Amazon.com Inc has been constantly indicted of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own wares at the expenditure of other merchandisers. The company has denied the allegations.
But thousands of runners of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a methodical crusade of creating copycats and manipulating hunt results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth requests.
The documents reveal how Amazon’s private- brands platoon in India intimately exploited internal data fromAmazon.in to copy products vended by other companies, and also offered them on its platform. The workers also augmented deals of Amazon private- brand products by apparel Amazon’s hunt results so that the company’s products would appear, as one 2016 strategy report for India put it,”in the first 2 or three … hunt results”when guests were shopping onAmazon.in.
Among the victims of the strategy a popular shirt brand in India, John Miller, which is possessed by a company whose principal superintendent is Kishore Biyani, known as the country’s”retail king.”Amazon decided to” follow the measures of”John Miller shirts down to the neck circumference and sleeve length, the document countries.
The internal documents also show that Amazon workers studied personal data about other brands onAmazon.in, including detailed information about client returns. The end to identify and target goods- described as” reference”or” standard” products-and”replicate”them. As part of that trouble, the 2016 internal report laid out Amazon’s strategy for a brand the company firstly created for the Indian request called”Solimo.”The Solimo strategy, it said, was simple” use information fromAmazon.in to develop products and also work theAmazon.in platform to request these products to our guests.”
The Solimo design in India has had transnational impact Scores of Solimo- ingrained health and ménage products are now offered for trade on Amazon’s US website,Amazon.com.
The 2016 document further shows that Amazon workers working on the company’s own products, known as private brands or private markers, planned to mate with the manufacturers of the products targeted for copying. That is because they learned that these manufacturers employ” unique processes which impact the end quality of the product.”
The document, entitled”India Private Brands Program,” countries”It’s delicate to develop this moxie across products and hence, to insure that we’re suitable to completely match quality with our reference product, we decided to only mate with the manufacturers of our reference product.”It nominated similar manufacturer moxie” Ethnical Knowledge.”
