Hacker News Reader

Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

Is this shocking to anyone? I don't mean to sound cynical but I thought we already knew this. It is fairly obvious if you search anything and the first product is a Amazon Basic product that they are toying with the results. There is no way a Amazon Basic product is the #1 in every category there is one. Just search "batteries" in Amazon Canada, Duracell has 30k reviews and 5/5, the only reason it is "above" Amazon Basic is because they pay (sponsored). A regular search shows two Amazon Basic listings (AA and AAA) both have less rating (4.8/5 versus 5/5) and reviews then the Duracell equivalents. Quiet clearly rigged.

View on HN

This is what is new:

> A trove of internal Amazon documents reveals how the e-commerce giant ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoff goods and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India - practices it has denied engaging in. And at least two top Amazon executives reviewed the strategy.

As far as I understand, those documents were not known before.

What I find interesting and somewhat unfair is the practice of allowing Amazon marketplace resellers to list every product of every other brand (even Costco snd Target house brands) EXCEPT Amazon brands.

So really every other brand has to contend with counterfeit or at least pricing arbitraged products being listed against their brand on Amazon, except Amazon.

That seems to give Amazon a monopoly driven upper hand and is materially different from what other marketplace platform players are doing.

To be a fair and transparent marketplace platform and avoid anti-trust litigation - Amazon should be allow resellers to price gouge and counterfeit Amazon brands as well.

[1] Kirkland and Target T-shirt on Amazon available from a variety of price gougers and potential counterfeiters

https://www.amazon.com/Kirkland-Signature-Mens-White-Large/d...

https://www.amazon.com/Goodfellow-Co-Standard-Lyndale-T-Shir...

[2] Amazon Essentials T-shirt on Amazon only available from - you guessed it - Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Essentials-Regular-Fit-T-Shirt...

But everyone on earth knew this what was happening. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

Yes, but we hadn’t yet seen the duckumentation.

…I’ll see myself out.

I guess some people are more convinced by evidence than just knowing things.

Yes... Because the Panama, Paradise, and Pandora papers proves that.. give me a break

Some people create unreasonable doubt where Occam's razor states things quite clearly.

I don't think that argument would stand up in Court!

To quote Denzel Washington in "Law Abiding Citizen": "It's not what you know. It's what you can prove."[0]

You can't charge Amazon with horrific anti-trust violations if you just think it. Now there's more specific proof.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hUWPBvppvU

I think that was Training Day

DAMMIT. You're right. It totally was. How did I mix up those two movies?!

Well, as mentioned in the article, Bezos swore under oath that his company prohibited doing that.

Is it also "rigged" if a 3rd party can buy the top spot?

Is the grocery store rigged if they put their house brand on the endcap? Is it different if a 3rd party buys endcap placement?

I expect Amazon to order their search results in a way to maximize their bottom line, i.e. the likelihood of making a sale AND the profit from that sale.

If I change the sort order from "featured" to "avg customer review", Amazon batteries drop down to #26.

> It is fairly obvious if you search anything and the first product is a Amazon Basic product that they are toying with the results. There is no way a Amazon Basic product is the #1 in every category there is one.

I'm not claiming they don't prioritize their own products, but two obvious reasons why it could be possible for Amazon products to regularly be the most popular is 1) if they're the cheapest and 2) if the Amazon brand is considered reliable. I personally tend to deliberately choose Amazon Basic for products that are cheap and which I perceive to be fairly commoditized, like AA batteries.

Why do I feel that whole review culture is entirely broken. How could a battery receive 5/5. If it works and contains perceived average amount of charge it deserves exactly 3/5. And that should expected experience for most consumers...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com