Amazon copied products, rigged searches: Report
NEW DELHI: Amazon.com Inc has been repeatedly accused of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers. The company has denied the accusations. But thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters — including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.
The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform. The employees also stoked sales of Amazon privatebrand products by rigging Amazon’s search results so that the company’s products would appear, as one 2016 strategy report for India put it, “in the first 2 or three … search results”.
Among the victims of the strategy: a popular shirt brand, John Miller. Amazon decided to “follow the measurements of” John Miller shirts down to the neck circumference and sleeve length, the document states.
The internal documents also show that Amazon employees studied proprietary data about other brands on Amazon.in, including detailed information about customer returns. The aim: to identify and target goods — described as “reference” or “benchmark” products — and “replicate” them. As part of that effort, the 2016 internal report laid out Amazon’s strategy for a brand the company originally created for the Indian market called “Solimo”. The Solimo strategy, it said, was simple: “use information from Amazon.in to develop products and then leverage the Amazon.in platform to market these products to our customers.”
The 2016 document further shows that Amazon employees working on the company’s own products, known as private brands or private labels, planned to partner with the manufacturers of the products targeted for copying. The document, entitled “India Private Brands Program”, states: “It is difficult to develop this expertise across products and hence, to ensure that we are able to fully match quality with our reference product, we decided to only partner with the manufacturers of our reference product.”
The internal documents show that high-level executives were told about it. The documents show that two executives reviewed the India strategy – then senior vice presidents Diego Piacentini and Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon’s international consumer business.
Amazon said these claims are “factually incorrect and unsubstantiated”.