Case
| HBS Case Collection
|
January 2017
(Revised December 2017)
X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (A)
by
Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella
|
Abstract
Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace, and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it had once been the only seller were now being sold by Amazon straight from X Fire’s suppliers, effectively cutting X Fire out. Amazon was also ignoring the minimum advertised price (MAP) set by manufacturers. How should X Fire defend itself? Now Amazon representatives were approaching X Fire to encourage them to sell on Amazon’s smaller but growing Canadian Marketplace. How should X Fire respond to this opportunity?
Keywords: Ethics;
Competition;
Market Platforms;
Online Technology;
Small Business;
Retail Industry;
Canada;