Amazon has aggressively fought outside companies’ efforts to scrape its data. Now, the e-commerce giant is being criticized for adopting the same tactic itself, pulling product listings from other retailers without their consent.
Amazon has been testing a feature that lists products it doesn’t sell, showing items from other retailers and brands without their permission. Shoppers who click on these new listings on Amazon.com are redirected to the external sites where the products are sold. Sellers who don’t want their products featured can request to have their items be removed, but Amazon doesn’t ask retailers to opt in ahead of time.
The new feature, called “Shop Direct,” is currently in beta and only available for certain product categories.
An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider the new tool is “designed to expand discovery for customers and help businesses reach more customers.” The product details, like prices and names, are pulled from “public information on a brand’s website,” the spokesperson added.
“Amazon is a longstanding supporter of small and independent businesses, and today more than 60% of sales in our store are from independent sellers who leverage our innovative tools and services to run their businesses and serve customers,” the spokesperson said.
The test reflects a markedly different position on data scraping for Amazon. The company has previously blocked AI tools from OpenAI and Google from collecting its product listing data, and filed a lawsuit against Perplexity over the AI startup’s use of Amazon’s shopping platform.
“Full of oddness”
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, told Business Insider that it’s unclear how Amazon manages product details and pricing for the new Shop Direct feature, which he described as “full of oddness.”
In a separate LinkedIn post, Kaziukenas said it was ironic that Amazon was engaging in the very behavior it prohibits others from doing.
“All of this is bizarre because Amazon blocked all AI scrapers and sued Perplexity for building automated buying on top of Amazon, while at the same time doing the same thing with others’ ecommerce websites,” he wrote.
Project Starfish
The feature appears to be a part of Amazon’s broader push to turn its marketplace into the definitive source of information for “all products worldwide,” an initiative internally codenamed Project Starfish, as Business Insider previously reported. An internal document said the AI tool was expected to collect product data from 200,000 external brand websites last year by “crawling, scraping, and mapping external items to Amazon’s catalog.”
The move turns Amazon into more of a search engine, akin to Google, which scrapes retail site listings and sends commercial queries out to the web.
Amazon also rolled out a “Buy for Me” feature last year that surfaces products from other brands’ websites and lets shoppers complete purchases without leaving the Amazon app.
“Undermines trust”
The new feature has caught some online sellers off guard.
Angie Chua, CEO of stationery accessory maker Bobo Design Studio, said she was puzzled when her products began appearing on Amazon late last month. She later posted a video saying she had never been informed of the program and had not opted in. Amazon pulled her products after she requested their removal.
Chua told Business Insider that the listings frequently contained incorrect product names and information. She described Amazon’s actions as “insulting,” stating that they had damaged her brand and customer relationships. She added that she’s aware of more than 100 brands that have had similar experiences.
“It completely undermines the trust that small businesses are working so hard to create,” Chua said.
Data scraping has become a flashpoint in the AI industry, as companies seek vast amounts of information to train models and provide chat-style direct answers for users. For Amazon, which operates the largest online shopping site in the US, preventing rivals from crawling its marketplace for valuable training data is especially critical.
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