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ARTICLE · 28 JANUARY 2015

Open And Online

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Suppliers that seek to restrict online sales via third party platforms (e.g. eBay, Amazon) risk being found to have infringed the EU antitrust rules.

European UnionAntitrust/Competition Law
John Cassels
John Cassels

Suppliers that seek to restrict online sales via third party platforms (e.g. eBay, Amazon) risk being found to have infringed the EU antitrust rules. 

The EU Commission's guidelines on vertical arrangements suggest that a supplier may ban sales over those platforms by requiring that customers do not visit the distributor's website through a site carrying the name or logo of the third party platform.  However, in practice, such restrictions are being investigated and struck down.

In Germany, headphone-maker Sennheiser was recently forced by the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) to change the terms of its online-distribution contracts that prevented the authorized dealers of Sennheiser's selective distribution system from selling products over the internet platform Amazon Marketplace. Since Sennheiser had appointed Amazon as one of its authorised dealers, the sale by other authorised dealers over Amazon's platforms could not be prohibited.

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