The aim: to identify and target goods - described as “reference” or “benchmark” products - and “replicate” them. The internal documents also show that Amazon employees studied proprietary data about other brands on Amazon.in, including detailed information about customer returns. Amazon is under investigation in the United States, Europe and India for alleged anti-competitive business practices. Congressional subcommittee in July last year. The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results so that the company’s products would appear, as one 2016 strategy report for India put it, “in the first 2 or three … search results” when customers were shopping on Amazon.in.Īmong the victims of the strategy: a popular shirt brand in India, John Miller, which is owned by a company whose chief executive is Kishore Biyani, known as the country’s “retail king.” Amazon decided to “follow the measurements of” John Miller shirts down to the neck circumference and sleeve length, the document states.Īmazon founder Jeff Bezos speaks via video conference during a hearing of a U.S. The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform. But thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.

Amazon first aid 2017