Amazon also pays for data? It may be enforced

In our daily operations, we sellers will inevitably use some keyword data or competitor data for reference. In addition to pulling data through software, many sellers will look for service providers to buy Amazon's internal data, such as competitor ads or ARA data.

Although paying for data is a common practice, it is still a gray area that cannot be made public. Recently, Amazon was also exposed for paying for data.

According to foreign media reports, although Amazon already has a large amount of online shopping data of buyers, it is obviously not satisfied with this. Foreign media investigations have found that Amazon is collecting users' offline consumption data on a large scale and is willing to pay a lot of "information fees" for it.

The name of this program is called "Amazon Shopper Panel" . Through this program, consumers can upload their offline shopping receipts such as supermarkets, pharmacies, restaurants and department stores. Amazon can analyze and summarize the data on these receipts and give consumers additional rewards based on the completeness.

In the plan, each consumer has 10 opportunities per month to upload eligible receipts to receive rewards, including bills for consumption in the places mentioned above, but not including medical, childcare and other service expenses, nor the purchase of guns or gambling, etc. Receipts must be compliant and machine-printed, and handwritten and foreign language receipts will not be accepted.

At the same time, Amazon has another new plan, Amazon ONE, which is a contactless payment system linked to a credit card or bank account. This plan will collect consumers' unique biometric data (fingerprints, irises, etc.) . If Amazon combines shopping data with biometric data, consumers will have no privacy in front of Amazon.

Although Amazon stated that the data will be used anonymously and will not involve consumers' personal privacy, considering that Amazon once admitted to abusing third-party sellers' data at an antitrust hearing , this promise to consumers is just for show.

Distrust of Amazon is not limited to sellers and buyers. Even competitors Target and Walmart have stopped cooperating with Amazon's AWS cloud service for fear that AWS will collect their data and provide it to their e-commerce departments to compete with them in turn.

What’s more serious is that some national agencies have already targeted Amazon over the issue of personal data.

Because India enacted a new personal data protection bill in 2019, the Indian government requested an investigation into Amazon to ensure that Amazon's policies and processes comply with the new bill.

However, Amazon has refused to cooperate and has used various excuses to hinder the investigation of Indian experts. Therefore, the task force recently held a press conference and publicly announced to the media that if Amazon does not give a positive response before the 28th of this month , the expert group will determine that Amazon "has the potential to infringe" and will take measures such as compulsory investigation against Amazon.

The privacy and exploitation of users' personal data will be more serious than the abuse of third-party sellers' data. The US antitrust authorities will soon take notice of Amazon's situation and may investigate Amazon like India did.

According to Amazon, the buyer data collected is intended to help suppliers and third-party sellers on the Amazon platform provide better and more targeted advertising services, which means that our sellers’ advertisements can be more accurate.

But to put it bluntly, the party that benefits the most from this data collection is definitely Amazon itself. The impact of this buyer data on the advertising of third-party sellers is actually very limited. DP ads that can be pushed on the external network are simply not something that small sellers can afford. In the end, it is actually to facilitate Amazon to promote and launch its own products.

The ideal situation for sellers is that the regulatory authorities will take advantage of the abuse of personal data to rectify self-operated products. This is the biggest benefit to us third parties. If we really want to talk about the positive impact on advertising, the role of this buyer data is probably not as good as optimizing it ourselves.