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WSJ has finally come out with something that all of us already knew. Amazon has been rigging their search algorithms to benefit their own products. This isn't surprising, and it's something that most (if not all of us) have already noted is happening.

Though now we know to the degree that it actually happens. So here we go. If you are to search for something along the lines of 'mens button down shirts' or 'paper towels' a large amount of the products that will be shown to you are products that are owned by Amazon through a private label brand. That's not something that is shown to you, as they are displayed alongside the likes of other brands.


All of this is happening while the EU is currently looking into this very issue, and they're seeing if there is anything wrong with a company owning a marketplace and selling products on that very marketplace . I'm assuming they're looking at this under an antitrust lens, as Amazon also controls about 37 percent of all online sales.

Here is the WSJ article as well - https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-changed-search-algorithm-in-ways-that-boost-its-own-products-11568645345?mod=hp_lead_pos5

This is not surprising at all as anyone who’s ever shopped from Amazon would have noticed it, the only thing I’m surprised is that the EU was silent for so many years about this issue. In my personal opinion if Amazon wishes to sell on it’s own platform then they should not rig the results, as this practice is unfair to all traders who sell on Amazon. What do you’ll think will happen now will the EU will fine them, or compel them to improve the mechanism of how products are displayed to a user.

Eh I mean there's this very weird balance between them attempting to show that their products might be better than others, and themselves literally rigging the 'vote' towards themself.

What I mean here is lets just say that Amazon products were to get to the top naturally, people would continue to say that these products have been pushed up by Amazons actions.

I don't know what exactly the EU is going to call this as well, due to the fact that any company should kinda have autonomy on their own platform. It's like any supermarket selling store brand products. Maybe the issue here is that Amazon isn't always displaying that it is store brand. Though stores do this as well, by buying a brand (or starting one) and selling products under this brand.

Though as the EU is very consumer oriented, they'll most likely fine them and Amazon will continue to do as they please. It's more profitable to be fined rather then to change.

Wasn't it Amazon that was also found doing discriminatory pricing several years ago? Basically keeping a history of your product searches and then pricing it accordingly I forgot whether they charge you more for the same product you use often but it pissed off a lot of people when it was discovered.


Indeed. Pay the fine and just earn it back. I wouldn't be surprised if these giants already include these in their operating budget.

Interesting but not surprising. Amazon also gives different brand names to a lot of their made-in-china products so sometimes its hard to tell what there products are.
When reading the reviews on amazon it becomes very obvious that a lot of the reviews are fake on some products. Amazon has to know about this because theres like 100 reviews posted by the same ip address or user agent or whatever and yet they do nothing about it and profit from it.

A few years ago i was selling HANDMADE knives that my neighbor made on amazon and a seller started selling identical knives to mine. He had literally bought one of my handmade knives, take a photo of it and then was claiming to sell them. I never bought one so I dont know if they were just reselling my knives or making bootleg ones. Amazon didnt do anything and the seller on amazon is doing 100k sales a month now.


Hopefully the FCC and FTC put them in there place soon.

I was completely against Amazon for quite a long time, but I'm changing my opinion.  I find that products they have bought in bulk, and fulfil themselves are usually cheaper and available for next day collection. They are new products as well, and not repackaged returns that some other retailers seem to push. Shops like PC World are more expensive, and when I asked for product clarification once, the manager seemed to be more interested in modelling his suit, and talking to the female members of staff. You don't get this with the Amazon robots.

Your situation regarding another person stealing your picture and using it would allow for you to sue him. Something you should've probably started with making a report to Amazon and then contacting a lawyer who knows this sort of law. Probably not going to help too much to be complaining here!


Oh I'm not saying I'm against Amazon in any way. Though people do have to notice that the reason Amazon is able to sell all of these products for so low is because they are losing money on the whole prime service. Amazon hasn't made a dime from it and it's a massive money sink. Why do you think a company would do this? In order to further market share and then take control of the market down the line.

Though the weird thing with Amazon though is that they have 32 percent of online sales in the US (last thing I read regarding it) and still haven't increased prices to make more money (On their own Amazon basic products of course)

Unfortunately Amazon has become too big for its own good...anyway it's important to note that certain products aren't sold by and shipped from Amazon itself. The sponsored listings are redundant too so sometimes it helps to search outside their (sometimes limited) offerings. In such instances, I'll search eBay or go to a local thrift store and find it at a more reasonable price most of the time. ;D

This has been obvious but it is their platform. Unethical? Maybe. But not illegal.

I was under the impression that all of those random brand names were chinese rebadges of the same product. I can't recall the brand (searching now for the story) but I recall reading a story where some random kid ordered a shit ton of those dermasuction devices from China and slapped his own brand name on them. Started undercutting a real brand name... something about a large portion of them being faulty, shit storm of bad reviews after selling thousands, I don't remember exactly but I will throw it in this post when I locate it. ANYWAY amazon ended up kicking the dude off their platform for this.

Good example of the random rebadges.. just search "led night light" on Amazon. 20 various brand names of the exact same thing.

If Amazon is actually doing some of that rebadging then I'd agree that deserves a thumbs down. Bezos ain't rich enough yet eh?

I mean that's something thats going to be up for debate.

Do I think that it should be illegal? No. I don't think that a platform that has given people great service through the years shouldn't be allowed to control their site in the way that they want.

I do think that there is a large amount of people on Amazon that do re branding, Amazon might just be entering the marketplace as well. I don't see issues here, but we'll see what happens I guess.

Could someone chime in who knows about this? Relating to law as a whole.

