Amazon has actually been requiring vendors to supply this info for a few years now. They have it in their database, but refuse to expose it. The Indian government forced them to, mostly because they are in a cold war with China and want to wean themselves off from Chinese goods.
> Last month, India tightened rules that will disallow foreign-owned online retailers from selling products via companies in which they own equity, and forbid them from pushing merchants to sell exclusively through their platforms
> A trove of internal Amazon documents reveals how the e-commerce giant ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoff goods and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India - practices it has denied engaging in. And at least two top Amazon executives reviewed the strategy.
As far as I understand, those documents were not known before.
Amazon can't directly sell products in India due to FDI (foreign direct investment) laws. These are laws that restrict foreign companies on multi-brand retail in the country.
the real reason is because Amazon wants to do business in China, so they absolutely cannot do something like that on their end without getting blacklisted by China's government.
Unlike other retailers, who are front and center that they own the sales data (some even sell it back to you, the 3p merchant), Amazon explicitly states they will not use that data (except in aggregate). Bezos' statement that he cannot say for sure if the policy has been violated is an admission that it has, and is even encouraged. It's very possible and easy in fact to enforce a chinese wall around that data. That they have chosen not to -- that the data is possibly available at all -- means that they expect successful PMs to use it on the down low.
It's clear they have this policy so as to attract merchants. So to turn around and violate it is a pretty severe issue.
Second, Amazon is in a position to actually produce or re-brand products under their own very strong brand. Unlike other retailers whose store brand is always the discount and less desirable option, and generally not taking away sales from the premium product.
I've heard this claim before, and I've never been shown evidence of this. Certainly Amazon didn't disclose this to me when I used to sell stuff on FBA.
Amazon agrees that what is being reported goes against their policies.
'"However, we strictly prohibit our employees from using nonpublic, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch." Amazon said employees using such data to inform private-label decisions in the way the Journal described would violate its policies, and that the company has launched an internal investigation.'
Were the Amazon employees who accepted the bribes from India? I don't see that mentioned anywhere on the link. It seems the third party contractors were hired by the Amazon sellers to bribe on their behalf.
Edit: On reading the full indictment, there is no mention of the national origin of any employees of Amazon. The 6 accused knew each other and were exchanging insider information from undisclosed Amazon employees with third party sellers in return for a fee. A couple of them were ex-Amazon employees who presumably used their insider knowledge to build confidence with the third party sellers, but I don't think they are being charged for using that knowledge.
Not sure how this would be prevented if Amazon did not have operations in India?
So this seems to be getting drowned out a bit; but the core issue here is not that Amazon is creating their own labels to compete with seller's products. It's that they've publicly stated, including to congress, that they don't use non-public, seller specific data to compete with them; and now former employees are claiming that's a lie.
Amazon agrees that, as claimed, this is a problem.
'Amazon said employees using such data to inform private-label decisions in the way the Journal described would violate its policies, and that the company has launched an internal investigation.'
> 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.
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