She also said they are not ads, despite the “sponsored” label in the source code. Rona, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company considers “featured from our brands” listings “merchandising placements” and not “search results,” despite their presence in the search results grid. Instead, Amazon labels the products “featured from our brands.” In 87 percent of cases, the listing’s source code identified them as “sponsored”-though that label isn’t shown to the public. She said brands that are exclusive to Amazon would not carry the disclosure because they are not owned by the company.Ī signal, invisible to the public but coded into the listings, suggests that most of the Amazon brand and exclusive products that were listed first were ads. We only found this to be the case in 23 percent of products in our sample that were Amazon-owned brands. She said the company identified its brands to shoppers by adding “Amazon brand” to the list of product features on the product page and sometimes to the listing title as well. In a short, written statement, Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company does not favor its brands in search results and declined to answer any of the dozens of specific questions posed by The Markup. The first three items on the search results page get 64 percent of clicks, according to one ex-Amazon-employee-turned-consultant. Half said they expected the first nonsponsored product on Amazon’s search results page to be the cheapest, highest rated, or bestselling.īy giving its brands top billing, Amazon is giving itself a significant leg up in sales. In a national survey we commissioned from YouGov, only 17 percent of respondents said they assumed Amazon put its own products first. We included (non-Amazon) competing brands Champion and Brooklinen as a control. We commissioned a national panel of 1,000 adults. However, we found that Amazon brands and exclusive products overall received an outsized portion of the top spot on search results, one that was far out of line with their proportion of the sample. And the Amazon-exclusive Concept 3sneaker from Skechers placed number one, four spots ahead of a similar but not exclusive to Amazon Skechers sneaker with the same star rating but 77 times more reviews.Ī former Amazon employee told The Markup that the company used to give its new house brand products an unearned place at the top of search rankings when they first launched. A vacuum cleaner from Amazon’s exclusive Noisz brand was placed on top, ahead of models from Bissell, Eureka, and Hoover with higher ratings and more reviews. The Markup found Amazon placed its Happy Belly Cinnamon Crunch cereal, with four stars and 1,010 reviews, in the number one spot ahead of cereals with better and more reviews including Cap’n Crunch (five stars, 14,069 reviews), Honey Bunches of Oats (five stars, 5,205 reviews), and Honey Nut Cheerios (five stars, 11,702 reviews). ![]() (We only analyzed products in that grid, ignoring modules that are strictly for advertising.)īecause it turns out moving fast and breaking things broke some super important things. These listings are not visibly marked as “sponsored” and they are part of a grid that Amazon identifies as “search results” in the site’s source code. We found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive could predict in seven out of every 10 cases whether Amazon would place it first in search results. The reason, he said, was clear: “Their search ranking is high because they’re an Amazon brand.”Īn investigation by The Markup found that Amazon places products from its house brands and products exclusive to the site ahead of those from competitors-even competitors with higher customer ratings and more sales, judging from the volume of reviews. “They ranked well right away,” Gomez said, each of them appearing among the top-three results for “coffee grinder” searches immediately. For more than two years, his coffee grinder had been one of his best sellers on Amazon. Robert Gomez, owner of startup 4Q Brands, in his warehouse in Buford, Ga., on Oct.
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