German online trade: Amazon is usually not the cheapest provider

Those who shop online in Germany usually also order from the market leader Amazon. But SWR research show that the US group offers the cheapest price in only 30 percent of the cases.

Almost every German online customer also buys from Amazon. Many are convinced that you are ordering at low prices from the most customer-friendly industry leader in Seattle. Whether that is really the case, she has SWR consumer editorial office market check checked. For five weeks, the expert for market observation and price optimization, Tobias Schlögel, observed on behalf of SWR-Journalists 816 top sellers from Amazon, including many branded products.

Traders have to pay high commissions

“If you now use the data of the last five weeks accordingly, we can dispel the myth that Amazon is the cheapest provider,” summarizes the price expert. In only 30 percent of the cases, Amazon was the cheapest. The observed products are often a quarter cheaper in many other online shops.

According to Schlögel, this is mainly due to the fact that Amazon demands one of the highest commissions from retailers who sell their goods via the Amazon market platform. It is quite normal for dealers to sell there at more expensive prices than, for example, in their own online shop. According to the comparison, Amazon’s main competitors in Germany – Otto, Ebay and Zalando – almost never offer the best price. With two thirds of the products examined, consumers were able to get the best bargains via the comparison portals Google Shopping or Idealo. Amazon itself advertises, among other things, with the slogan: “Amazon: Low prices, when and where you want.”

Germany’s most important Amazon market after the USA

Amazon.de is accessed 15 million times a day. Germany is by far the most important market for the group outside of the USA. In the pandemic year of 2020, Amazon’s daily sales in this country were 31 million euros higher than in 2019. This is based on a current study by the Institute for Retail Research in Cologne emerged.

The US giant thus dominated the German online mail order business with a 53 percent market share. Above all, the 22 million Prime customers represent 70 percent of all sales at Amazon. The “Amazon Prime” program is like a fly net, explains Eva Stüber, head of the study. “There are so many different points at which you can get in, and customers ultimately dock in this fly net and then automatically get deeper and deeper. There are more and more points of contact, films or series are being watched, you are on the platform and you will This makes it more and more important for Amazon, because more sales are generated accordingly. ”

This is also reflected in the figures: Amazon generates five times as much sales in Germany as its main competitors otto.de and Zalando combined.

Open questions about sustainability promises

Amazon does not only make great promises when it comes to prices. The group is also making great efforts to promote sustainability, aiming to become CO2-neutral by 2040. Returns and logistics expert Björn Asdecker from the University of Bamberg estimates that 25 to 30 percent of the directly responsible emissions were primarily generated by logistics in online retail. It does not go together on the one hand to send electric vehicles and cargo bikes for the last mile on a large scale and on the other hand to set up our own air freight company.

Asdecker complains, Amazon is silent about how much CO2 emissions are incurred per order or per return. “Amazon is a data-driven company – they know exactly what they’re doing,” he says. “We have a huge black box here. In many cases we don’t know what’s going on.”

Report on ongoing returns destruction

It is similar with the destruction of new goods by Amazon. The online retailer sends around 849 million parcels a year in Germany alone. With an estimated return rate of five percent, that would be around 43 million Amazon returns per year. It was not until May 2021 that undercover employees of the environmental organization Greenpeace found out that new goods were still being systematically destroyed in an Amazon logistics center, although the grand coalition took action against it in 2020 and the Bundestag passed a corresponding law.

Market check Against this background, wanted to know from Amazon how many tons of new goods are destroyed per month in Amazon logistics centers in Germany. The group did not want to comment on this.

The conclusion of the logistics and returns expert Asdecker about Amazon’s commitment to sustainability is sober: “You just have to say that at Amazon we are dealing with a retailer who is not influenced by sustainability considerations, but by economic considerations” , says Asdecker. “It must always be worthwhile for this group.” Metaphorically speaking, Amazon is “like a kind of hydra that casts itself off. A head is cut off at one point with a high public profile and then two new heads are grown in another place where one is not looking.”

You can see more on this topic tonight in the program “MARKTCHECK checks … Amazon” at 8:15 pm on SWR television and at 10:15 pm on tagesschau24.