🛒 Ending the magic "world reference price."

🛒 Ending the magic "World Reference Price."

When Amazon is no longer a "cheap standard," and the balance of power in the e ‐ commerce world is quietly changing hands.

This article does not intentionally attack Amazon as a brand, but uses Amazon as a key case study of "changing market structure and pricing power" in the e ‐ commerce world, which is sending tremors directly to consumers, entrepreneurs and platforms in Thailand.

Over the past decade, if consumers want to know where the "middle price of the world" is, the top websites are Amazon.com, etc.

Amazon on that day. Not just a big online store, it acts as a virtual. The ruler of digital capitalism is a reference point, "How much should this piece cost?" with a memory of cutting middlemen, a highly efficient logistics system, and an economic scale that can press costs lower than others.

"But as it steps into 2025-2026, this memory picture is clearly fading away."

Amazon is not missing the global retail game, but it is shifting its role from price deflator to price setter, and this transition is creating latent costs for many consumers without even questioning them.

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1) When the "world price ruler" starts to twist.

In the past, prices on Amazon have been used as de facto Reference Prices, among consumers, cross-country shoppers, to retailers in many countries that have taken them as their base of comparison.

But today, a small number of products have significantly higher prices on Amazon than

* Direct ‐ to ‐ Consumer Official Website

* Online retailers in that country

* Or even Marketplace in Southeast Asia, etc.

The explanation is not that Amazon is "not as good as it is," but because the cost structure of the platform has completely changed.

Industrially, it is well known that

Amazon's total take rate from third ‐ party sellers, combined with commissions, warehousing (FBA), freight and advertising costs, can range from 30-45% of the sale price in many product categories.

In some categories where advertising competition is high, vendor-side cost figures may unconsciously move closer to 50%.

As a result, sellers have almost no choice but to "add platform costs" directly to the price of the product.

Amazon is gradually changing its position from a marketplace that allows sellers and buyers to a mandatory infrastructure where anyone who wants to reach large customers has to accept the cost, and as Infrastructure becomes more expensive, destination prices can't be the same.

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2) Power Shift from price savior to price maker?

The major turning point is not just cost, but the shift in market power.

Amazon today does not compete primarily with "cheapness" like the past, but also with competition.

* Convenience

* Speed (Speed)

* Familiarity and Embedded in Consumer Behavior (Habit & Ecosystem)

In platform economics, this is the time when Market Power moves from consumer to platform.

When the platform has an enormous number of users, and it automatically becomes the beginning of a product search, what follows is

The platform is not necessarily the cheapest, but must be "indispensable."

The strategy of raising prices and then using the Sale, Prime Day or Flash Deal badge became the main tool, but modern consumers have more tools, both Price Tracker and Price History, which is starting to distinguish them as

"This is a real discount" or "Just a discount on a price that has already been pushed up."

As a result, the sanctity of the word Amazon price began to shake, as never before.

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3) "DTC," the profit equation that brands don't want to tell, but consumers are starting to see.

On the one hand, a lot of brands are aggressively turning back to Direct ‐ to ‐ Consumer (DTC).

The numerical reason is straightforward.

* Selling through DTC helped the brand maintain a significantly higher Gross Margin than Marketplace.

* No multi-layer toll required

* Control price, customer experience and consumer information yourself

When a brand can set a lower direct selling price than Amazon, but also higher unit profit, this is not a coincidence, but a business equation that begins to clear up every year.

More comparable consumers began to question, "If it is cheaper to buy from a source, why pay more expensive because of habituation?"

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4) Reflections on Thai e ‐ commerce? = "Polite but familiar pain"

The same phenomenon is happening in the Thai e-commerce market, and a small number of consumers are starting to notice

* Major Marketplaces aren't the cheapest of all categories.

* The Official Store has a high price, but compensates with a frequent pro, so that the net price is hardly different from other stores.

* While some brands choose to sell through Line OA, Facebook or their own websites, with "more direct" prices.

This is a sign of a platform that starts to carry system costs and simultaneously pushes that cost on sellers and buyers.

Thai consumers did not give up the platform because of emotion, but because they began to ask the most fundamental question of economics: "What value does the money paid... really give back?"

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🎯 a bigger lesson than Amazon.

"Amazon will not collapse, and the Thai Marketplace will not disappear, because what has already" collapsed "is the belief that large platforms are automatically fair prices."

For consumers

* Deprecate either platform as the international price standard.

* Always compare with the direct channel of the brand.

* Look at the actual net price, rather than the whiz Sale sign

For businessmen and executives.

* Understand that Marketplace is Cost Center, not just Sales Channel.

* Power Shift has happened, and anyone who doesn't read it will be squeezed by an uncontrollable structure.

"In the capitalist world, platforms are never permanently friendly." The day we stop questioning is the day we pay the price.

# Two stories a day

# AmazonEffect

# EcommercePowerShift

# PricingStrategy

# SmartConsumer