Did Amazon India copy products and rig searches?

Another allegation against Amazon India and this time it is accusing the e-commerce giant of copying sellers products and then manipulating search results to to favor its own products.

A Reuters report on Wednesday which cites Amazon's internal documents titled “India Private Brands Program" states the company systematically used sales and feedback data to identify best selling “reference brands” to replicate. In launching its private-brand business, internal documents accessed by Reuters show how Amazon used its Indian website to gain a clear edge for its own products on the platform. The creation of its Solimo brand offers a case study.

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Amazon executives including founder Jeff Bezos have maintained it’s against company policy to use data from third-party merchants to build future products. Bezos told a congressional committee in July 2020 that Amazon has a policy that safeguards seller data from employee access.

Reuters is also alleging that Amazon teams in India also worked to boost the company’s private label products in search results, using a technique called “search seeding”. This allowed Amazon to ensure that new products were the second or third result in search queries.