By Matt Day, Bloomberg
Sometime around Christmas, Sarah Burzio noticed that the holiday sales bump for her stationery business included some mysterious new customers: a flurry of orders from anonymous email addresses associated with Amazon.com Inc.
Burzio, who doesn’t sell her products on the retail giant’s site, soon discovered that Amazon had duplicated her product listings and made purchases on behalf of Amazon customers under email addresses that read like gibberish followed by buyforme.amazon.
“I didn’t worry about, it to be honest,” she said. “We were getting customers.”
Then people started complaining. Amazon’s listings, automatically generated by an experimental artificial intelligence tool, didn’t always correspond to the correct product in Burzio’s inventory. In one case, a shopper who thought they were receiving a softball-sized stress ball, which Burzio’s Hitchcock Paper Co. doesn’t sell, received the smaller version of the product that her northern Virginia store does carry.
“People ordering these Christmas gifts and holiday gifts were getting the wrong items and demanding refunds,” Burzio said in an interview. “We had to explain that it’s Amazon that’s doing this, not us, the mom and pop. We fulfilled the order exactly how it came to us.”
Between the Christmas and New Year holidays, small shop owners and artisans who had found their products listed on Amazon took to social media to compare notes and warn their peers. Angie Chua of Bobo Design Studio in California posted videos on Instagram documenting her experience.
In interviews, six small shop owners said they found themselves unwittingly selling their products on Amazon’s digital marketplace. Some, especially those who deliberately avoided Amazon, said they should have been asked for their consent. Others said it was ironic that Amazon was scouring the web for products with AI tools despite suing Perplexity AI Inc. for using similar technology to buy products on Amazon. Perplexity has denied wrongdoing and called Amazon a bully.
The automated Amazon listings at issue are designed to let shoppers purchase products carried by other retailers. While the strategy could generate sales an independent seller might not otherwise get, it raises questions about who owns the customer relationship and who bears responsibility when something goes awry. Some retailers say the listings displayed the wrong product image or mistakenly showed wholesale pricing. Users of Shopify Inc.’s e-commerce tools said the system flagged Amazon’s automated purchases as potentially fraudulent.
Karla Hackman, a jewelry artist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, discovered a handful of her pieces were on Amazon after seeing a warning in a social media group for artists. She asked Amazon to take them down on Saturday, and the products were removed by Tuesday.
“I’m a one-woman show,” she said. “If suddenly there were 100 orders, I couldn’t necessarily manage. When someone takes your proprietary, copyrighted works, I should be asked about that. This is my business. It’s not their business.”
In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay said sellers are free to opt out. Two Amazon initiatives — Shop Direct, which links out to make purchases on other retailers’ sites, and Buy For Me, which duplicates listings and handles purchases without leaving Amazon — “are programs we’re testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon’s store, while helping businesses reach new customers and drive incremental sales,” she said in an emailed statement. “We have received positive feedback on these programs.”
Tagay didn’t say why the sellers were enrolled without notifying them. She added that the Buy For Me selection features more than 500,000 items, up from about 65,000 at launch in April.
Chua, whose products were removed from Amazon after she emailed a support line — branddirect@amazon.com — said she never intended to sell on Amazon.
“I just don’t want my products on there,” she said. “We create them, we source them, it’s not where we want to be. It’s like if Airbnb showed up and tried to put your house on the market without your permission.”
Chua said she has fielded calls from an intellectual property attorney, and that as of midday Tuesday, 187 other merchants have filled out a survey form she set up to canvas how widespread the unprompted Amazon listings were.
Among those filling out the survey was Amanda Stewart, founder of Mochi Kids, a Salt Lake City-based retailer. She’d ignored requests over the years from Amazon representatives to sell on the site, but found last week that much of her inventory was listed there anyway. Her order book showed a little more than a dozen sales to mysterious Amazon addresses. “Our whole product catalogue was on there,” she said. “I was so shocked.”
Stewart worries that the listings risk running afoul of copyright on product photos, or of agreements with her own suppliers — themselves mostly independent brands — that prohibit reselling products on Amazon.
Amazon has for years invited independent merchants to sell goods on its site, a group that today accounts for about 60% of Amazon’s sales. Those merchants sought out the business with Amazon, manage their product listings directly, and pay Amazon a commission on sales. The new moves — essentially enrolling merchants in Amazon’s store, in some cases without their knowledge — appears unprecedented, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, an independent analyst who closely tracks Amazon’s marketplace.
“They seem to have gotten more aggressive and started onboarding brands that didn’t opt in,” he said in an interview. “They just went out and included a bunch of random e-commerce sites. It’s just a very messy approach to kickstart this feature.”
When Burzio tried to figure out what Amazon was doing with her listings, she tried the company’s support numbers. One Amazon representative asked for a seller account number, which Burzio has never had, and then suggested she get one and pay $39 a month to get Amazon seller support.
“When things started to go wrong, there was no system set up by Amazon to resolve it,” Burzio said. “It’s just ‘We set this up for you, you should be grateful, you fix it.’”
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