Emails detail Amazon’s plan to crush a startup rival with price cuts

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos speaks via videoconference during a House Judiciary Committee meeting on Wednesday, July 29, 2020. (credit: Graeme Jennings/Washington Examiner/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Emails published by the House Judiciary Committee this week confirm an accusation that critics have long leveled against Amazon: that the company's aggressive price-cutting for diapers in 2009 and 2010 was designed to undercut an emerging rival.

That rival, Quidsi, had gained traction with a site called Diapers.com that sold baby supplies. Amazon had good reason to worry. As journalist Brad Stone wrote in his 2013 book about Amazon, Bezos' company didn't start selling diapers until a year after Diapers.com did. At the time, diapers were seen as too bulky and low-margin to be delivered profitably.

But Quidsi's founders figured out how to do it. They optimized their packaging for baby products and positioned warehouses close to metropolitan areas. That not only allowed them to get cheaper ground-shipping rates-it also allowed them to provide overnight shipping to most of their customers-in many cases, faster than Amazon's own shipping.

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