There's a lot of chinese shit on Amazon and they are promoting it every way they can. In the daily offers for example 90% of products is brandless stuff. I mean it has some brand but it's a chinese brand that happens to produce only this little USB lamp or led strip. It's so visible in tools as you can find an electric drill that looks exactly the same and has one chinese brand on it and another, exactly the same, with a different chinese brand. Usually all that chinese stuff happens to be in promo or some special offer and appears on top of the search list.
Also, I find it annoying that Amazon doesn't give us a normal search option. It's always "amazon presents" or cheap/expensive, but there's no popularity search. You can't really see products listed according to sales. They don't want you to see it because new chinese brands always have 0, because their products appear and disappear and Amazon wants you to buy these because it pays good.

I try to avoid cheap Chinese stuff but sometimes it's impossible.

They should really have that kind of filter feature just like on other marketplaces. Ex. Lazada.com where they do have that filtering which is really very helpful
to get rid of those unnecessary stuff or brandless items to pop-out.We arent discriminating about Chinese stuffs but its really uncomfortable if you do see these
suggestions every time you do tend to put up some searching for items.Its not really illegal and since they do have the power since its their website on the first place.

In this day and age I do truly think that it is impossible. There's no way to get around it in the world of ecommerce. I must say though, there are some reputable brands even in China -- think of a brand like Anker (who makes phone charges) -- they're a pretty amazing company in China.

Though I guess they are a diamond in the rough of horrible brands.

But yeah -- everyone is selling the same generic Chinese brand with different 'brands' on them. Good deal for most of these items, and if you buy them on Amazon you're able to return anything if it dies. That's the reason that most people like Amazon anyway, it's the customer service behind it.

This happens everywhere in most of online market platforms. They collect people’s search inputs and control the ads shown to the buyer based on the data they’ve collected.

I remember this super long ads from an Investment Speaker everytime I play a vid on YT. This happened when someone search his name on my computer.

Also on other websites, there’s a lot of suggested goods that I believe was based on my previous searches.

I don't think it's a good/fair strategy

Only fools are surprised. I've never shopped at amazon and I won't ever.
Supermarkets are doing the same. The products at the best height on their shelves are the ones which give the highest profits, while the best deals are always close to the floor.

Totally agree. Google are also favouring big companies in search results which means smaller companies have to pay for traffic using Google ads. I run a 250 pound monthly Google ads campaign for the company I work for called https://www.s-pgroup.com/ (https://www.s-pgroup.com/) just to get our products on the 1st page. I guess the issue is that Google and Amazon are so big that they think they have their own set of rules to play by.

Nothing surprising here... and a long time suspected.

138 - The number of Amazon own brands. And this is even 'old' number.

https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/online/how-disruptive-are-amazons-own-label-brands-really/591665.article
"...Since the start of 2017, its number of own brands has grown from 27 to 138, according to research by TJI..."

I'm having few sites with Ama Associates and 1 FBA site with 6 SKUs.
Even as of my SKU's is "Amazon's Choice", Ama brands are beating is heavily.

Amazon is very influential already. They have many re sellers,merchants, FBA's  promoting amazon products 24/7. They have a very good platform too  and  no surprise they are rigging results for their own advantage. They have a vast network covering several countries around the world.

It's the algorithm. Back in the day, while backlinks to your site and pages were the primary criteria, on page keywords, ratios and the like had more weight and so even small sites could compete better. But when google added in social "signals", on page time, "clicks", "traffic" and more, I knew it was game over for small sites and we can see that today. Small companies just don't have the resources to compete when you have huge companies getting tons of all the signals required to push them up in the serps. Of course, an argument can be made that they surely would have known what would happen but we have no way of knowing without internal documents.

Did people already forgot that Amazon Representative admitted that they are deleting reviews, fake review, and bumps.
They also take bribes to leak data of Amazon in order for sellers to manipulate everything in their favor.

Amazon is clearly biased towards its own products, which is normal. However, this will obviously cause Amazon sellers to get significantly reduced traffic and damage the interests of Amazon sellers.

That's really unethical for Amazon to do that. If they don't tell it to advertisers and sellers of their site who sell on Amazon that they are paying for selling on a platform in which the algorithm is against them favoring Amazon owned brands and not giving equal exposure, then it's really not fair!

And the other sellers there are losing money right? From what I understand with companies like this (e.g. Lazada) is you pay them just to be able to put your products on their "shelves" and then they also get some cut upon your product getting purchased.

Brazen really. People saying these behemoths shouldn't be broken apart only need to look at abuses of power like this.

I don't know how likely it would be but I seriously hope Amazon gets the Rockefeller treatment. Bezos is just arrogant. Still bristling remembering him saying "It would be 'irresponsible' to not have Amazon Prime". No wonder people joke about him looking like Lex Luthor.

I think we all knew that Amazon do that, but it's nice to have some evidence. The big tech companies are all the same. Google get in trouble for rigging search results in their favour, too. And Facebook scrape our souls and sell everything about us for their own profit.

The maxim that these companies live by is the old "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."
They will break whatever laws they want and rig everything in their own favour, and then apologise and plead ignorance later. What are the chances Amazon pin this on some anonymous lone rogue agent who has since been disciplined and 'no longer works for the company'... ?

For me I don't see anything wrong in this except there is a superior argument to the contrary. Companies can acquire another company for several reasons. I have read how a company acquired another company that provides its raw material and this is due to the fact they want to ensure consistency in supply of the raw material. Companies have always been biased against companies that is not related to them compared to one in which there is an established relationship just like human endeavors. So, if Amazon can have a company that produces what the client is looking for and they suggested in addition to other sellers, so far they are not forcing customers to buy from their preferred supplier, then there is nothing wrong in it.