The EU's Price-Parity Enquiry Into Amazon: What It Means If You Sell Cheaper Off Amazon

If you price lower on your own site than on Amazon, the European Commission is now asking sellers whether that costs them visibility on Amazon.

Bloomberg reported on September 18, 2026 that Commission officials are questioning Amazon's third-party sellers over suspected price-parity restrictions. Trade coverage dated September 21 places the enquiries under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and describes them as early-stage, with no formal investigation opened. Amazon says it does not use parity clauses that conflict with the DMA, and in its own 2026 DMA compliance report it states that sellers can offer the same products elsewhere at any price without affecting Featured Offer eligibility.

That is a regulatory story about Amazon. For a brand or agency running Amazon next to a DTC store, Walmart, or another marketplace, it is a pricing-architecture story about you. The open question decides whether you can price each channel to its own cost to serve, or have to price every channel to the one with the highest fees. This post covers what has and has not been confirmed, and the record to keep so you can answer the question from your own data. It is general information, not legal advice.

Quick Answer

The short list for sellers who price differently on Amazon and elsewhere:

What Has Been Reported, and What Has Not

The facts are thinner than the headlines. Separate what outlets reported from what is established before you decide anything.

The reported facts

What is not established

One more boundary. Amazon made binding commitments to the Commission in 2022 on marketplace data use and Buy Box practices, and Novadata notes that cross-channel pricing was not part of them. Keep the two matters separate.

The Legal Frame: The DMA Bans Parity Requirements, and Amazon Says It Has None

The Commission designated Amazon as a gatekeeper under the DMA on September 6, 2023. The DMA prohibits gatekeepers from imposing parity requirements that stop businesses from offering better commercial terms elsewhere, and the Commission has told another gatekeeper, Booking, that measures with equivalent effect are barred too. The provision in play is Article 5(3), per Amazon's own report.

Amazon's position, in its compliance report, is that its pricing tools "cannot and do not prevent Sellers in any manner from offering different prices" elsewhere, and that sellers can price on any third-party marketplace or their own site "at any price without affecting their eligibility to be highlighted as the FO or SDO." The reported enquiry tests that statement against what sellers experience. Those are different questions: one is about written terms, the other is about how automated systems behave.

Two scoping notes. The DMA applies to Amazon's EU services, and this post asserts no US parallel because none has been sourced. Amazon's separate Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy points the other way. As our cross-channel pricing guide summarizes, it lists pricing significantly higher than recent prices offered on or off Amazon among the practices that can cost you the Featured Offer. That concerns being too high, not too low. We could not retrieve the policy page for this post, so read the live wording in Seller Central.

Why the Answer Decides Which Channel Sets Your Price Ceiling

A lower price on your own site only makes sense if you can price each channel from what it costs you. An Amazon unit carries a referral fee, a fulfilment fee, and usually advertising. A direct order carries payment processing, shipping, and customer acquisition. Those stacks are different, so the right price on each channel is different, and the gap can run either way.

If lowering a price off Amazon puts your Amazon visibility at risk, the highest-fee channel becomes your price ceiling by default. You hold every channel up to protect the one that sets the rules. That is the cost the enquiry puts on the table, and it is why the question matters before any ruling exists.

The opportunity: price each channel to its own cost to serve

If Amazon's stated position holds, a brand can pass the savings from a cheaper-to-serve channel to the buyer there, win DTC orders it would otherwise hand to Amazon's fee stack, and keep Amazon priced to its own economics. Our guides on Amazon pricing strategy and selling on Walmart and Amazon cover how the fee stacks differ.

The risk: acting on a correlation

The danger runs both ways. Hold prices up out of fear and you give away margin and DTC share. Discount aggressively off Amazon on a hunch that nothing will happen and you may lose Featured Offer time you cannot explain afterward. Featured Offer eligibility depends on many inputs besides price, including stock, shipping speed, and seller metrics, so a drop after a discount proves little by itself.

If You Already Sell Cheaper Off Amazon, Do This First

Start with documentation, not price changes. These steps cost little and keep your options open. None of them is legal advice, and a seller who receives a Commission questionnaire should involve counsel before answering.

How to Document Your Cross-Channel Pricing Before Anyone Asks

You can run this without any new software. The goal is a dated record that lets you answer one question from your own data: what happened to your Featured Offer share the last time you discounted off Amazon?

Steps one through five are clerical. Step six is the one that fails in practice.

Where Qinetix Dynamic Pricing and Qore Fit

Step six is the one that breaks in practice because the history does not live in one place. Most brands manage cross-channel prices in three places at once: a repricer on Amazon, a DTC storefront, and a spreadsheet. None of them holds the full record, so a weekly comparison across hundreds of SKUs gets skipped the week it matters.

Qinetix is our platform for ads automation, dynamic pricing, and DSP. Qinetix dynamic pricing is where you set your floor and ceiling per product and the rule for how far one channel can sit from another, including a deliberate gap, and the system executes inside those limits with a change log. The operator sets the condition. Our Amazon dynamic pricing guide walks through setting those guardrails before automating anything.

Qore is our product for turning a check you run by hand into a workflow that runs on a schedule. Qore lets you describe "compare our Amazon price and Featured Offer status against our DTC price every week and flag divergence," then runs it and routes the finding to a person. Actions default to manual approval, and autonomy is available once you trust a workflow. Qore is in open beta, and you can sign up here.

What neither one can do

Both enforce and record your own pricing policy. Neither can show you why Amazon changed a Featured Offer, because Amazon does not expose the inputs to that decision. Neither can tell you whether a given Amazon term is enforceable in your jurisdiction. A cleaner record makes your question answerable. It does not answer it for you.

Conclusion: Build the Record Now, Decide on Prices With Evidence

The Commission's enquiry is early, unresolved, and so far reported mainly through trade press. Amazon's stated position is that sellers can price as they like elsewhere. Both can be true at once while sellers still see behavior they cannot explain. The practical move for any brand that sells on Amazon and elsewhere is to keep a dated pricing and Featured Offer record on its top ASINs, so the question of what a discount off Amazon costs is answered by your data rather than by a headline. This is general information, not legal advice. If you want to see how an operator-set pricing rule and a weekly Qore check would look on your catalog, start in the open beta.