Internal documents reveal that Amazon copied products and manipulated search results

Internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters suggest that Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in – including proprietary data and detailed information about customer returns, in order to copy products sold by other companies. Amazon also manipulated search results to boost its own products. The company identified and targeted goods described as ‘reference’ or ‘benchmark’ products  and ‘replicated’ them, according to Reuters. The strategy was laid out in a 2016 internal report dedicated to a brand the company originally created for the Indian market called ‘Solimo’. The documents provide an insider perspective about business practices that Amazon has denied over the years. In a 2020 testimony before the United States Congress, Jeff Bezos affirmed that Amazon has a policy against using seller-specific data to aid their private-label business, although he could not confirm if the policy had ever been violated.