👉 Background: Amazon is known for its enormous marketplace of products, its Prime program and  relentless focus on global domination for e-commerce and tech. And generally, it will stop at nothing to get there.

👉 What happened: Now, The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Amazon has created an alias, "Big River Services", to sell products on other e-commerce platforms such as eBay, Shopify, Walmart. The goal of this project was to gather intel, such as pricing data and logistics insights of its competitors.

👉 What else: It’s all been uncovered under a project called “Project Curiosity”, which actually launched back in 2015 - so Amazon has been running these secret stores for years.

What's the key learning?

💡There’s a fine line between comprehensive market research and corporate espionage. While It’s common for companies to do market research on competitors, Amazon's tactics with its fake business kinda blur the lines.

💡Big River Services was able to join a fulfilment program for e-commerce sellers operated by Fedex and then the Big River employees reportedly relayed the pricing and other terms to the Amazon’s logistics team.

💡 Amazon isn’t the only tech company capturing questionable data to give itself a competitive edge.
Last month, it was found that Meta was found to have peeked into their users’ supposedly-encrypted traffic to and from Snapchat too.