it could become “vulnerable to a concentrated base that could, in theory at least, coordinate or exit.”