Amazon accused of rigging search results to promote its own brands

Amazon is under fire for “knocking off products it sells on its website”, according to Reuters.

The media giant reported that Amazon is accused 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.

“We display search results based on relevance to the customer’s search query, irrespective of whether such products have private brands offered by sellers or not,” Amazon said.

Reuters reported: “The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand 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” when customers were shopping on Amazon.in.”

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.” It termed such manufacturer expertise “Tribal Knowledge.”