Amazon confirmed its investigation of employees who are allegedly accepting bribes in exchange for confidential information like internal sales metrics and email addresses of product reviewers. The employees were also suspected of accepting payments to delete negative product reviews and reactivate banned Amazon products.
The employees have reportedly been accepting between $80 and $2,000 according to unnamed sources who spoke with The Wall Street Journal. The alleged malpractice was predominantly observed in China according to the sources.
Amazon has started its investigation and so far found that brokers working independently are communicating with sellers and connect them with Amazon employees through China's messaging service WeChat.
The sources told the Journal Chinese Amazon employees were lured to engage in these illicit activities because the number of sellers in the country has been rapidly growing. Another factor that compelled Chinese employees is their low salaries offered by Amazon, particularly that the majority of these employees were working in Shenzhen.
If they can truly get $2,000 from one Amazon seller, this could go a long way compared to the median middle-income worker salary of about 4,415 yuan or $675 a month, Gizmodo noted, citing a 2016 data from the South China Morning Post.
To address the allegations, Amazon said it has since shuffled its key executives in China and still in the process of designing a scheme that could rule out the said bribery entirely. In a statement, Amazon said it requires all employees to uphold a high ethical standard and anyone that acts or behaves in contradiction shall be appropriately disciplined. The employees who will be found guilty face termination and potential legal and criminal penalties. Punishments will also apply to sellers who will be found abusing the systems.
Gizmodo noted that Amazon is still currently faced with problems such as counterfeiting, fake reviews, click farms, and other breached in its algorithm which the company discovered since 2016.
Stacy Mitchell, co-director for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told Gizmodo that the problem may be rooted to Amazon's own platform design. The company has been dominating the e-commerce market that at some level it is already competing directly with the very retailers and manufacturers that are selling through its platform. Mitchell also mentioned several market studies concluding that Amazon monitors what products are in demand within their platform and sells those items itself.
Another factor why sellers are trying to game its systems is the tough competition among retailers and manufacturers. Mitchell explained that most online shopping searches now start at Amazon rather than at a search engine. Naturally, sellers will race to set up shop on Amazon's and will do all means to land the first page of the e-commerce platform.
