AMAZON. Reuters suspects the American e-commerce giant of producing counterfeits and manipulating its search engine results to promote its own references.
For the moment the case concerns almost exclusively Amazon’s activities in the Indian market, but Reuters news agency revelations relayed by The world are likely to permanently tarnish the image of the American multinational with consumers. According to thousands of pages of documents consulted and analyzed by the Reuters agency, Amazon – already accused in 2020 by the Wall Street Journal to use the data of the sellers present on its site to promote the development of its own products – is suspected of manipulating the search engine results of its Amazon.in site to promote its own references, but also of creating articles that are ‘akin to counterfeits inspired directly by successful sales of partner brands. The elements cited by Reuters, in a long survey published on October 13, 2021, date back to 2016 and detail the menu of practices which, if they were proven, could fall under unfair competition. At the bend of thousands of pages composed of email exchanges, strategic documents or business plans, we learn that the articles of the brands produced by Amazon must appear in second or third position of the results displayed by the search engine of the site to impose itself as a choice for the consumer.
Another sensitive accusation: counterfeiting. This is not the first time that Amazon has been suspected of engaging in this type of practice. In 2018, in the United States, the group had already been accused by a furniture distribution brand, Williams-sonoma, for having copied several of his references. The case ended in a (confidential) agreement between the parties. According to Reuters, which takes the example of John miller, a brand of t-shirts particularly popular in the Indian market, Amazon’s strategy would consist more broadly in identifying the products that work, in examining the commercial practices of the brands (item return policy, etc.) to duplicate these elements for its own references. The news agency also claims that these practices were known to several senior Amazon executives including Russell Grandinetti, in charge of Amazon’s international retail sales branch and based at the group’s headquarters in Seattle.
Amazon denies Reuters accusations
For its part, Amazon stands firm and questions the veracity of the documents examined by the Reuters agency. “As Reuters did not share the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the accuracy of the information in this report. We believe that these claims are factually incorrect and unfounded.”, explains the American group in a written response to the press agency. In 2020, testifying under oath before US parliamentarians, Jeff Bezos, now the former CEO but still founder of Amazon, claimed that the group prohibited its employees from using the data of its business partners to promote brands ( from “private labels”) developed by Amazon. Because Amazon has been working for several years to develop a vertical integration strategy in fashion, but also in everyday consumer products (cosmetics, food, frozen foods, tech accessories) by creating its own brands. Brands highlighted on various Amazon sites around the world but which do not always appear to consumers as being explicitly linked to Amazon. This type of product presents for a group like Amazon the advantage of generating larger margins than the average while optimizing production costs and marketing expenses.
Concerning the commercial partners present on its site and via its marketplace, Amazon officially makes a point of promoting them and strives to put forward the local know-how. In France, this can take the form of a space dedicated to what is … “Made in France”, ora series of shows on his YouTube channel designed to introduce Internet users to the little-known talents of SMEs working with Amazon. On the other hand, in financial matters, Amazon is not known to do favors to its precious partners. Thus, when in 2019 France decided to create a tax (called “GAFA tax”) Introducing a tax on large companies in the sector not on profit, but on turnover achieved in France, Amazon had purely and simply chosen to apply to all French sellers in its marketplace a 3% increase in selling costs and therefore pass on the cost of this tax directly to them.