Amazon has a lot of brands in-house that sell everything, from low-cost tech accessories (Amazon Basics), to e-readers and Kindles. A new investigation by The Markup sheds light on how large this empire is and uncovers some disturbing allegations about the benefits these brands appear to have over third party competitors selling on Amazon. This fascinating report is well worth reading.
The Markup was required to analyze public records from the US Patent and Trademark Office in order to determine how many brands Amazon has. It reported that the ecommerce giant owns or registered over 150 brands. This includes some brands that are not connected to Amazon. Worse, some of these brands and others that only sell on Amazon seem to be able to outrank the rest in search results, even without receiving as many positive reviews.
According to the Markup, Amazon's Happy Belly Cinnamon Crunch cereal was ranked number one. It received four stars and 1,010 reviews. This is ahead of other cereals with higher and more reviews such as Honey Bunches of Oats (five star, 15,069 reviews), Honey Nut Cheerios (5 stars, 5,205 reviews) and Honey Bunches of Oats (5 stars, 5,205 review), which all have five stars and 11,702 reviews. The Amazons Noisz vacuum cleaner was ranked first, ahead of models by Eureka, Bissell, and Hoover, which had higher ratings and received more reviews. The Amazon-exclusive Concept 3sneaker by Skechers was ranked number one. It was four spots ahead of an identical but not exclusive Amazon Skechers sneaker, which has the same star rating and 77 more reviews.
The Markup interviewed a former Amazon employee who claimed that search seeding was a technique used by employees to give their products an advantage over competitors. JT Meng, an ex-employe, stated that although the practice was stopped by the time he left Amazon, it was still possible for employees to clone search rankings from competitors in order to give Amazons products a boost during launch.
Meng was involved in the launch of Amazon Elements baby wipes. He said that they were seeded against similar products by Huggies, Pampers and others. His team was forced to stop promoting Amazon Elements wipes because they were gaining too much market share.
We have seen claims that Amazons brands are competing with third-party sellers on its platform before (The Wall Street Journals April report is an example). But, The Markups analysis is noteworthy for its breadth and depth of product analyses. It also provides empirical data about Amazons ranking. It is worth reading the entire report along with other articles that were included in its package on Amazon.
