Amazon reportedly ran a fake business to spy on rivals such as Walmart, eBay, and Fedex, an operation it called “Project Curiosity”.
The Wall Street Journal report claimed the project started in 2015 as a way to compare the experiences of third-party sellers on Amazon to those of e-commerce rivals, and quickly morphed into a means of snooping on competitors, especially Walmart.
The alleged firm, Big River, sold items like t-shirts, shoes, and beach chairs on competitors' platforms with an aim to to get information from rivals that Amazon could then use to inform its own business decisions, the Journal reported.
To hide their connections to Amazon, Big River employees "minimized electronic records of their work". The employees also used separate, non-Amazon email addresses when talking to other companies, the report added. They were even coached on how to respond if someone found out that they were working for Amazon.
An Amazon spokesperson told The Journal that it was simply “benchmarking,” a legal practice of comparing its products to rivals.
Big River Services International members were instructed to take screenshots of competitors' pricing and advertising systems, catalogs, and listing pages when accessing their sales systems, and were prohibited from emailing any of the screenshots they took.
Based on information provided by Big River Services International, Amazon made changes to improve the seller experience on the site.
Big River also developed its own brands to sell through rivals' marketplace websites. This includes an India-based brand called Crimson Knot that sells photo frames on Flipkart, and a streetwear brand called Not So Ape, which used a website hosted by Shopify to sell in the US, according to the Journal.