Amazon Manipulates Its Algorithms to Stay Ahead of Third-Party Private Label Competitors

2. Amazon degrades its search quality by stacking the deck against third-party competitors of Amazon's private label products

241. Amazon further degrades the quality of its search results by burying organic content under recommendation widgets, such as the "expert recommendation" widget, which display Amazon's private label products over other products sold on Amazon.

242. A recommendation widget is a discrete portion of Amazon's website or mobile app that lets customers scroll through a set of recommended products. Previously, such widgets were limited to displays like an area on a product's Detail Page indicating what "customers also bought," or an area suggesting shoppers may want to replenish items they had previously purchased, like paper towels. (Redacted)

243. Amazon (redacted)

244. (Redacted)

245. (Redacted)

246. (Redacted) Rather than competing to secure recommendations based on quality, Amazon intentionally warped its own algorithms to hide helpful, objective, expert reviews from its shoppers. One Amazon executive reportedly said that "[f]or a lot of people on the team, it was not an Amazonian thing to do," explaining that "[j]ust putting our badges on those products when we didn't necessarily earn them seemed a little bit against the customer, as well as anti- competitive."

247. (Redacted)

248. In competitive markets, the possibility of losing business to rivals would tend to pressure a company to create more value for its customers, shoppers and sellers alike. But Amazon's unchecked dominance allows it to degrade its service without ceding and indeed while expanding its business. The fact that Amazon's degradation of its search results through biased widgets did not cause Amazon to lose sufficient business or to change its behavior further demonstrates its monopoly power.