How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners

To keep customers happy, which Mr. Bezos has long said is Amazon’s fixation and growth strategy, executives behind the scenes have methodically waged targeted campaigns against rivals and partners alike—an approach that has changed little through the years, from diapers to footwear.

No competitor is too small to draw Amazon’s sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon’s site, hurting the vendor’s sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm’s owner said. Amazon said it didn’t violate the company’s intellectual-property rights.

When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair Inc., Mr. Bezos’s deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team. Amazon and Wayfair declined to comment on the matter.

Amazon set its sights on Allbirds Inc., the maker of popular shoes using natural and recycled materials, and last year launched a shoe called Galen that looks nearly identical to Allbirds’ bestseller—without the environmentally friendly materials and selling for less than half the price.

“You can’t help but look at a trillion-dollar company putting their muscle and their pockets and their machinations of their algorithms and reviewers and private-label machine all behind something that you’ve put your career against,” said Allbirds Co-CEO Joey Zwillinger. “You have this giant machine creating all these headwinds for us.”

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Some rivals and partners say Amazon’s competitive zeal looks like unfair practices. The Journal this year reported that Amazon employees used data about independent sellers on its platform to develop competing products and that it has used the investment and deal-making process in ways that entrepreneurs and others said helped it develop products that competed with its would-be partners. Journal reporting showed how Amazon has limited some competitors’ ability to promote rival streaming devices and other gadgets on its dominant e-commerce platform.

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Shoe seller Allbirds, too, refused persistent Amazon efforts to get it to sell on the tech giant’s site, said Mr. Zwillinger, the co-CEO. The San Francisco startup launched its first shoe, “Wool Runner,” in 2016. It was the product of three years of research and development, using fabric from an Italian mill and a sole that was “carbon neutral,” produced with a Brazilian chemical company.

The lightweight shoe became an instant success. Amazon consistently contacted Allbirds between 2017 and 2019 to sell on its site, said Mr. Zwillinger. Allbirds always declined.

Allbirds’ team in mid-2017 began noticing that, on Google’s search engine, the top results for “Wool Runner” were knockoffs from outside vendors on Amazon, Mr. Zwillinger said. Allbirds believed Amazon was buying advertisements on Google to siphon demand for the shoes to itself, he said.

Mr. Zwillinger said it isn’t possible to track the damage to his company, but that “to see a company with the deep pockets of Amazon try to siphon off demand and give it to copycats is really frustrating.”

Then came the Galen shoe. Mr. Zwillinger said he believes search data guided Amazon’s decision to clone his hit product, which he said looks “eerily similar” to his shoe.

“I’m not saying whether they did or didn’t infringe. We didn’t get a lawyer involved,” he said. Because of Amazon’s size, he said, “it seems like that’s going to be an uphill battle that’s not worth fighting.”

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At roundtables with its sellers, the people said, Amazon has learned that many had been defecting to Shopify because of increasing fees from Amazon, which on average collects 30% of each sale on its platform from outside vendors, up from 19% five years ago, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Shopify collects 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction.

How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners

Shopify

Many alternatives to Amazon, including BandH Photo, WalMart, Sam’s Club, Costco, Home Depot, Lowes, HayNeedle, WayFair, Fry’s Electronics, Etsy, NewEgg, Your local hardware store, etc., etc. Use product name, SKU, ISBN, model number to search for alternatives.