Shopping Elsewhere Will Not Save You: Inside Amazon's Alleged Scheme To Look Cheapest By Making Every Rival Raise Prices

The cheapest price on Amazon may only look that way because, according to a new investigation and two sweeping antitrust cases, the company allegedly spent years pressuring brands and rival retailers to raise theirs.

A More Perfect Union investigation published this week, titled 'We Uncovered Amazon's Scheme To Inflate Prices Everywhere', lays out how the retail giant allegedly maintains its lowest-price image by forcing prices up everywhere else, so that a vendor offering a better deal on a rival site faces punishment.

The Emmy-winning outlet's thesis is documented in extraordinary detail across two court records: the Federal Trade Commission's landmark antitrust complaint and newly unsealed evidence from California's price-fixing lawsuit, which together accuse Amazon of punishing sellers who discount elsewhere, pressuring vendors to push competitors' prices up, and deploying a secret algorithm that raised prices knowing rivals would follow.

Unsealed Emails Show Vendors Told To Fix Rivals' Prices

The most vivid evidence emerged on 20 April 2026, when California Attorney General Rob Bonta secured the public release of a largely unredacted injunction filing in his 2022 lawsuit against the company. The documents describe specific exchanges in which Amazon allegedly leaned on first-party vendors to raise their products' prices, or pull listings entirely, on Walmart, Target, Chewy, Best Buy, Home Depot and Wayfair.

One episode involves a pair of khaki trousers. Amazon allegedly flagged that Walmart was selling Levi's khakis for less than its own listing and pressed the brand to intervene; Walmart raised its price, and Amazon then confirmed internally that the higher £22 ($29.99) figure was showing on its own site. In another, Amazon sent Hanes links to cheaper listings on Target.com and Walmart.com, and Hanes confirmed it had contacted both retailers to have the prices increased.

The filing quotes one vendor telling Amazon, 'I am very determined to help you hunt the disrupters in the market.' Bonta said the company had strong-armed vendors to protect its margins, arguing its low-price reputation rests on intimidation rather than efficiency.

His office is asking San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman to ban the practices immediately and appoint an independent monitor, with a preliminary injunction hearing set for 23 July. The case goes to trial next year.

The Buy Box Penalty That Keeps Sellers From Discounting

The federal case describes the machinery behind that leverage. The FTC's complaint, filed in 2023 with a coalition of states, alleges Amazon polices the entire internet for lower prices and punishes marketplace sellers who offer them, even on their own websites. The chief weapon is the Buy Box, the display through which nearly 98 percent of Amazon sales flow; the complaint says Amazon knows internally that ejecting a seller from it causes their sales to 'tank'.

The alleged effect is a price floor across online retail. The complaint states that many sellers raise their prices on other platforms to avoid punishment, others never attempt discounting out of fear of retribution, and some abandon rival marketplaces altogether.

Start-ups that tried to compete on price paid dearly: Jet.com abandoned its low-price strategy within months of launch, and Zulily, which displayed Amazon's prices beside its own lower ones, saw traffic collapse before liquidating in 2023.

A federal judge in Seattle allowed the core claims to proceed in 2024, ruling for the first time that systematically tracking and matching rivals' prices, even without collusion, can plausibly violate the Sherman Act when done with anticompetitive intent. The bench trial is scheduled for early 2027.

Project Nessie And The Algorithm That Raised Prices To Be Followed

The most notorious allegation concerns a tool Amazon codenamed Project Nessie. According to unredacted portions of the FTC complaint, the algorithm identified products where rivals were likely to match Amazon's price increases, raised those prices, and held them once competitors followed, lifting prices across the market rather than merely on Amazon.

The complaint alleges Nessie ran from 2014 and generated more than £746 million ($1 billion) from American households, with an internal 2018 estimate putting its contribution at £249 million ($334 million) in a single year, including £43 million ($57 million) from higher-priced books.

Regulators say Amazon switched the tool off during Prime Day and the holiday season, when journalists and shoppers were most likely to notice, then reactivated it once attention faded.

Amazon has disputed that characterisation, telling the Wall Street Journal the project was meant to stop price-matching from driving prices unsustainably low and was scrapped years ago after failing to work as intended. The FTC counters with Amazon's own documents, which describe Nessie as 'an incredible success', and a 2022 message in which retail chief Doug Herrington mused about reviving 'our old friend Nessie' to boost profits.

What The Cases Mean For Shoppers Who Think They Have A Choice

The through-line of the investigation and both lawsuits is that comparison shopping cannot rescue consumers from a price structure Amazon allegedly sets for the whole market. If rivals are induced to match Amazon's prices upward, and sellers dare not discount elsewhere, the lower price a shopper hunts for on another site may simply no longer exist.

That is the argument More Perfect Union distils for a mass audience, and it lands a week before the California injunction hearing that could curb the practices while the cases proceed.

Amazon rejects the entire premise. The company argues the government's market definition ignores fierce competition from Walmart, Target and the wider retail sector, and maintains that its practices deliver lower prices, wider selection and faster delivery. Walmart declined to comment on litigation it is not a party to, saying it works to keep its prices low. None of the allegations has been proven, and both cases could yet settle before verdicts.

Until the courts rule, the price tag on the screen carries an asterisk prosecutors have spent four years writing: cheapest compared to what.