By Jon Emont in Hong Kong, and Robert McMillan and Laura Stevens in San Francisco
Amazon.com Inc. is fighting a barrage of seller scams on its
website, including firing several employees suspected of having
helped supply independent merchants with inside information,
according to people familiar with the company's effort.
Amazon was investigating suspected data leaks and bribes of its
employees, The Wall Street Journal reported in September. Since
then, the company has dismissed several workers in the U.S. and
India for allegedly inappropriately accessing internal data that
was being misused by disreputable merchants, these people said.
Amazon in recent weeks also has deleted thousands of suspect
reviews, restricted sellers' access to customer data on its website
and stifled some techniques that trick the site into surfacing
products higher in search results, according to the people.
An Amazon spokeswoman said the company is aggressively pursuing
those who are trying to harm sellers on its website, using tools
including machine learning to block bad behavior before it
happens.
"If bad actors abuse our systems, we take swift action,
including terminating their selling accounts, deleting reviews,
withholding funds, taking legal action and working with law
enforcement," she added.
The crackdown, however, hasn't stopped some sellers from
sabotaging rivals. A recent rash of merchants claim competitors are
maliciously flagging products as being counterfeit or infringing
trademarks, prompting Amazon to temporarily boot legitimate
products from the site while it evaluates them.
Sellers also are buying Amazon wholesaler accounts on the black
market to gain access to volumes of product listings, people
familiar with the practice said. These accounts on Amazon's Vendor
Central system are designed to enable wholesalers to edit product
listings to ensure they are marketed accurately. But some sellers
misuse these accounts to alter rivals' product pages, such as by
changing photos to unrelated items, these people said.
Some Chinese firms are selling wholesale vendor accounts for
roughly $15,000, or renting them for up to $1,500 a month, the
people familiar with the matter said.
An estimated three million merchants sell products on Amazon,
according to e-commerce data firm Marketplace Pulse. This year,
U.S. shoppers are on track to spend $124.1 billion online, 15% more
than last year, according to Adobe Analytics. Roughly half that
spending takes place on Amazon, according to analyst estimates.
The competition intensifies in the all-important holiday retail
season, helping prompt Vendor Central attacks.
Ankit Jain, an Amazon seller in Boca Raton, Fla., said his
best-selling mermaid sequined throw pillow was suddenly
misclassified as an adult product in mid-November, meaning it would
no longer show up in most Amazon searches. Mr. Jain said he
succeeded in persuading Amazon to switch it back.
Mr. Jain now has his own team based in India monitoring his
listings every three minutes, so they can complain immediately to
Amazon when his products are under attack. He estimates that
miscategorizations have cost him roughly 20% of his early holiday
season sales.
The Journal reported in July on a variety of ways sellers
attempt to outsmart Amazon's automated system, which ranks some
half-billion products in search results. The tactics include
pummeling rivals' listings with overly positive or negative
reviews, and repeatedly clicking on links to products they want
boosted to trick Amazon's algorithm into ranking them higher in
search results, according to people familiar with the
practices.
Amazon has increased efforts to scrub the site of potentially
suspicious reviews, according to sellers. In recent months, some
product listings lost thousands of reviews in a day, a number that
can take years to build. Some of the reviews were legitimate and
erased inadvertently, according to the sellers and a person
familiar with the matter.
Some sellers engage in a practice dubbed "brushing," in which
fake accounts use real addresses to place orders so they can leave
positive reviews, according to people familiar with the matter.
Amazon's security team was sent scrambling late last year, when a
customer wrote Chief Executive Jeff Bezos to complain of such a
scam after a vibrator he didn't order was sent to his address, one
of the people said.
Intermediaries, meanwhile, are selling what they claim is
authentic Amazon sales data that can give sellers an advantage,
people familiar with the matter have said.
Amazon is focusing part of the internal bribery investigation on
India, a major alleged source of data misuse by Amazon employees,
according to a person familiar with the effort.
Some Amazon employees in India and China who work with sellers
in customer-support roles have said their ability to search an
internal database for data such as specific product performance or
trending keywords has been strictly limited, according to people
familiar with the matter. Some in India also are no longer able to
use their USB ports to download such data, some of the people
said.
In October, Amazon notified some customers by email that their
email addresses were shared with an outside seller in violation of
its policies, and it said it had fired the responsible employee.
Amazon last month again notified customers that their email
addresses were disclosed, though the company called it a technical
error and not a breach, without elaborating.
Fit Simplify, a Pleasanton, Calif., fitness-equipment company,
said it believes it was the victim of a Vendor Central attack after
product photos of its fitness bands were changed to an image with
text that read, "Please stop attacking us or we will attack all the
sellers in this category. Let's be good sellers, OK?"
Write to Jon Emont at jonathan.emont@wsj.com, Robert McMillan at
Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com and Laura Stevens at
laura.stevens@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 10, 2018 05:44 ET (10:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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