One of the ways that medical and healthcare professionals are advising people on how to take care of themselves during the coronavirus outbreak, is by keeping ourselves clean and practicing good hygiene. This includes washing our hands thoroughly, using hand sanitizer, and wearing face masks.As expected due to the crisis, such commonplace products have suddenly become very lucrative commodities and as such, there are quite a number of sellers online who are taking advantage of this by marking up these products considerably. Turns out Amazon isn’t thrilled by this and have since revealed that they have taken down hundreds of thousands of product listings over price gouging due to the coronavirus.
This is in response to a letter Sen. Ed Markey wrote to Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, in which he asked Bezos if Amazon was doing anything to counter the price gouging that customers are seeing on its platform. Amazon has since responded by saying that they are aggressively enforcing its fair price policy, which has resulted in at least 530,000 listings being taken down from the marketplace, with 2,500 seller accounts in the US being suspended as well.
Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy adds, “We have also instituted additional manual audits of products in our stores due to the increased risk of price gouging from unscrupulous sellers seeking to evade our automated systems and take advantage of customers.”