2023-11-10 23:33:46
An article published today by Insider indicates that the process that investigates the agreement signed between the Apple it’s at Amazon in 2018 it goes far beyond the issue of price fixing. Apparently, it also involved the adoption of a kind of different treatment with regard to the display of advertisements on Apple product pages sold at the ecommerce giant.
As the publication shows, when browsing product pages such as iPhones and iPads, there is a cleaner interface than on product pages from other brands. A screenshot compares, for example, the page of an iPhone (which does not have banners or related ads among the device details) with that of a Samsung smartphone (which has banners and blocks of related products from other manufacturers in at least three prominent areas).
An exchange of emails between the two companies, shared by the American courts, indicates that Apple made a series of demands before signing the agreement with Amazon, in 2018. With the deal, it is worth remembering, Amazon started to directly sell a large number of Maçã products and began to allow them to be sold only by authorized resellers — which ended up increasing the price of the products and was the starting point for opening the process.
At the time, Apple asked Amazon to make its product pages “cleaner”, without recommendations for any products that were not theirs. Apparently, Amazon was reluctant to give in to the request at first, arguing that it does not block or limit on product pages, but highlighted that Apple might pay for these spaces to compensate for the loss of revenue.
With this discrepancy in Apple’s product pages in relation to other companies, everything indicates that these spaces were “bought” as part of the agreement — which involved many other points. This was confirmed by Apple itself, which told Insider that the agreement provides that other brands cannot buy ads for specific queries for the company’s products (such as “iPhone” and “iPad”), but can do so for searches for more general terms (such as “iPhone case”).
According to Maçã, the objective is to provide the best possible experience for customers — and highlighted that other companies might do the same. However, according to the investigation of the Insider, it is unclear to what extent Amazon makes an agreement similar to the one it made with Apple available to other brands that sell products on its website. In fact, this possible special treatment given to Apple would be a source of frustration for some of its main competitors, such as Samsung.
Experts and executives contacted by the site expressed surprise and strangeness when seeing the discrepancies between research on Apple products and other brands — including a former senior manager at Amazon. The apparent consensus is that the company, by default, refuses proposals from brands to buy all of its space, but that, in relation to Apple, “Amazon is not neutral” — in other words, “it is more biased”.
via 9to5Mac
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