Amazon accused of copying brand sellers' products and selling them at low prices

Peak Design, which has made camera bags and accessories for more than a decade and gets most of its sales from Amazon , last year discovered that Amazon ’s own - brand camera bags looked eerily similar to Peak’s best-selling Everyday Sling bag .

Dai Lin said in an interview: " Amazon copied the shape , joints, colors and even the trapezoidal logo of our products . But they can't learn all the details of Peak Design handbags because they need more effort and cost. "

Furthermore, Amazon even grabbed the name and named its own product Everyday Sling.

What Amazon lacks in originality and quality, it makes up for in price : Peak Design ’s bags currently sell for nearly $90 on Amazon , but knockoffs from AmazonBasics, the company ’s own brand, cost about two-thirds less.

In response to this issue, Dai Lin's team responded with a sarcastic video , mocking Amazon 's shameless behavior .

"You don't have to pay for all those bells and whistles , like years of R&D, officially certified recyclable materials, lifetime warranties, comprehensive employee benefits , and complete carbon neutrality," a man's voice says in the video. "Instead, you get a handbag designed by an elite team at Amazon. "

The video went viral and was covered by HBO's John Oliver in a June feature on tech monopolies . Amazon eventually stopped selling the bag after Peak Design fans left a string of negative reviews for it .

For Amazon, its huge market size makes it a perennial focus of regulators , and plagiarism scandals like this one are also a headache for Amazon. In 2020, the European Commission accused Amazon of using its market size and data to peddle its own products, which indirectly suppressed sellers selling the same products on its platform and constituted unequal competition . Earlier this year, Amazon said it would stop obtaining data from platform sellers .

Meanwhile, California's attorney general filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which is being considered by Congress but has not yet been voted on, would combat the ability of big tech companies to dominate the market at the expense of small businesses.

However , while Amazon 's own products are suspected of plagiarism , it is not illegal to imitate other brands ' products. This has become a business practice that most large retailers use to some extent .

In fact, private brands are just like ordinary stores . Retailers find a suitable manufacturer and then produce reasonably priced "white label" products, said Kusum Elawadi, a professor of marketing at Dartmouth College . Then retailers put their own brands on the packaging and sell them . The price of such products is 25%-40% lower than that of well-known brands on average .

Amazon has developed many of these private brands by collecting data . They know what search terms people use, what they click on, and how long they stay on a certain page . Therefore, they are able to analyze all of this data and turn it into a competitive advantage that ordinary brand stores cannot match .

In fact, this situation is also very common in China. Brands like JD.com have become deeply rooted in people's hearts, but issues such as the use of data and unfair competition by large platforms are also worthy of people's reflection.

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Plagiarism