Amazon CEO: Sellers will try to pass tariff costs along to buyers

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy predicted that the retailer’s web of third-party sellers will try to pass the extra costs incurred by the Trump administration's wide-ranging tariffs on to buyers. 

“I understand why, I mean, depending on which country you’re in, you don’t have 50 percent extra margin that you can play with,” Jassy said during a Thursday interview with CNBC. “I think they’ll try and pass the cost on.”

Jassy noted that it is too early to tell what the impact of the tariffs will be, but Amazon has not “seen any change in consumer behavior in a meaningful way yet.” 

Amazon’s network includes millions of third-party sellers who are either in China or whose products originate from there. 

President Trump said Wednesday he would pause his expansive tariffs on most of the U.S.'s trading partners, allowing countries a chance to renegotiate better trade deals. The announcement prompted a jump in financial markets, which had plunged after the president unveiled the tariffs days earlier.

At the same time he announced the pause, however, Trump also said he would further hike tariffs against China to 125 percent. 

Jassy, who became the CEO of Amazon in 2021 after its founder, Jeff Bezos, stepped down, told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin that the company has “done some strategic forward inventory buys to get items, as many items as makes sense for customers, at lower prices.” 

“There are some cases where we have deals we negotiated that weren't done, where we'll renegotiate terms to make it easier for customers to have lower prices,” he said. “We are doing everything we can to keep prices as low as possible.” 

Jassy said that Amazon’s consumers have not stopped buying.

“In certain categories, we do see a little bit of people buying ahead, but it’s hard to know if it’s just an anomaly in the data, because it’s just a few days, or how long it’s going to last,” the CEO said.