[charanreddy]

Originally Posted by tsk1979

Counterpoint, does every retailer not do this? For example in a supermarket in USA, you will find house brands placed prominently next to name brand items at a cheaper price.

So what Amazon is doing is not unusual or different. Its just that they are doing it online

Amazon is a retailer masquerading as a market place. Third party Sellers list items on Amazon which may be a new invention or an evolution of existing product. Problem is when Amazon duplicates items or copies them out right or sources an item in demand and starts competing with the seller. Amazon has tons of data which helps it figure out real time demand. This Data is from sellers who have listed the items in the first place. They then promote their own items short changing the seller. The govt is trying their best to stop this by putting constraints around share of sales from self owned businesses / sellers.

Originally Posted by Samurai

But Amazon poaches on successful small firms that don't have any brand power to fight back and win their customers back. There is no way to police what Amazon does to the small vendors.

+1. Bigger problem here as Amazon creates the rules. They are a competitor as well as referee.

Originally Posted by agree

Forget rigging the search, I'm having a suspicion on rigging the ratings as well.

Could very well be. I know from a few other sources that Flipkart does this.

Originally Posted by kayak29

As a marketplace, if one does not have equitable terms for all sellers and starts favouring a few, it is bound to create tensions. The same seems to be happening here. Amazon seems to have taken best selling products from some of its sellers (for some, a single SKU could be contributing 50-60% of their overall sale) and asked its 'preferred sellers' to copy them and sell at a lower price under the Amazon private label.

Exactly. Problem is that Amazon has been extensively focusing on buyer experience and getting things for buyers right. Returns, cancellations, refunds, shipping and many other functions are extensively buyer centric and hence they have a set of recurring, loyal buyers. This gives them leverage over sellers as demand is guaranteed. The fees are also higher in Amazon vs comparable Ecommerce platforms.

[Electromotive]

What Amazon is doing is anti-competitive but I don't really care at all because this only harms the Indian trader community and I have ZERO sympathy for them.

Most of the Indian traders affected by this are merchants selling stuff imported from china with their label slapped on. Amazon is also sourcing those same products from China and selling them cheaper. Often the quality is also better because Amazon ensures more quality control.

The trader community failed to innovate for decades and have actively stifled innovation and competition in India. Price fixing and cartel like behavior is the norm. Their only objective is to increase their own profits while delivering poor customer service and low grade products at relatively high prices.

My life is much much better with Amazon and Flipkart in it. I can blindly trust them to support me as a customer should something go wrong. I have more choice and a wider price band, not to mention the great discount offers. I can't even say that of the mom/pop generational family shops in the neighborhood. Unless you have a "relationship" with said mom and pop shop, their obligation ends the moment you walk out of the shop. Then their is the whole issue with their attitude towards customers, pressure sales tactics, outright lying and mis-selling.

Supporting the Indian traders is just supporting more middle men - parasitic entities that solely exist to benefit themselves while creating little to no value. Also, a lot of traders are tax evaders and their businesses are fronts for money laundering. In this age of ecommerce, there is no need for more middle men than what the ecommerce platform provides.

Unless Amazon is somehow actively harming innovative startups (there are none), the govt. should stop meddling. Only when threats like Amazon and Flipkart/Walmart exist will the desi businesses and traders be forced to innovate and become competitive. All this noise is being created because Asia's richest businessman is entering e-commerce and in typical 'biznes' mentality wants the field cleared of competition. Neutering Amazon/Walmart would result in trading a little anti-competition for outright crony capitalism.

A call from Potus will sooner than later fix all this ado about nothin'.

[Ritz2010]

The delivery experience and product spread Amazon offers is unquestionable. Considering positives there is bound to be negatives.

Just reminds me of popular quote in my circle - "Opposite values are complimentary to each other"

We can talk about host of other negatives like tax evasion in US, killing of smaller players by gaints but that's how market is - unforgiving.

