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Amazon started a fake business called Big River Services International to spy on rivals such as Walmart, eBay, and Fedex an operation it called “Project Curiosity” according to a Wall Street Journal investigation published. The project started in 2015 as a way to compare the experiences of third-party sellers on Amazon’s site to those of e-commerce rivals already a questionable aim….Story continues….
By: Laura Bratton
Source: Quartz
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Critics:
The Amazon sales rank (ASR) indicates the popularity of a product sold on any Amazon locale. It is a relative indicator of popularity that is updated hourly. Effectively, it is a “best sellers list” for the millions of products stocked by Amazon. While the ASR has no direct effect on the sales of a product, it is used by Amazon to determine which products to include in its bestsellers lists.
Products that appear in these lists enjoy additional exposure on the Amazon website and this may lead to an increase in sales. In particular, products that experience large jumps (up or down) in their sales ranks may be included within Amazon’s lists of “movers and shakers”; such a listing provides additional exposure that might lead to an increase in sales. For competitive reasons, Amazon does not release actual sales figures to the public.
However, Amazon has now begun to release point of sale data via the Nielsen BookScan service to verified authors. While the ASR has been the source of much speculation by publishers, manufacturers, and marketers, Amazon itself does not release the details of its sales rank calculation algorithm. Some companies have analyzed Amazon sales data to generate sales estimates based on the ASR, though Amazon states:
Please keep in mind that our sales rank figures are simply meant to be a guide of general interest for the customer and not definitive sales information for publishers—we assume you have this information regularly from your distribution sourcesAmazon uses many different transportation services to deliver packages. Amazon-branded services include:
Amazon Air, a cargo airline for bulk transport, with last-mile delivery handled either by Amazon Flex, Amazon Logistics, or the US Postal Service. Amazon Robotics fulfillment center robots moving picking shelves
Amazon Flex, a smartphone app that enables individuals to act as independent contractors, delivering packages to customers from personal vehicles without uniforms.
Deliveries include one or two hours Prime Now, same or next day Amazon Fresh groceries, and standard Amazon.com orders, in addition to orders from local stores that contract with Amazon. Amazon Logistics, in which Amazon contracts with small businesses (which it calls “Delivery Service Partners”) to perform deliveries to customers. Each business has a fleet of approximately 20–40 Amazon-branded vans, and employees of the contractors wear Amazon uniforms.
As of December 2020, it operates in the United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Amazon Prime Air is an experimental drone delivery service that delivers packages via drones to Amazon Prime subscribers in select cities. Amazon directly employs people to work at its warehouses, bulk distribution centers, staffed “Amazon Hub Locker+” locations, and delivery stations where drivers pick up packages. As of December 2020, it is not hiring delivery drivers as employees.
Rakuten Intelligence estimated that in 2020 in the United States, the proportion of last-mile deliveries was 56% by Amazon’s directly contracted services (mostly in urban areas), 30% by the US Postal Service (mostly in rural areas), and 14% by UPS. In April 2021, Amazon reported to investors it had increased its in-house delivery capacity by 50% in the last 12 months (which included the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States).
Amazon first launched its distribution network in 1997 with two fulfillment centers in Seattle and New Castle, Delaware. Amazon has several types of distribution facilities consisting of cross-dock centers, fulfillment centers, sortation centers, delivery stations, Prime now hubs, and Prime air hubs. There are 75 fulfillment centers and 25 sortation centers with over 125,000 employees.
Employees are responsible for five basic tasks: unpacking and inspecting incoming goods; placing goods in storage and recording their location; picking goods from their computer recorded locations to make up an individual shipment; sorting and packing orders; and shipping. A computer that records the location of goods and maps out routes for pickers plays a key role: employees carry hand-held computers which communicate with the central computer and monitor their rate of progress.
Some warehouses are partially automated with systems built by Amazon Robotics. In September 2006, Amazon launched a program called FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) whereby it could handle storage, packing and distribution of products and services for small sellers.
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