Competing With Amazon on Amazon

Thousands of small merchants depend on Amazon to reach customers who otherwise wouldn't know they exist. A few of them complain, though, that Amazon sometimes eats their lunch. According to some small retailers, the Seattle-based giant appears to be increasingly using its Marketplace—where third-party retailers sell their wares on the Amazon site—as a vast laboratory to spot new products to sell, test sales of potential new goods, and exert more control over pricing.