8 Ways Amazon Sellers Game the System

Amazon is the dominant player in ecommerce in the US. They have built a retail business with massive scale offering hundreds of millions of products. With so many products, however, vendors selling through Amazon often have to resort to a range of techniques to get onto the first page of search results or “win the buy box” and become discoverable to Amazon’s captive consumer audience.

Here are a eight ways vendors game the Amazon system in order to improve product ranking:

1. “Sniping” in which one vendor sabotages another by leaving bad reviews and then voting those bad reviews as helpful so they are more likely to appear
2. Fake positive reviews in which vendors pay users to write 5-star reviews
3. Self-purchased products, in which vendors buy their own products, often shipping them to unsuspecting consumers, in order to write the verified reviews themselves
4. Filing a false trademark complaint against a competitor, causing Amazon to suspend that competitor while the complaint is reviewed
5. Invalid advertisement clicking, in which a vendor clicks incessantly on a competitor’s ad without buying anything in order to cost the competitor money and make their ad conversion rate less effective
6. ASIN hijacking, in which a merchant offers a cheaper, knock-off version of a product but lists it under the same Amazon ID number (ASIN) as the original, real product
7. Custom URL referral links, in which a vendor drives traffic to their product page but makes Amazon think that the traffic came from a more general consumer search for their brand or product in order to increase perceived relevance of their brand
8. Vendor powered coupons, in which vendors use Amazon’s native coupon platform in order to drive traffic to a product page and drive verified reviews, often through 3rd party deal sites, friends and family purchases, or even bought by the vendors themselves

While many sales hacking approaches on Amazon are entirely legitimate, the fact remains that Amazon’s ranking-based product listings encourages vendors to go to extremes. The stakes are high, competition is fierce, and acquiring customers is expensive. Here at SesameOpen, we believe that providing a better channel for product discovery and lower customer acquisition costs reduces the incentives to cheat that plague centralized ecommerce storefronts like Amazon.

To learn more about how we are setting up incentives the right way, join us on Telegram at https://t.me/SesameOpen or visit us at www.sesameopen.network.

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