Report: Amazon Internal Documents Show Company Copied Popular Products, Rigged Search Results

A recent report claims that internal Amazon documents show that the company created knockoff items and manipulated search results to promote its own product lines in India.

Reuters reports that according to internal documents, e-commerce giant Amazon has been developing knockoff products and manipulating search results to promote its own product lines. Reuters reports that the documents show that Amazon’s private-brands team in India exploited internal data obtained from its marketplace in the country to identify popular products sold by other companies and then create copies to compete against them.

The private-brand team also reportedly altered Amazon’s search results so that Amazon-owned brands would appear “in the first 2 or three … search results” according to a strategy report from 2016. Some of the brands that were copied including the popular shirt brand John Miller, which is owned by a company whose CEO Kishore Biyani is known as India’s “retail king.”

Amazon reportedly chose to “follow the measurements” of John Miller shirts down to the exact neck circumference and sleeve length, essentially creating Amazon-branded copies. – READ MORE