A new report says Amazon manipulates search results for its own brand’s knockoffs

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Amazon has a ridiculous amount of market power and it would be fairly easy for the company to take advantage of that power to further its dominance.

A new report claims that the company has been doing just that, with a systematic campaign designed to rip off products and sell them as its own while simultaneously boosting search results for its own products.

A scathing new report from Reuters claims that Amazon has been taking advantage of its market position in India, one of the company’s fastest-growing markets.

According to the report, Amazon’s private brand teams in India have been copying products that are sold by different companies. Amazon then offers the same product as their own, all the while ensuring that its own products show up first in search results.

Reuters claims to have obtained several internal documents, including emails, strategy papers, and business plans that show that the company has been acting this way in India.

One of the strategies found in those documents was for an Amazon brand called Solimo, selling various household and health products. Documents show the strategy for the brand was to, “use information from Amazon.in to develop products and then leverage the Amazon.in platform to market these products to our customers.”

Of course, the company has denied these claims in its response to the report that reads,  “As Reuters hasn’t shared the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated. We believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated.”

Copying product designs and manipulating search results is something that Amazon is constantly being accused of, and this new report certainly looks pretty bad. If true, these documents could prove to be damning in the antitrust investigations that Amazon is constantly the subject of.

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