I'm no way agreeing to thread headline - but that's how it is and onus is on the buyer to choose what they want (but not much of choice if algorithm rigs even your thinking process)

[Iyencar]

Amazon is a platform for selling and not a retailer. The fact is they have already been subject to an enquiry by the CCI and it was upheld by the SC when Flipkart and Amazon went to court. They have broken the law and ought to face the consequences. Saying that xyz co. in xyz country does it or the traders (a front for money laundering apparently) deserve it is doing ourselves a disservice. We complain when laws are changed arbitrarily. Let's not complain when the law is being applied uniformly.

These e-commerce platforms are seller-agnostic. They cannot become sellers. Nor can they deviously promote associate companies. All of which is being done. They tamper with algorithms; they tamper with data, and they tamper with SEO: all of which is designed to lure customers into believing they (the consumers) have a limited choice. Which they don’t.

What is unknown to most of us is that almost 75% of the sale on all these platforms is from and through these preferred suppliers of these e-commerce companies thus making it a perfect case of anti-trust investigation which is why the Competition Commission and is (and rightly so) concerned.

Couldn't have put it better myself:

It’s ultimately about fairness. Not about competition; or about country of origin. For these companies to tout how much they are doing for India or for Indian retail is a misnomer too. No one has sought any favours. Being legally compliant is not a virtue: it is a necessity and India is not a banana republic where you can come, like centuries ago, the East India Company did, and believe you can get away with everything.

Source

[GKR9900]

This has been going on for quite a while. I remember reading up about a Silicon Valley startup 'June' who were one of the pioneers of manufacturing smart ovens. They listed the product at around 700$ in Amazon. It was getting tremendous response from buyers and soon after Amazon introduced their own version of Alexa controlled smart oven for 250$. Apart from being a monopoly, Amazon always have its fingers on the pulse of the global and local market, getting advance calls of where or when the next big disruption is about to happen. And they're heavily capitalizing on it.

[Rocketscience]

Don't forget even if every retail chain and grocery store does this, this is far worse as for FMCG products many people trust their own brand (of soap, toothpaste etc) and the shop can only place their products near them and people can choose to not even look at them, for Amazon, what most people shop from is the first 3-4 results or at most the first page, unlike shops the space you can look is limited and most people don't browse 5 pages to buy a single item, they can and do strategically place themselves at the prime spot, and place maybe number 3 or 4 brands which people anyways don't like near it and relocate the biggest brands in 2nd page or so and sell theirs for like 50% cost, they can and they do sell products at or below even their cost price because they can afford to and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

They can and do rig the review system, use all the user data and return data to improve their product and in some cases they have gone to the same factory as the highest selling brand and ordered in bulk/sold at lower than cost to effectively eliminate the brand and won the case in US court.

If you talk about ethics, they have none, during corona 2nd wave when your opportunistic pharmacists were overcharging for almost everything and the world was burning, Amazon was not far behind, take this, they prominently displayed a certain brand (DR XYZ (USA)) at top of search results and that brand was Amazon's choice, sold by cloudtail owned by them and most other brands were effectively eliminated from the first few pages, that brand was selling products at 5-6x prices shamelessly (3.5k-5k for oximeter, 600 for digital thermometer), now coming to the brand which itself is a scam and it doesn't take a genius to figure that out.

It took me 15 minutes to find out it was a newly created local Indian brand claiming to be from USA which is false advertisement, their USA website is for namesake and everything they sell on it is out of stock because obviously they have no stock there, their office address there does not exist on the map or anywhere, none of their products is listed on US's e-commerce websites (Amazon, wallmart and all), not even 1, this is just low effort brand building opportunistic brand taking advantage of people who were vulnerable, scared, desperate and some of them even broke and lost their job. How did that brand got thousands of reviews and top Amazon spot and recommendation in such a small period of time? If i can notice such huge plotholes in their story, couldn't Amazon and cloudtail?
On looking further at 6-7th pages you could find the same oxymeter for 800-1000 bucks because almost all the sellers were selling the exact same rebranded chinese imports at that time including the aforementioned brand, but they were so far and such buried in the search results that no one could reach them, this is how they function and no this is not at all like your big bazars and wallmarts, daal cheeni brands.

[dragonfire]

There was a time when Walmart was the evil Goliath (Step aside for a moment, Bill Gates), and they wanted a David to kill it. Then came along Amazon and people were all praises how they started from a garage and revolutionized eCommerce. And they grew and overtook Walmart, so people pushed Walmart off the evil pedestal and installed Amazon there instead.

