While it is not a secret that Amazon has a large number of private labels that sell everything on its platform, one The Markup investigation sheds light on the power of Jeff Bezos’ company and accuses it of giving its products an unfair advantage over competitors outside of the e-commerce site.
The Markup says in the investigation that in order to find out how many brands Amazon actually has, it was not enough to ask, it had to analyze the public records of the United States Patent and Trademark office. Something that took him months.
As investigated, Amazon has registered or owns more than 150 brands, including some in which the connection between the brand and the platform is hidden.
Most worryingly, some of these brands, as well as others that sell exclusively on Amazon, outperform the competition in search results even with fewer positive reviews.
Examples of Amazon’s strategy
For example, The Markup found that Amazon placed its cereal Happy Belly Cinnamon Crunch, with four stars and 1,011 reviews, in first place ahead of other cereals with more and better reviews, such as Cap’n Crunch (5 stars, 14,070 reviews), Honey Bunches of Oats (5 stars, 5,200 reviews) and Honey Nut Cheerios (5 stars, 11,700 reviews).
Another example from The Markup research says that a brand vacuum cleaner Noisz, from Amazon, appears earlier in searches than the Bissell, Eureka and Hoover models, which have higher ratings and greater volume of reviews.
And the Concept 3 sneaker, also from Amazon, took first place, four places ahead of the Skechers, similar but not exclusive to Amazon, with the same star rating but 77 times more critical.
The outlet interviewed a former Amazon employee, JT Meng, who said workers at Bezos’ company have in the past used a tactic called “seed hunting” to give their own products an edge over the competition.
Although he said the practice was no longer in place when he left the company, he explained that employees could “clone the search ranking” of a competitor to boost Amazon products in their launches.
According to The Markup, Meng worked on the launch of Amazon Elements brand baby wipes. He said Amazon’s strategy was to “seed rankings” among similar Huggies and Pampers products and that sales soared so fast that they had to stop promoting Amazon wipes so they wouldn’t earn as much. market share.
It is not the first report that accuses Amazon of giving advantage to its brands, in April 2021, another report from The Wall Street Journal exposed the same.
However, The Markup’s analysis is very interesting due to the wide variety of products analyzed.