Amazon ‘guilty’ of promoting its own products over rivals through ‘review manipulation’
Disgruntled merchants have claimed that the retail giant uses its Vine program to get lots of positive reviews for its own products
AMAZON has been manipulating its review system to ensure that its own products get good ratings, according to claims made by independent merchants.
The online retailer allegedly takes advantage of its Vine review program, using this to send free copies of its own products to frequent reviewers so that these receive better ratings than rival offerings.
The allegations were by Bloomberg, which spoke to several anonymous independent merchants who sell through the Amazon Marketplace.
Their accusations centre around Vine, a program open to official Amazon 'Vendors,' third-party merchants that have either received an invitation from Amazon to become a Vendor or that pay a monthly fee for the privilege.
Once signed up to the Vine program, such Vendors are able to send free products to top-rated reviewers, who then provide (generally glowing) reviews.
However, the program excludes all the marketplace sellers who aren't Vendors, even though such sellers supply around 50% of the goods sold through Amazon.
This system gives an unfair advantage to Amazon, the anonymous sources claim, since Amazon uses Vine regularly to send copies of its own products to reviewers.
And because it's in a better position to send products for review than Vendors as well as non-Vendors (who can't even use Vine), it has been able to engineer a situation where its products receive more favourable reviews than others.
Such accusations come at a time when Amazon is facing increasing scrutiny regarding its practices.
In September, the European Commission announced that it was beginning a preliminary into antitrust violations allegedly committed by Amazon.
The investigation is focused mostly on whether Amazon uses data arising from third-party sellers on its platform to benefit its own position at the expense of these sellers.
The EU's competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said at the time, "The question here is about the data, because if you as Amazon get the data from the smaller merchants that you host — which can be of course completely legitimate because you can improve your service to these smaller merchants — well, do you then also use this data to do your own calculations?"
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In the face of the merchants' allegations, Amazon has said that it didn't benefit any more from the Vine program than its Vendors.
Its spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg that Vine reviewers "can select from any eligible product, whether it’s an Amazon private-label product or a product from one of our vendors. The same guardrails that are in place for vendors are in place for our private-label brand."
They also noted that, even though sellers who aren't official Vendors can't use Vine, they can still make use of the "early reviewer program" to get their products reviewed.
Do you think Amazon has been abusing its platform? Let us know in the comments.
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