After numerous complaints from market sellers, the general director of ANO “Digitalization and New Technologies” (CNT), member of the public council of the FAS, Alexei Kozhevnikov, wrote an official appeal to the head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS). ) Maxim Shaskolsky calls for reviewing sites for violations of antitrust legislation: the “price index” introduced by marketplaces (based on comparing prices for the same product in different online stores) prevents sellers from fixing prices that are favorable to them. .
The FAS must now check to what extent the use of the algorithm to assign a “price index” to goods actually has negative consequences, writes Kommersant, which has read the document.
The essence of the tool is as follows: if the algorithm finds a product from the same manufacturer at a lower price in competing markets or stores, this item immediately drops down in the search results, as it is assigned a “index of prices increased”.
This situation, according to sellers in the markets, forces them to set the lowest possible prices for the products. Manufacturers can’t even set a competitive price on their own websites. In addition, selling on other sites for less money can become a reason for exclusion from the loyalty program.
Taken together, this looks like an imposition of unfavorable contractual conditions, an interference in pricing policy and sales management and, consequently, an abuse of a dominant market position (which directly contradicts antitrust laws).
The markets do not consider their tool to limit entrepreneurs and separately note that indexing has little effect on search results:
“The price index is an additional tool for sellers, which shows how attractive their prices are for buyers, and serves only as a convenient guide to prices, which sellers themselves determine,” say Ozon representatives. — The impact of the index on search positions is negligible. To a greater extent, the place in the search depends on other factors important to the buyer: popularity of the order, reviews, speed of delivery to the buyer, description of the product sheet, etc.
The FAS reported that the businessmen’s letter will be considered at the next meeting of the expert council on the development of competition in the field of information technologies. But there can be problems when checking the markets.
This is because the largest online retailers are IT companies accredited by the Ministry of Digital Development, so their inspections are prohibited until the end of 2024. And FAS can only analyze data based on open sources and work with voluntary responses. of market participants to agency requests, if any.
The FAS will also have to understand the algorithm itself for forming and calculating the “price index”, which is not always transparent, and also convincingly demonstrate the real negative effects for sellers and competition in general.
Vadim Kuzmin, head of the antitrust regulation practice at Tomashevskaya & Partners, draws analogies of this appeal with the inspection of Booking.com by the FAS, which was fined 1.3 billion rubles, discovering similar imposition of the terms of the contract in terms of prices.
Author:
Ekaterina Alipova
Source: RB
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