Amazon admits to behind-the-scenes manipulation! Brother-in-law appears in court to explain

Let’s start today’s main text.

On Tuesday, I mentioned something very important. My brother-in-law will personally attend the antitrust hearing on Wednesday local time. This is the first time that my brother-in-law will appear at such a meeting, and he will also make positive responses to multiple antitrust issues.

Now the hearing is over. This time my brother-in-law attended the hearing via remote video. When he was asked at the meeting whether he would use third-party sellers’ data to develop products and compete with them (sellers) in turn, my brother-in-law unexpectedly admitted it!

Below are my brother-in-law’s original words for you to hear for yourself.

As a result, the hearing committee released the speech of Amazon lawyer Nate Sutton, who attended the antitrust hearing on behalf of his brother-in-law a year ago, and the content of the speech was exactly contrary to that of his brother-in-law himself.

At the time, the lawyer claimed that the company did not use any specific third-party seller data when creating its own brand products, and Amazon relied entirely on its powerful algorithms to dig out products with potential. The two completely opposite testimonies made the scene very embarrassing for a while, and my brother-in-law quickly drank a sip of water to calm down.

My brother-in-law then said that he would definitely not be able to make similar testimony now (without using the seller’s data at all), but Amazon will continue to increase its self-audit efforts to reduce or even eliminate this phenomenon.

It’s not just about using sellers’ data. The antitrust panel also mentioned that Amazon’s search algorithm and voice assistant Alexa are more inclined to guide consumers to buy self-owned brand products . My brother-in-law also admitted this!

When asked about this question, my brother-in-law said that although he did not know whether the Alexa voice service had been "trained" to promote its own products to customers, he admitted that some Amazon advertising positions and formats were indeed exclusive to its own brands and could not be used by third-party sellers (original words: The company plugs its goods in the marketplace in a way that third-party sellers can't.)

The brother-in-law also explained, "I am sure that in some cases, our algorithm does tend to promote our own products more, which is a business practice ."

Although this is an "unspoken rule" that we sellers are all well aware of, my brother-in-law acknowledged to the mainstream society at the antitrust hearing that Amazon has these problems. The media and the government will pay more attention to Amazon's actions on these issues.

This situation of supporting self-operated products and suppressing third-party sellers' products will definitely be curbed. Our main task now is to maintain the competitiveness of our own products. In the future, there will definitely be a weakening of self-operated products, and we can seize the market.

The key to maintaining product competitiveness is to continuously improve product rankings. The key factors affecting rankings are mainly the following three.

1. Conversion rate factors: Many things will affect the conversion rate of a product. Product pictures, product prices and reviews will directly determine whether consumers place an order or not. These are the key points of conversion rate.

2. Relevance factors: Relevance factors include product titles and product descriptions. These factors allow the A9 algorithm to consider under what search terms your product page should be displayed, which is directly related to the weight of the listing.

3. Account weight and performance: This is what we often call customer satisfaction and retention rate. These factors include our account's ODR (order defect rate), CR (order cancellation rate), etc., which also affect product rankings. Therefore, if we want to improve account authority and performance, we need to provide customers with a better shopping experience.