It happens all the time. Tomorrow a new business grows to an enviable size, people will start digging dirt.

These matters are private to the buyers and sellers. If I don't like how Amazon does business, I'd walk away and find another retailer. Others should not have a say on what/how Amazon can sell and where I can buy my stuff from.

[amol4184]

Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show

Is this the Solimo brand? I see it everywhere whenever I search for a product - most recently being a wall clock. Since the ads are quite aggressive I even purchased those products a few times.

Fortunately, almost all Solimo branded goods have turned out better than random Chinse crap that gets sold through Amazon. Not surprising Amazon is doing this.
To their credit the prices are rather competitive and quality marginally better. If you know the exact brand and product name, you can always search by that, ignore Solimo and other non sense.

[abhijeet080808]

Business entities are not regulated by ideals like fairness. They are focused solely on the bottom-line.

However, taken to the extreme, Amazon will only have self branded products in the marketplace. And customers would have lost the freedom to select a brand of his choice. If Amazon branded products provide sufficient value to the customer, they will tend to stick with Amazon or else will tend to look else where for their purchases. If that affects the bottom-line, it will be a self regulating force on Amazon to pare back on the copy-paste tactics.

So, either way, competitive behaviors like this will get customers a better deal.

[DigitalOne]

Somehow, I fail to see what the issue is; maybe I am stupid.

In the brick-and-mortar store world this is fairly routine. Pre-Covid, I used to do all my grocery shopping in Reliance Fresh, and I have completely switched to Reliance store brands for many items (Cleaning solutions/Oats/Muesli etc). If one is not very finicky about the brands, they can save 20-30% on any item. Even my neighbourhood kirana store promotes his own home-made pickles and namkeens over branded ones.

Now online also, Reliance Jio promotes its own brands over the known ones. Below are screenshots from the Jiomart App. For every item, the store brand (Good Life, Healthy Life, My Home, Expelz etc) item comes in the first 3, if not the top. Knowing the clout Reliance has over the govt and media, I guess this would never make it to the news .









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Yes, Amazon gets an unfair advantage because people search and buy on their site, and based on that intelligence, they can introduce a competing product quicker than other competitors in the same space, but is that illegal?

Suppose Firefox Cycles introduces an innovation, and if Decathlon based on Firefox sales that they observe in their stores, bring in the same innovation to their BTwin brand, is that illegal or cheating?

Maybe all this would lead to is growth of Store brands/private labels over the known brands, but not monopolization by Amazon. Our 'local' biggies (Tata, Reliance) are equally smart. Till they scale up, Amazon has to put up with this lobbyist attacks

[Mr. Nobody]

Same with grofers and big basket too. They promote their inhouse labeled products over the common brands.

[AZT]

The below link shows the entire Reuters article and investigation. Finding a product which sells takes a lot of trial and error and what Amazon did is piggyback off others efforts and made their own label in those products. Then promoting their own label just got easy.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates...india-rigging/

[Candy$Cars]

Originally Posted by shancz

-
Ditto for ACs, washing machines etc. IIRC Midea is a Flipkart brand or maybe some other, can't recall.

Not contributing to the topic at hand, just a correction -

Midea is Carrier's sub brand. I guess MarQ is flipkart's brand.
Similarly, reliance digital has bought the rights to make and sell Kelvinator brand ACs and these are a little cheaper on their site compared to other popular brands.

[Candy$Cars]

Originally Posted by shancz

-
Ditto for ACs, washing machines etc. IIRC Midea is a Flipkart brand or maybe some other, can't recall.

Not contributing to the topic at hand, just a correction -

Midea is Carrier's sub brand. I guess MarQ is flipkart's brand.
Similarly, reliance digital has bought the rights to make and sell Kelvinator brand ACs and these are a little cheaper on their site compared to other popular brands.

[shancz]

Originally Posted by Candy$Cars

Not contributing to the topic at hand, just a correction -
Midea is Carrier's sub brand. I guess MarQ is flipkart's brand.

Thanks for correcting

I was trying to recall and Midea came to mind.
MarQ it is and noted.

Apologies for the mix up.