An e-commerce giant is remaking small business in its image.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Amazon might seem a nathema to small business, but the fact is, third-party sellers account

for the majority of its sales.

Now that tiny font under the Buy Now button that says sold by and often shows a name,

you don't recognize.

These sellers range from independent artisans and designers to opportunistic resaylers of

products from big box stores.

A new report from the non-profit data and society examines how Amazon is helping, hurting,

and generally transforming the small business retail model.

Author Moira Weigel is a professor at Northeastern University.

She describes the effect as a trickle-down monopoly.

Amazon's market dominance is giving rise to a new kind of small business that is Amazon-native

optimized for Amazon, kind of engineered to succeed on Amazon, but we must acknowledge

like, can scale and bring real opportunities to people, but that remain extremely vulnerable

to Amazon's shifting prerogatives and very much under Amazon's control.

I saw many sort of really literal examples of that in my research, whether it was merchants

who call themselves retail arbitrages, hoarding huge amounts of goods in their homes or

their garages or their cars, sort of turning their daily lives into out miniature fulfillment

centers, or whether it was sellers being encouraged by Amazon training materials or by

other training materials to sell it a loss for a period of time in order to gain market

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