Does Amazon favor its own brands? There is something fishy about the search results ranking

Amazon typically ranks its own-brand products and products sold exclusively on the platform ahead of third-party sellers, even if those sellers have higher product ratings and sales, according to a survey by research firm The Markup.

For example, The Markup found that Amazon placed its own brand of cereal at the top of the search results, but this product only had a four-star rating and more than 1,000 reviews, while there were many products behind this product that had five-star reviews and tens of thousands of reviews; a vacuum cleaner brand sold exclusively by Amazon ranked first, also ahead of other products with higher ratings and more reviews .

A former Amazon employee told The Markup that the company used to push its new private-label products higher in search rankings when they first launched , but that practice has been discontinued.

Amazon has seen a significant boost in sales by giving its private-label brands better rankings : According to another former Amazon employee, the top three listings on a search results page get 64% of clicks .

An organization analyzed the search results of 3,492 popular products on Amazon in 2021 and studied the patterns of Amazon's homepage search results. The results showed that Amazon sold 60% of the homepage search results to advertisers and added labels to indicate that these products were paid advertising positions. At the same time, Amazon allocated 20% of the positions to its own brands and exclusive sales brands, and third-party sellers also occupied 20%.

However, it should be noted that Amazon's own brands and exclusive sales brands only account for 6% of all brands in the sample , while the number of third-party sellers accounts for 77% of the total sample. This seemingly fair distribution model is actually not fair.

There is no doubt that search rankings are important to sales. In order to gain higher exposure and better rankings, sellers must pay more advertising fees to Amazon.

It is understood that Amazon is the third largest online advertiser in the United States, second only to Google and Facebook, and is still growing rapidly. Amazon's financial report shows that the company's "other" revenue, which "primarily consists of sales of advertising services," increased by 52% in 2020 to US$21.4 billion.

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