Why selling books in a store and selling books online are two different businesses
I can understand the need to protect companies from creating monopolies through predatory competition, but the French government’s decision to impose a minimum €3 surcharge for shipping books costing less than €35 on Amazon and other online stores seems a bad idea.
Firstly, because there is no reason why books should be subject to different legislation from other products; the fact that they are and that their prices can be changed is simply another way of distorting competition. Secondly, if, in addition to preventing unit prices from being touched, any way of lowering their price is also prohibited for those who do nothing more than increase their availability, then access is simply being restricted, which is no solution either.
Where’s the sense in preventing a company from selling stuff cheaply? Amazon understood from the get-go that adding shipping costs at the end of the transaction led a lot of people to abandon their purchase. To avoid this, it began offering logistics companies high volume in exchange for a discount on their prices, and further subsidized those prices to the consumer at the expense of its own margins. Over time, that evolved into Amazon Prime, a subscription model in which the consumer got a flat logistics fee in exchange for an annual payment.
