Yoga balls are relatively interchangeable. Once you get past the variations in colour and size, one big inflatable orb is much like another. And yet, search Amazon for “yoga ball” and it will deliver more than 8,000 results. How is any seller on the ultra-competitive online marketplace supposed to stand out?
Shortly before Christmas two years ago, one enthusiastic yoga ball seller took matters into their own hands and manipulated the giant Amazon catalogue. They switched multiple rival listings to display pictures of Sony PlayStations so that searching for “yoga ball” would mean only their listing would display what shoppers were seeking.
The incident was an extreme example of the lengths that some sellers go to get ahead in the hyper competitive Amazon marketplace. On a daily basis, a fraction of the millions of third-party sellers are in a constant game of cheating, hustling and sabotage.
Often, they are helped by networks of online consultants with access to Amazon employees, providing a back door advantage.
This month, American prosecutors charged six people with an international conspiracy to secure unfair advantages for Amazon sellers by bribing employees, using them to bypass the company’s rules, reinstate accounts that had been suspended, and flooding competitors with negative reviews. They are alleged to have secured more than $10m (£7.9m) for clients in unfair sales.
The alleged crimes stretch back to 2017. The six plan to fight the charges. But sellers and consultants say that the online shopping boom brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic has raised the stakes, as well as led to new underhand tactics from sellers.
In the three months to the end of June, Amazon’s sales increased by 40pc, an unprecedented spike for a company of this size.
Retail sales in North America, its most lucrative market, increased even faster. The majority of that spending is not direct sales from Amazon itself, but happens on the company’s “marketplace”, a network of millions of merchants in every corner of the world.
These “third-party sellers” range from tiny part-time businesses to large companies in their own right.
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But while these merchants are the ones doing the selling, the Amazon pages where their goods are sold are out of their direct control. That responsibility lies with Amazon’s “catalogue team”, workers tasked with updating and maintaining the hundreds of millions of items on the site, and capable of making changes.
If another merchant is selling the same product in a different size or colour, they can propose changes to the page, adding new images or descriptions. “Amazon works on the basis that it’s a contributor-based system, so anybody can make changes to any product,” says Dave Bryant of EcomCrew, a company that advises sellers.
“That used to work really well before Amazon became as cut-throat as it is now. Now it’s come back to haunt them a little bit.”
Amazon’s vastness means that manually checking every listing would require an army of moderators. Instead, the company is increasingly relying on automation to police the catalogue, using algorithms and filters to determine when pages are legitimate.
But artificial intelligence often contains major blind spots that can often be exploited.
Amazon sells a massive range of goods through its marketplace
Credit: Jason Alden/Bloomberg
“There’s no one sitting down reading through every product and comparing them one-to-one,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas, the head of research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Malicious page alterations take two main forms: hijacking, in which a merchant takes over a page to sell another, often-unrelated product, and sabotage, in which pages from rival sellers are altered to hurt sales.
Hijacking often involves taking command of a page for an item that is no longer on sale, and thus not monitored by the original seller. Finding an expired page to take over is like discovering a video game cheat code: instead of starting with nothing, sellers can maintain the crucial star ratings and ranking within Amazon’s search engine that the previous item enjoyed.
Often, new products are listed that are completely different to the original.
One page selling an electric scooter contains dozens of positive reviews for tool kits. Another, for a smartphone screen protector, appears to have lived multiple previous lives, as a necklace and an electronic pressure cooker.
Amazon’s endless pursuit of convenience and speed has given shoppers instant gratification, meaning that shoppers might rarely read reviews, but merely glance at a star rating.
Amazon has seen its revenues rocket during lockdown
Credit: Marina Bakush/Alamy Stock Photo
“If you have a business of any size, you are going to experience this type of product hijacking,” says Bryant. “Anybody who does it and relies on Amazon as a full time income has experienced this in some regard.”
Sabotage, meanwhile, can involve adding malicious descriptions or images to a page so that they fall foul of Amazon’s rules, which ban things such as spam, miracle cures and safety violations.
Aron Raduly, a former Amazon seller who now runs SentryKit, a company that monitors listings for signs they have been tampered with, says one tactic is for a competitor to label a product as an adult item, which might see it removed from search listings even if it is not taken down.
In some cases, the pandemic has made Amazon’s efforts to clean up its service more challenging.
Booming online sales have raised the stakes for those using underhand tactics to boost sales. Consumers, struggling with supply shortages and economic hardship, may not exercise the due diligence they might once have, instead opting for anything that is cheap and in stock.
When coronavirus struck, Amazon closed down the call centres that disgruntled sellers could call to have their problems fixed, leaving them in email or live chat queues to have problems resolved.
For months, sellers in private forums have complained that it is impossible to get through to someone.
“Due to government regulations and social distancing requirements related to Covid-19, phone support was intermittently unavailable.
“Sellers have always been able to contact us via email or live chat and we continue to respond to them quickly,” the company said.
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In some cases, though, humans are the problem. Hijacking and sabotage campaigns are often an inside job, with sellers, or consultants acting on their behalf.
The recent US charges against a network of consultants claimed employees would often reinstate accounts or vandalise others for small payments. In one case, images of a fleece blanket were replaced with offensive hand gestures to put off consumers. In another, contact details of negative reviewers were handed over in bulk.
Sometimes the price of this was a few hundred dollars; other times tens or hundreds of thousands.
Amazon said it had assisted in the investigation, and that there is “no place for fraud at Amazon”. The company said it invested $500m (£394m) in fighting fraud and abuse last year, that it had 8,000 staff tackling the issue, and that last year it blocked 2.5m seller accounts and 6bn listings from suspected bad actors.
But sellers still find they have to take things into their own hands. Raduly’s company, SentryKit, provides alerts to merchants when their pages have been hijacked or their listings altered. In a perfect world, he says, a company like his would not exist. Instead, it is as busy as ever.
“There’s so much money to be made and the whole system is so complicated,” he says. “They [Amazon] are always stepping in the right direction. But there’s always some trickster, some new thing that’s happening.”
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