Wouldn't this reveal their margins? If you see the tariff amount, you can then find the appropriate line in the policy and then calculate how much they paid for it at import.
Yes, good point. I suspect the numbers won't be precise. The objective is to qualify raising prices, not necessarily their own transparency. Of course this is signaling that Amazon is choosing to distribute the costs to customers rather than absorbing them in any way, so take that for what it is.
>This has to be illegal. You can't slap on a $20 sales tax fee at the end when it's actually $12 and pocket the difference as profit.
Not sure where you are, but this is pretty much de rigueur in the US for a whole bunch of stuff, notably telecom (mobile and fixed line), ISP, cable TV, electric utilities, as well as other stuff. On your invoice, you'll see stuff like "regulatory recovery fee", "franchise fee", "FCC Admin fee" and the like. None of which are taxes or government imposed fees. Rather, they're just using standard cost-of-doing-business expenses to tack on to your bill while claiming the price is at least 10-15% less.
My favorite is the $23/month "broadcast TV surcharge," which the cable company claims is to cover fees paid to the networks they carry. Since they have to pay these folks to carry their content anyway, they should just include it in the normal price, right? But if they did, that alone would increase the "price" by at least 15-20%.
As such, at least in the US, what law makes this "illegal?" Please tell me as it would save me at least $100/month in such fees/surcharges, or at least the "price" would be the actual "total you owe" price on the bottom line.
This isn't sales tax, this is tariff. Not sure if they are any laws regarding that or not.
It might be like shipping and handling: $20. The shipping is probably $5, the handling is $15. The handling is just a fee they charge to sell it to you. They want you to think it's shipping that's why they put "shipping" first. Uber Eats calls it "taxes and other fees," which are mostly fees, but they want you to think it's taxes, that's why they put "taxes" first.
Many business are scummy like that, we've just gotten used to it.
The point being, they are signaling a price hike and they are trying to attribute it to tariffs, which maybe or may not be true down to the penny. If they were exact in what the tariff was, people can easily calculate their cost, which Amazon doesn't want. I'm sure they will sneak in some extra profit in there at some point using similar tactics as described above.
Even if they can get away with it I don't think this will work so well. So upon check out you're just getting a fee and sometimes it's egregiously high and sometimes it is nonexistent? If you're buying a $100 item (and let's say a $50 cost basis) that has three versions: US made, Japanese made and Chinese made you could get a $0 fee, a $5 or a $50 fee. And at the same time you know that retailers could be just completely making up the tariff fee because there is absolutely no regulation or accountability? Seems like a very fast way to completely lose the trust of your customers.
>So upon check out you're just getting a fee and sometimes it's egregiously high and sometimes it is nonexistent? If you're buying a $100 item (and let's say a $50 cost basis) that has three versions: US made, Japanese made and Chinese made you could get a $0 fee, a $5 or a $50 fee.
It would be more obfuscated than that. They're scummy, I didn't say they weren't clever. A company probably wouldn't make the exact same product in three different countries and Amazon probably wouldn't stock all three, they'd just pick the version they could make the most money on. Also, they probably wouldn't make the difference obvious, just a few cents or dollars here or there. They would say the tariff is $5, when it really was $4.50 and they'd just round up. At scale that really ads up.
>Seems like a very fast way to completely lose the trust of your customers.
Most of them lost trust a long time ago. I mean, what companies do you trust? I don't trust very many, if any.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we should all trust Amazon...
Edit: Amazon said displaying tariffs was never approved and won't happen. More junk news.
I currently trust that when I add items to my shopping cart at a known retailer (either online or brick&mortar) the prices listed are the ones I'll see at checkout, plus some small deterministic sales tax and/or shipping fee.
> If you see the tariff amount, you can then find the appropriate line in the policy and then calculate how much they paid for it at import
With the amount of day-to-day and place-to-place variation in tariffs, I'd say that's highly unlikely. Simpler: check their public filings for aggregate statistics.
