New Delhi:
US Senator Elizabeth Warren named for breaking up Amazon.com Inc and Indian retailers demanded a government probe of the organization soon after a Reuters investigation showed the e-commerce giant had copied goods and rigged search benefits in India.
The Reuters report, reviewing thousands of internal Amazon documents, identified that the US organization ran a systematic campaign of developing knockoffs and manipulating search benefits to enhance its personal private brands in India, one of the company’s biggest development markets.
Wednesday’s report showed that, at least in India, manipulating search benefits to favour Amazon’s goods, as properly as copying other sellers’ goods, had been portion of a formal technique at Amazon – and that at least two senior executives had reviewed it.
The Reuters investigation drew bipartisan criticism of Amazon from U.S. lawmakers.
Linking to the story on Twitter and Facebook, Warren, a lengthy-time critic of Amazon, stated “these documents show what we feared about Amazon’s monopoly power – that the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stiffing small businesses and entrepreneurs.”
“This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up,” she stated.
Warren, a prominent Democrat, advocated the breakup of Amazon and other tech giants in 2019 when she was operating for president. Since then, as a senator from Massachusetts, she has continued to apply stress on providers like Amazon.
Ken Buck, a Republican on the House of Representatives antitrust subcommittee, also shared the story on social media, saying, “These documents prove Amazon engages in anticompetitive practices such as rigging search results and self-preferencing their own products over competitors.”
“More concerning, it contradicts what Jeff Bezos told Congress,” the Colorado lawmaker stated. “Amazon and Bezos must be held accountable.”
These documents prove Amazon engages in anticompetitive practices such as rigging search benefits and self-preferencing their personal goods more than competitors.
More regarding, it contradicts what Jeff Bezos told Congress. Amazon and Bezos will have to be held accountable. https://t.co/ARvgND3hH6
— Rep. Ken Buck (@RepKenBuck) October 13, 2021
Asked for comment on the reactions, Amazon issued a statement equivalent to one it offered for the Reuters investigation.
“These allegations are incorrect and unsubstantiated,” it stated. “We display search results based on relevance to the customers, irrespective of whether such products are private brands offered by sellers or not.”
Amazon stated it “strictly prohibits the use or sharing of non-public, seller-specific data with sellers, including with sellers of private brands,” and investigates reports of its personnel acting contrary to that policy.
The organization did not comment on the criticisms by US lawmakers or Indian retailers.
India retailers, begin-ups concerned
In sworn testimony ahead of the subcommittee last year, Amazon founder Bezos stated the organization prohibits its personnel from working with information on person sellers to assistance its private-label business enterprise. In 2019 yet another Amazon executive testified that the organization does not use such information to build its personal private-label goods or alter its search benefits to favour them.
The Amazon documents reviewed by Reuters showed how the company’s private-brands group in India secretly exploited internal information from its India unit to copy goods sold by other providers, then provided them on its platform.
The organization promoted sales of its private brands like AmazonFundamentals by rigging search benefits on its platform in India so that its goods would seem, as one 2016 technique report place it, “in the first 2 or three … search results.”
A group representing millions of India’s brick-and-mortar retailers stated on Thursday the country’s government will have to launch an investigation into Amazon.
“Amazon is causing a great disadvantage to the small manufacturers. They are eating the cake that is not meant for them,” Praveen Khandelwal of the Confederation of All India Traders told Reuters. The group says it represents 80 million retail retailers in the nation.
Indian retailers say foreign e-commerce companies like Amazon and Walmart Inc’s Flipkart indulge in unfair business enterprise practices that hurt smaller sized firms, allegations the providers deny.
The Alliance of Digital India Foundation, a nonprofit representing some of India’s greatest startups, stated the practices detailed in the Reuters report had been “highly deplorable”, calling into query “the credibility of Amazon as a good faith operator in the Indian startup ecosystem”.
In a weblog post, the group urged the Indian government to take action against “Amazon’s predatory playbook of copying, rigging and killing Indian brands”.
A leading official in the financial wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological mentor of the BJP, urged customers to shun the organization on Thursday.
“I call upon people of this country to #boycottAmazon,” Ashwani Mahajan, co-convenor of Swadeshi Jagran Manch, stated on Twitter.