Amazon starts poaching employees? Poached sellers go to court

Third-party sellers are an indispensable resource for e-commerce platforms like Amazon. The more sellers there are, the more competition there is, and the more and cheaper products can be provided, which can attract more consumers to shop on the platform.

Therefore, Amazon is constantly using various policies and advantages to attract sellers to join, and even goes to the edge of breaking the law to attract sellers. Recently, the U.S. federal government ruled on a lawsuit in which eBay sued Amazon for poaching third-party sellers from its platform!

In the federal court lawsuit, eBay submitted two cases of Amazon's official poaching and accused Amazon of setting up a special internal headhunting program to train dozens of sales representatives to poach eBay's third-party sellers. These sales representatives would set up eBay member accounts and introduce Amazon's advantages and support policies to a large number of eBay sellers through the members' "M2M" email system to attract them to switch platforms to Amazon.

This poaching behavior has been going on for more than a year, and hundreds of sellers have begun to turn to Amazon. eBay claims that this is extortion and fraud by Amazon managers, which has caused substantial damage to eBay, and has filed a lawsuit against Amazon in federal court for interference with contractual relations and other charges.

In this ruling, the federal court's arbitration panel rejected all of eBay's claims, saying that although the investigation found that Amazon did poach employees, eBay could not prove that it suffered losses as a result. Neither Amazon nor eBay commented on the ruling.

This wave of fighting between eBay and Amazon has exposed the competition between the two companies behind the scenes. This operation of poaching and attracting third-party sellers must have started since the establishment of the platform. Since you can attract my sellers, I must also attract your sellers. The fact that eBay chose to go to court at this time also shows a problem. The battle to attract people behind the scenes can no longer beat Amazon . In the time it takes for eBay to poach one Amazon seller, Amazon may have poached 10 eBay sellers. This is simply unbearable, and the only way to stop the loss of its own seller resources is to expose it.

Therefore, this ruling also attracted the attention of the US antitrust department, because the antitrust investigation into Amazon just ended at the end of July, and a detailed report was issued last month, stating that Amazon has a substantial monopoly position among third-party sellers and suppliers. Although Amazon won this ruling, it also shows to a certain extent that Amazon also has a certain monopoly position in the e-commerce platform. The antitrust investigation team said it would investigate and collect evidence on this situation.

In short, as third-party sellers, we are of course very happy to see competition between platforms. Such multi-party competition can ensure that each platform will provide sufficiently favorable conditions and operating environment to attract sellers to settle in.

Now many sellers will choose to operate on various platforms simultaneously, diversifying risks while also opening up more markets. Some sellers will choose to open multiple stores on Amazon, which can also have a certain effect, but they must pay attention to the issue of association.