Confirmed! Amazon manipulates search results and copies other sellers’ product information

As the world's largest e-commerce giant, Amazon has been repeatedly accused of manipulating search results and engaging in unfair competition with third-party sellers, but these have been denied by Amazon one by one.

However, a recent Reuters report pointed out that a large number of internal documents revealed that Amazon copied other sellers' product information and manipulated search results. This is a slap in the face ...

Amazon is accused of manipulating search results

Reuters reported that a review of thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents, including emails, strategy documents and Amazon's business plans, found that the company had carried out a systematic campaign to create knockoffs and manipulate search results to boost its products ' rankings and sales in the Indian market .

The documents reveal how Amazon’s private label team in India secretly used internal data to copy products sold by other sellers and then offer them on its platform. Amazon employees also manipulated Amazon search results to boost sales of Amazon’s own brand products .

Using the platform's data to select products, and finally manipulating search results to get buyers to place orders, such operations are difficult for even the most powerful third-party sellers to resist.

Foreign media said that Amazon created a brand called " Solimo " in its Indian market . In an internal report, Amazon said Solimo's strategy is simple - use information from Amazon.in to develop products and then promote these products to customers on the Amazon India site .

Amazon manipulated search results to favor its own products in India, internal documents show

Amazon uses a technique called “Search seeding” to boost the rankings of its AmazonBasics and Solimo branded items , according to a 2016 private label report, which states: “We use Search seeding for newly launched ASINs to ensure they appear in the first 2 or 3 ASINs in search results. ”

The document also mentions another technology that gives Amazon an advantage: " Search sparkles."

“We actively use search functionality on desktop, mobile and apps to specifically promote Solimo products in relevant customer searches across all product searches and category searches, ” the 2016 private label report states.

A former Amazon employee said that while these tools can legitimately help online shoppers find certain popular new products, using search seeding to boost the rankings of Amazon's own products can hurt sales of rival merchants on the platform.

Amazon's actions have also caused sellers to suffer, and some sellers have been forced to stop selling on the platform. Piyush Tulsian, a computer accessories retailer in New Delhi , told Reuters that he used to sell Logitech mouse pads on Amazon India, but two years ago, the seller found that his sales were declining. The seller said that when customers browsed the details of the Logitech mouse pad he sold for $21, they would be recommended an Amazon-operated mouse pad that was 60% cheaper.

Because of this, the ranking of Logitech products sold by the seller in search results began to drop significantly. Tulsian, 36, said : "Amazon is abusing sellers, so we stopped selling Logitech mouse pads on Amazon."

According to foreign media reports, a survey released by technology news website The Markup on Thursday showed that Amazon often places its own brand products higher than competitors in search results. The report said that Amazon brands and exclusive ads "occupy a very large share of search results."

The report also claims that Amazon places its brands and exclusive products at the top of search results half the time …

Amazon copies sellers’ products to boost its own sales

Once Amazon’s private-label employees decide which categories to enter, they look at sales and customer review data about such products on Amazon India to identify brands to “copy , ” “reference” or “benchmark,” according to private-label documents from 2016.

In the case of Solimo, Amazon ’s 2016 document states that to ensure the brand’s products met “customer performance requirements, we identified and replicated these reference products .

Amazon also targeted other brands that are popular in India. For pots and pans, Prestige, one of India's largest kitchen equipment companies, was the "reference brand." For men's shirts, Amazon "referenced" Peter England and Louis Philippe .

The Reuters report includes a table from a 2016 Amazon document showing internal data the company accessed when deciding which men's business shirts to use as a "benchmark" for copying. Employees considered a number of metrics when choosing which John Miller brand to copy, including the number of shirts sold, the percentage of customer returns due to quality issues and the average selling price.

It has to be said that Amazon’s own operations can indeed use internal data to give it a huge advantage on the platform. Not only in India, Amazon’s own operations have good rankings and sales on other sites.

In addition, Amazon has launched a European and American style clothing brand called Symbol in India . On October 11, 11 of the 25 best-selling men's formal shirts on Amazon.in carried the Symbol brand name.

Amazon has repeatedly denied unfair competition

In recent years, Amazon has been accused of antitrust many times, and regulators in many countries have also conducted antitrust investigations on Amazon, but Amazon has denied them all.

It is understood that in sworn testimony before the US Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using individual sellers' data to help its private label business. And, in 2019, another Amazon executive testified that the company would not use such data to create its own private label products or change its search results to support self-operated products .

Amazon said this on the surface, but it is still engaging in unfair competition behind the scenes. Previously, employees of Amazon's own brands stated that Amazon used the proprietary data of individual sellers to launch competing products and manipulated search results to increase sales of the company's own products.

The Reuters investigation also showed that, at least in India, manipulating search results and copying other sellers' products was part of Amazon's secret strategy , and that top executives knew about it . Amazon's internal documents showed that two Amazon executives reviewed the India strategy : Diego Piacentini, a senior vice president who has left the company, and Russell Grandinetti, who currently oversees Amazon's international consumer business.

On the platform, Amazon is not only a referee, but also a player. This business model harms the interests of third-party sellers on the platform. Moreover, regulators in various countries are also reviewing Amazon's various behaviors. I believe that antitrust will eventually bear fruit, and Amazon will receive huge fines for unfair competition!

Amazon

Self-operated

Unfair competition