Yes, but Amazon has way more affected Sellers than Walmart. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t many affected Walmart Sellers, but it’s less of an optics/PR move than a simple efficiency move: If you can settle some precedent on the biggest of all the big fish, the rest of the big fish have less fight in them.
Ultimately, this is where the FTC has some investigative obligation:
Last week, Amazon sellers told Fortune that at least one of the new fees—called “the inbound placement service fee”—appears designed to pressure merchants to utilize another Amazon warehousing service in addition to FBA, called AWD, or Amazon Warehousing and Distribution. The idea of AWD is to replace warehouses where Amazon sellers store their long-term inventory before they are shipped to Amazon’s FBA warehouses or fulfillment centers to be packed into customer orders.
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Beyond the new inbound placement fees, on April 1 Amazon will also begin charging most sellers a fee if they don’t consistently have four weeks of inventory in Amazon fulfillment centers. One problem, sellers told Fortune, is that Amazon also charges sellers for storing too much inventory in Amazon facilities.“You gotta precisely thread the needle to not get completely killed,” Judah Bergman, the CEO of a major Amazon seller called Jool Baby, said last week of the low-inventory charges.
However, sellers can avoid the low-inventory fees by handing Amazon more control of their supply chain and utilizing the AWD service for long-term inventory storage.
The previous Fortune article that got the FTC interested is discussed in @Pepper_Thine_Angus topic here: [Fortune] Inbound, outbound, and low inventory fees.