Amazon plans to disclose internal data! Is the era of self-operation over?

Europe's antitrust investigation into Amazon has made significant progress in the past two days. Amazon has proposed to share market data with third-party sellers and increase the exposure of competitors' products, trying to reach a settlement with the EU antitrust agency on this condition!

This matter dates back to half a year ago. In November last year, the EU antitrust agency ended an investigation that lasted more than a year. When issuing a report, it announced that it had preliminarily determined that Amazon had violated EU antitrust laws and might face a sky-high fine of 10% of annual sales. According to last year's sales data, the fine is as high as 37 billion US dollars!

The EU antitrust investigation believes that Amazon has been feeding non-public third-party seller data (such as the number of ordered products and seller revenue) into its own platform algorithms and self-operated product development to help determine the price and style of its new products, etc. This means that Amazon has allowed third-party sellers to be marginalized and their ability to grow is limited by default.

The results of the EU investigation are actually similar to those of the United States, but the EU is much more powerful in terms of enforcement and efficiency. The United States ended the investigation a long time ago but there has been no news so far, while the EU directly forced Amazon to make concessions. The difference is obvious.

Back to Amazon's concession policy this time, it is actually aimed at the two issues raised by the EU. One is the abuse of sales data of third-party sellers and competing with the sellers in turn; the second is unfair competition, marginalizing third-party sellers and pushing traffic to self-operated businesses.

Amazon's concessions are also very simple. First, it separates the business department and the retail department in terms of data, so that the business department that needs to develop its own products cannot access the sales data of third-party sellers in the retail department. Then it opens up some category sales market data to sellers, and sellers can freely access this data to assist in their own product development.

At the same time, Amazon also proposed that if self-operated products are displayed in the first column of the search position, then the products of third-party sellers will definitely be displayed in the second position. This is to support competitors of self-operated products in the same category and prevent self-operated products from dominating the market.

These two pieces of news are really more explosive than the other. For third-party sellers, self-operated products cannot use sales data and may not see any changes in the short term. In the long run, the competitiveness of self-operated products will definitely be affected. In addition, sellers can also access more real market data in the background to assist in product selection. Isn’t it wonderful to kill two birds with one stone? The second policy is even more exciting. It directly gives a third party the first display next to the self-operated products. This display volume is quite considerable. However, this position is too prime. In order to determine which third-party product to push, Amazon must have a separate set of algorithms. It is not ruled out that Amazon may say it is very good on the surface, but poison the algorithm behind the scenes.