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April 18, 2024 12:00 pm

Inside Amazon's Secret Operation To Gather Intel on Rivals

Amazon staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called "Big River," WSJ reports. The mission: to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices. From the report: For nearly a decade, workers in a warehouse in Seattle's Denny Triangle neighborhood have shipped boxes of shoes, beach chairs, Marvel T-shirts and other items to online retail customers across the U.S. The operation, called Big River Services International, sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon under brand names such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss. "We are entrepreneurs, thinkers, marketers and creators," Big River says on its website. "We have a passion for customers and aren't afraid to experiment." What the website doesn't say is that Big River is an arm of Amazon that surreptitiously gathers intelligence on the tech giant's competitors. Born out of a 2015 plan code named "Project Curiosity," Big River uses its sales across multiple countries to obtain pricing data, logistics information and other details about rival e-commerce marketplaces, logistics operations and payments services, according to people familiar with Big River and corporate documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The team then shared that information with Amazon to incorporate into decisions about its own business. [...] The story of Big River offers new insight into Amazon's elaborate efforts to stay ahead of rivals. Team members attended their rivals' seller conferences and met with competitors identifying themselves only as employees of Big River Services, instead of disclosing that they worked for Amazon. They were given non-Amazon email addresses to use externally -- in emails with people at Amazon, they used Amazon email addresses -- and took other extraordinary measures to keep the project secret. They disseminated their reports to Amazon executives using printed, numbered copies rather than email. Those who worked on the project weren't even supposed to discuss the relationship internally with most teams at Amazon.

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