Amazon is known for its anti-competition practices. While they aggressively charge you for every sale you make, they also get to see all of your sales data; valuable information to have if you want to launch products. Even better if you plan on launching copycats! In more than one way, just by selling on their platform, they get you to pay them…to do their market research.
In the end of the article, the author plugged their competing platform so this isn’t a neutral opinion. I still agree with it. A federation of online retailers would be an interesting idea. Given that it involves exchanging money for products, it would be a lot more completed than kbin, lemmy, or Mastodon.