Amazon’s Shell Company: Gather Intel on Walmart, FedEx

Amazon Operated Shell Company, Big River to Gather Intel on Rivals like Walmart, FedEx

According to a report, Amazon's Shell Company, Big River Services International has performed operations to gather intel on rivals like FedEx, Walmart, eBay, and others for several years.

The key purpose of, Amazon's Shell Company, Big River was to gather exclusive information related to FedEx, Walmart, and eBay which Amazon used for tweaking its offerings according to the competitive landscape. Amazon's Shell Company employees acted as sellers on several platforms by dealing in things like beach chairs, t-shirts, and shoes on the platform of business rivals. to gather exclusive information about the company.

With the Walmart acquisition in 2018, the reach of the project extended to Flipkart even though the shell company aimed to analyze the US e-commerce competitors. There was a big rivalry between Amazon and Flipkart to capture the Indian e-commerce market that led to these developments. According to analysts at Bernstein, Amazon falls behind Flipkart with an investment of over $6.5 billion.

According to a report, the employees of Amazon's Shell Company, Big River hid their Amazon connection by not keeping any electronic recordings of their work while informing Amazon's top authority about the findings of the company. The executives weren't allowed to keep any traces and recordings of the reports of the Big River team.

In March 2018, Amazon received access to Flipkart in India with the Crimson Knot brand. Walmart purchased a majority stake in Flipkart in May 2018.

According to an Amazon spokesperson, Benchmarking is one of the common business practices. He also said that the company also includes teams for benchmarking and customer experience that perform research on customer experience including selling partners to enhance the experiences.

However, according to an Amazon spokesperson after reviewing the documents there are no traces of the recordings of Fed Ex pricing information are there with Amazon employees using the information for making changes in their pricing or any instance of pricing discussion with sellers.

According to another spokesperson, the reviewed information shows that the pricing information of Amazon was obtained after FedEx introduced FedEx Fulfillment on February 7, 2017, and this is one of the information revealed as part of the discussions on prices.

Earlier in 2020, a congressional committee found recordings that showed Amazon has designed its product by using data from third-party sellers, specifically from independent sellers and businesses.

Moreover, a lawsuit by the FTC also reveals that Amazon has made changes to the price by raising it so that Amazon charged the third-party sellers and punished them for offering lower prices on websites regardless of Amazon.