> Your assumption is that Amazon, the middleman, must exist.

You don't think stores should exist? How do you justify that?

>If Best Buy, a brick and mortar, were anything like Amazon, they would be under investigation as well.

I don't see how they are so different. Both are stores that sell third and first party items. BB even does significant online business. Care to explain?

Many sellers on Amazon have their own stores, be they brick and mortar and/or website. Amazon in these cases is just a middleman processing sales that the third parties are already capable of making themselves. They simply lack the web traffic. This is not true of all the brands carried by Best Buy. Many do not do direct-to-consumer sales.

There are less obvious differences such as the contract terms agreed between brands and Best Buy versus the ones between sellers and Amazon. Those details often are only discovered through litigation.

To suggest Best Buy was already doing what Amazon is doing is nonsense.

> _Many_ sellers on Amazon.

> This is not true of _all_ the brands carried by Best Buy.

Now you're just playing word games. Both Amazon and Best Buy sell some amount of stuff that could be sold direct to consumer, and some amount of stuff that could not. Even if the proportions are different, I'm not seeing how they differ in principle.

> They simply lack the web traffic

How would they acquire it? Amazon is normally their answer to "I'm trying to sell, but don't have the web traffic". Seems like if they could get the traffic without Amazon, they'd leave the platform, like Nike did.

As to the question, I would guess the answer is "Not easily." Otherwise, we would not be having these problems with overgrown websites acting as middlemen for large swaths of the web. The rest of your statements are all true, but that does not change the truth of "They simply lack the web traffic". Amazon has an amount of traffic that gives them leverage as a middleman.

Beyond that, even when you order directly from the manufacturer's website, that doesn't mean they, personally, are handling the sale. All the logistics that go with fulfilling orders and customer service around that I'm sure is outsourced frequently (to Amazon or someone else)

True, however those payment processors are not in competition with the sellers in terms of the goods/services being sold.

The facts are that Amazon does not sell only payment processing, order fulfillment or customer services.

The GP made no such assumption

"How is Amazon going to pay sellers their money if Amazon has no data on what is bought and sold?"

I might agree with you if this sentence used a generic term instead of "Amazon". However it specifically refers to Amazon.

I think people forget that Amazon did not operate as a middleman when they first appeared in the early 1990's.

Amazon was originally a bookseller, not a middleman for other sellers.

Not only does the sentence above from GP assume the existence of Amazon, it assumes that Amazon must act as a middleman for other sellers.