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Slashdot: Emails Detail Amazon's Plan To Crush a Startup Rival With Price Cuts

Emails Detail Amazon's Plan To Crush a Startup Rival With Price Cuts
Published on July 31, 2020 at 11:32PM
An anonymous reader shares a report: Quidsi's (parent company of Diapers.com) founders didn't want to sell their company, but Amazon's diaper price war was starting to hurt Quidsi. Growth was slowing, and Quidsi was having trouble raising additional capital to continue expanding. On September 14, the founders of Quidsi flew to Seattle to meet with Amazon and discuss a possible acquisition. As Quidsi's founders were sitting in a meeting with Amazon brass, Amazon hit Quidsi in the gut. It announced a new program called "Amazon Mom" that offered free Prime service and an additional 30-percent discount on diapers if users signed up to get them through Amazon's monthly "subscribe and save" program. This was a larger discount than Amazon offered on most other Subscribe and Save items. This put Quidsi in an untenable situation, as Stone writes: "That month, Diapers.com listed a case of Pampers at $45; Amazon priced it at $39, and Amazon Mom customers with Subscribe and Save could get a case for less than $30. At one point, Quidsi executives took what they knew about shipping rates, factored in Proctor and Gamble's wholesale prices, and calculated that Amazon was on track to lose $100 million over three months in the diapers category alone." Amazon's losses may have actually been even larger. During Wednesday's hearing, Scanlon said that internal documents obtained by the committee showed Amazon losing $200 million in a single month from diaper products."

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