Amazon gives a leg up to hundreds of house brand and exclusive products that most people don’t know are connected to Amazon. From a report: It took Robert Gomez about five months to get his Kaffe coffee grinder to the big leagues in e-commerce: among the first three search results for “coffee grinder” on Amazon.com. Gomez, founder of Atlanta-based consumer goods startup 4Q Brands, said he obsessively refined his photos and description, amassed reviews from happy customers, and paid Amazon $40,000 a month on advertising to boost sales, one of the elements Amazon tells sellers will increase search ranking. Then Amazon introduced a competitor from house brand Amazon Basics and another from a brand that sells exclusively on Amazon, DR Mills. “They ranked well right away,” Gomez said, each of them appearing among the top-three results for “coffee grinder” searches immediately. The reason, he said, was clear: “Their search ranking is high because they’re an Amazon brand.”
An investigation by The Markup found that Amazon places products from its house brands and products exclusive to the site ahead of those from competitors — even competitors with higher customer ratings and more sales, judging from the volume of reviews. We found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive could predict in seven out of every 10 cases whether Amazon would place it first in search results. These listings are not visibly marked as “sponsored” and they are part of a grid that Amazon identifies as “search results” in the site’s source code. (We only analyzed products in that grid, ignoring modules that are strictly for advertising.) When we analyzed star ratings and number of reviews, neither could predict much better than a coin toss which product Amazon placed first in search results. Amazon told Congress in 2019 that its search results do not take into account whether a product is an Amazon-owned brand. Sellers say it doesn’t seem that way to them. Gomez said Amazon’s brands have “unfair advantages” that make it harder for small merchants like him to compete on its open marketplace. “Who bears the cost are those entrepreneurs and small businesses that don’t have the means to fight.” From Wednesday: Amazon Copied Products and Rigged Search Results To Promote Its Own Brands, Documents Show.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.