Amazon is without a doubt the biggest company when it comes to selling products online and it is also doing great when it comes to delivering products at a time of pandemic meaning that the company’s profits are off-the-charts and everything is going well. However, a new report related to Amazon might concern the company and its employees because this is a big revelation and one that could damage the relationship between Amazon, third-party sellers and its customers. This report is from Wall Street Journal who have reported a shoddy practice that is allegedly being carried out by Amazon employees.
Now, it is not clear if the upper management at Amazon knew about this but it is quite clear that Amazon’s employees have been involved in this act. Coming to the report, WSJ says that Amazon which is a platform selling its own products, as well as third-party products, has vowed not to track third-party product sales and make competing products. However, it has been found out that Amazon employees have been tracking sales of third-party sellers on the platform and if the products do well, they have been found to make competing products under the Amazon brand as well.
WSJ says that this is after conducting interviews with “more than 20 former employees of Amazon’s private-label business and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal”. Amazon has said many times, “including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use the information it collects from the site’s individual third-party sellers”. However, this new report shows that they clearly did the same meaning it lied to Congress under oath.
Amazon’s response is that “Like other retailers, we look at sales and store data to provide our customers with the best possible experience,”. “However, we strictly prohibit our employees from using nonpublic, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch.”