BY GREG BENSINGER
Thousands of small merchants depend on Amazon.com Inc. to reach customers who otherwise wouldn't know they exist. A few of them complain, though, that Amazon sometimes eats their lunch.
According to some small retailers, the Seattle-based giant appears to be increasingly using its Marketplace—where third-party retailers sell their wares on the Amazon.com site—as a vast laboratory to spot new products to sell, test sales of potential new goods, and exert more control over pricing.
Jeff Peterson, owner of Collectible Supplies Inc., a Garden Grove, Calif., retailer of sports merchandise, last summer began selling $29.99 Pillow Pets—stuffed-animal pillows modeled after NFL ...
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