LONDON (Reuters) -Amazon faces two mass lawsuits from retailers and consumers worth up to 4 billion pounds ($5.4 billion) for allegedly abusing its dominant position, after a London tribunal on Thursday certified the cases could proceed.
Andreas Stephan, a competition law academic, is bringing one of the cases on behalf of over 200,000 third-party retailers, worth up to 2.7 billion pounds.
His lawyers allege that Amazon manipulates the “Buy Box” feature on its website to its own advantage and favours products that use Amazon’s own logistics centres and delivery network.
Consumer advocate Robert Hammond is separately bringing a case valued at up to 1.3 billion pounds on behalf of millions of Amazon customers for similar alleged abuses of dominance.
Amazon argued that the Competition Appeal Tribunal should certify the cases to proceed, an early step in the proceedings, including because the economic methodology for proving the cases was flawed.
But the tribunal certified both cases on an opt-out basis, meaning members of the claimant class will be part of the case unless they decide otherwise.
An Amazon spokesperson said: “These claims are without merit and we’re confident that will become clear through the legal process.
“Amazon has always focused on supporting the 100,000 businesses that sell their products on our UK store, and more than half of all physical product sales on our UK store are from independent selling partners.”
(Reporting by Sam Tobin; Editing by Sachin Ravikumar)
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