Amazon Ran Secret Firm 'Big River' To Gather Intel On Rivals: Report

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New Delhi: The multinational technology company Amazon, has reportedly operated a subsidiary firm called Big River for many years, as reported by Wall Street Journal. It was supposedly a fake business which aimed to gather intelligence on its rivals like eBay, FedEx, and Walmart. This operation was called as "Project Curiosity."

This project by Amazon began in 2015, as reported by Wall Street Journal. When asked about this project one of the spokesperson from Amazon stated that this was one of the legal practices they did for comparing their products with their competitors in the market called “benchmarking.” ()

The project mainly aimed to monitor how other companies in the market operated. It also compared the experiences of third-party sellers on Amazon with those on other e-commerce platforms to gather insights from competitors to help Amazon make smarter business decisions. ()

The firm sold items such as t-shirts, shoes and beach chairs on the rival platforms. Big River went as far as creating its own brands to sell on competitors marketplace websites, as per reports by Wall Street Journal. They launched a streetwear brand called ‘Not So Ape’ on a Shopify-hosted site in the US. Additionally, they also launched an Indian-based picture frame company on Flipkart.

The employees at the fake company were instructed to take screenshots of the products on various marketplaces. The screenshot was used to compare the pricing and strategies. They used different email IDs to make it difficult to trace their connection to Big River.