Amazon internal employees plead guilty! Selling gray industry services to make millions of dollars

Amazon has made a big news in the past two days. Two internal employees were investigated for bribery. At present, the two have pleaded guilty to the law enforcement department! A series of internal data and service gray industry secrets were involved.

According to the clues we have so far, the two belong to a team that provides illegal gray market services to third-party Amazon sellers. The team bribes Amazon employees to obtain some internal data that only Amazon can access, and then packages and sells it to the outside world. At the same time, they will also work with the bribed internal employees to carry out some illegal operations such as unblocking stores, attacking rival products, lifting certain performance restrictions on stores, and even manipulating sellers' product reviews, etc., and will charge huge service fees to third-party sellers.

Many service providers’ so-called internal channels are mostly just gimmicks. I didn’t expect that there is a group of people who actually bribed Amazon internal staff to open channels. This group has sold millions of dollars in a few years just for services, and the number of sellers involved is as high as five figures. In addition, some of them are responsible for running their own stores, using their own channels to attack Amazon sellers, and then in turn collecting protection fees from the attacked sellers.

It's okay to see the gray market services being sold in the beginning, but buying internal data is just a willing bait. Even if the data is real, many people will not read or use the data after getting it. They are just giving money to the service provider. The self-directed and self-acted protection fee collection in the latter part is really outrageous. Maybe the [email protected] that received indiscriminate complaints in multiple categories some time ago was just a spoof protection fee collection scheme.

Amazon has always had a lot of problems. This practice of selling data for money has been rampant, and once involved Eric Broussard, a vice president in charge of international markets. It can be said that Amazon's internal demons have never been eradicated. Part of the reason is that Amazon itself has not done a good job in many aspects, which has indirectly contributed to the development of this gray service industry.

For example, at the beginning, many people would buy the internal ARA data, which is used to analyze category sales and track competing products. Amazon has always had this data, but it is not open to sellers. In contrast, on domestic platforms such as Taobao, industry data has always been accessible to sellers, which is conducive to sellers' targeted product selection and optimization, and to grasp the direction of the industry. There is no harm to the platform, but Amazon sellers cannot get this data from official channels and can only buy it from service providers.

Later, Amazon noticed this problem and created a Brand Dashboard, which integrated some ARA data into the page. Sellers who completed brand registration could finally access this data through official channels, so service providers selling ARA data have almost disappeared in the past two years.

There are also many services such as forced opening, checking the cause of death, and unblocking. This is also because the normal channel complaint process of Amazon is too long. Sometimes you can’t find the complaint entrance. Once the review is triggered, it will be frozen for 90 days. There are even many sellers who are killed by mistake and can’t even appeal. This leads to many sellers thinking of finding service providers first once the store is blocked. Even the US government’s antitrust investigation on Amazon believes that Amazon is too subjective in handling complaints from third-party sellers and fails to provide effective complaint channels. If the government supervision can be taken over in the future, it will definitely start from this aspect to rectify Amazon’s seller complaint process.