Official orders? Amazon is exposed to favor self-operated products!

Amazon's self-operated products have always been a headache for third-party sellers and the government. Although many sellers who are good at operations can crush self-operated products, Amazon still relies on various biased policies and traffic support to allow its self-operated products to suppress most sellers.

Recently, foreign media discovered that Amazon’s own products were operating in an extremely overbearing manner, trying to “force” orders from third-party sellers.

What did the foreign media find? Can Amazon cancel this feature under the criticism of the public? Let me analyze it for you.

Amazon features that have been criticized in the media

This Amazon scandal, written by the Wall Street Journal, accuses Amazon of placing advertisements for its own products above the shopping cart buttons of third-party sellers.

Here in the picture, right above the "Golden Shopping Cart" button for the third-party seller's product is the same type of Amazon-operated product.

It should be noted that adding products to the shopping cart is already a step for consumers to prepare to place an order. Amazon’s purpose of placing its products in this position is quite clear - to attract consumers who are ready to buy third-party products to its own products and blatantly snatch orders from sellers.

To achieve this goal, even the self-operated products pushed by Amazon at this location have cheaper prices than third-party products. In the example above, the self-operated products are about 10% cheaper than the products on the page.

After the Wall Street Journal aired this report, it caused widespread discussion and condemnation of Amazon, and Amazon was forced to respond.

In short, the spokesperson said that this is a very common promotion method on Amazon. We just want to provide consumers with products that offer great value for money. Moreover, this function is not only available to us, but will also be provided to our partners.

Does this mean that this ad space is open to sellers? Yes and no. Amazon has played a trick in this statement, and it is difficult to know the trick if you are not an Amazon employee.

Because the "partner" in the statement does not refer to our third-party sellers, but specifically refers to VC accounts. This is a display advertising position that can only be used by VC accounts, while the SC accounts used by ordinary sellers like us can only use a few not-so-good display positions.

The display ads that ordinary accounts can use are only in the sidebar, while VC accounts can use not only the ad space above the shopping cart, but also some ad spaces below the five-point description.

Although these are things that have existed in Amazon for a long time, it does not mean that they are reasonable. It is also a good thing for us that they are now exposed by the media. Why?

After media exposure

In fact, an almost identical incident occurred in the first half of the year. Also, unequal competition was exposed by the media. That time, everyone criticized "Top Rated from Our Brands" , which also unfairly displayed self-operated products together with third-party products.

After media exposure and criticism from netizens, Amazon quietly removed these features or moved the recommended locations to less prominent places.

This is an event from a distant past. Even recently, there is a similar example, which is Amazon’s new feature “Donation”, which is also a change forced by the media.

Several powerful European media outlets reported that Amazon discards millions of euros worth of new products every year. Just a few months after the exposure, Amazon added a "discarded product donation function."

Therefore, the media's exposure of these unfair competitions is definitely beneficial to our third-party sellers. The hotter this topic becomes, the more likely Amazon will compromise and modify these unequal functions.

Finally, I collected some information about display ads that can be used by ordinary seller accounts. Please scan the QR code and get it from me~

PS. If you want to join the seller discussion group, you can also private message me to let me add you to the group