Are You on Amazon? You Might as Well Not Exist?

If you want to show up in the first page of listings on Amazon, you've got to be prime. Prime is delivery charged to the sellers instead of the purchasers. And then after you pay for that, you have to buy what Amazon euphemistically calls ads. If you're selling on Amazon, they're taking more than half of the gross price of the good. So this is where the thing that initially benefited consumers starts to look really bad for consumers because the prices go up.