It appears that Amazon employees are shaking down vendors to allow them to navigate the online retailer's opaque vendor suspension protocol.
You get suspended, and you cannot talk to a human being, or even know if a human being has reviewed the decision, so now Amazon employees are selling access to ……… Well, to themselves:
For the millions of sellers who make up the booming Amazon marketplace, few things are as perpetually concerning as the threat of getting suspended for alleged wrongdoing and watching business evaporate overnight.
Helping third-party sellers recover their accounts has turned into a large and lucrative enterprise, because the only way the merchants can get back up and running is to admit guilt and correct the issue or show sufficient evidence that they did nothing wrong. The process is often costly, lengthy and fraught with challenges.
Enter the illicit broker.
For a fee of $200 to $400, sellers can pay for services such as "Amazon Magic," as one broker on encrypted messaging service Telegram calls it. The offerings also include access to company insiders who can remove negative reviews on a product and provide information on competitors. Users are told to send a private message to learn the price of certain services.
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The groups are part of a robust market of so-called black hat service providers that have cropped up alongside the rise of third-party marketplaces on Amazon, Etsy and Walmart. Amazon's marketplace now accounts for over 60% of goods sold on the platform, and includes numerous businesses that generate millions of dollars in annual revenue on the site.
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A public Facebook page identified by CNBC offers an internal screenshot service with "valuable insight into your seller account, allowing you to see how Amazon employees view your account and its performance."
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Brokers, who act as middlemen between sellers and employees, often reach out to insiders on LinkedIn, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Amazon has an internal group tasked with threat analysis and response, including a team dedicated to investigating employees suspected of leaking data, the source said. The threat analysis unit monitors social media platforms for abusive groups where bad actors may congregate before engaging in illicit activity on Amazon's marketplace.
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In 2018, Amazon investigated claims that employees, primarily based in China, received payments of $80 to more than $2,000 to share confidential sales information or delete bad reviews, The Wall Street Journal reported. More recently, the Department of Justice charged six individuals in 2020 with participating in a scheme to bribe employees and contractors for internal data.
In July, the fifth defendant in the case, who is a well-known seller consultant, was sentenced to probation and house arrest after pleading guilty in March. Account annotations, internal notes from an Amazon staffer on a seller's account, were among the confidential data being exchanged between the defendants and employees.………
Amazon sellers have for years complained of being unfairly kicked off the site without explanation. The process of getting their account back can take months, costing critical sales in the meantime. The issue was a key focus of a 16-month investigation by the House Antitrust Subcommittee into competitive practices at Amazon and other Big Tech companies.
"When Amazon turns off the faucet, everything goes to hell," said Cynthia Stine, president of eGrowth Partners, a consultancy that helps merchants get reinstated. "I've had CEOs of large companies cry on the phone with me, and they've had to lay off their people. They've declared bankruptcy."
The abusive nature of Amazon's business model does not seem sustainable to me.
In fact, as shown above, their model seems positively criminogenic.
At some point, the dysfunctional nature of Amazon's relationships with its users and its vendors will reach a point where people will go MySpace on their ass.
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