Amazon is ending a third-party seller program that Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson alleged involved price-fixing.

Ferguson filed a lawsuit in which he charged “Sold by Amazon” violated antitrust laws. According to Ferguson’s suit, Amazon used the program to agree on prices with third-party sellers who sold on the multinational technology company’s e-commerce marketplace, rather than compete with those businesses.

The practice “unreasonably restrained competition in order to maximize [Amazon’s] own profits,” Ferguson charged.

The alleged wrongdoing occurred between 2018 and 2020. In a Jan. 26 announcement, authorities said Amazon will shutter its “Sold by Amazon” program nationwide and pay the Washington attorney general’s office $2.25 million, which will be used to support the office’s antitrust enforcement. Amazon, whose net sales in the third quarter of 2021 alone were $110.8 billion, will also have to provide annual updates on its compliance with antitrust laws.

“Consumers lose when corporate giants like Amazon fix prices to increase their profits,” Ferguson said in a press release. “Today’s action promotes product innovation and consumer choice, and makes the market more competitive for sellers in Washington state and across the country.”

Amazon denied any wrongdoing. The Seattle-headquartered company told Insider that the program aimed to provide small businesses another channel for reaching customers and to offer lower prices to consumers.

“This was a small program to provide another tool to help sellers offer lower prices, much like similar programs common among other retailers, that has since been discontinued,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “While we strongly believe the program was legal, we’re glad to have this matter resolved.”

According to authorities, Amazon targeted a small percentage of the millions of third-party sellers on its platform to join the “Sold by Amazon” program. “Amazon kept the program small as an experiment then slowly began to request more sellers join as it evolved,” authorities detailed in a release.

Ferguson alleged that “Sold by Amazon” drew third-party sellers by guaranteeing that they would receive at least an agreed-upon minimum payment for sales of their products in exchange for their agreement to stop competing with Amazon for the pricing of their products. Consequently, if sales exceeded the negotiated minimum payment, Amazon and its competitors split the surplus proceeds amongst themselves.

The “Sold by Amazon” program resulted in prices for some products increasing when Amazon programmed its pricing algorithm to match the prices that certain external retailers offer to online consumers, Ferguson’s investigation reportedly found.

“As a result, when prices increased, some sellers experienced a marked decline in the sales and resulting profits from products enrolled in the program,” the attorney general’s office said. “Faced with price increases, online customers sometimes opted to buy Amazon’s own branded products – particularly its private label products. This resulted in Amazon maximizing its own profits regardless of whether consumers paid a higher price for sales of products enrolled in the ‘Sold by Amazon’ program or settled for buying the same or similar product offered through Amazon.”

According to the investigation, prices for the “vast majority” of the remaining products enrolled in the “Sold by Amazon” program stabilized at artificially high levels. “This is because Amazon programmed its pricing algorithm to maintain the seller’s pre-enrollment price as the price floor,” the AG explained. “This meant participating sellers had limited, if any, ability to lower the price of their products without withdrawing the product’s enrollment in the ‘Sold by Amazon’ program.”