This first appeared on LinkedIn.
Preamble: What do you do when the world’s largest store, which is your biggest outlet, and has a disproportionately large share of your sale, decides that they will have unreasonable, impractical, and impossible to police policies which you will be responsible for adhering to, on the pain of deactivation?
You suck it up and carry on with the hope that they’ll not bother to trouble you: a small startup out of Pune selling fruit spreads. And you wonder if any of this is enforceable in a court of law, or if they will even throw the book at a multi-national, or whether they even mean any of this. Truth is that (a) the rule is impossible for us to implement, (b) we never broke it, (c) it is untenable in a court of law, and (d) it reeks of monopolistic practices.
But the truth also is that there is no recourse. We just have to bow to the Emperor and carry on, hoping we didn’t upset him too much. So, here is my take, Amazon. Hope you take notice, if I may use that word. 🙂
Dear Amazon India,
We received this “Notice” from you this morning: “Dear Tasha & Girl, We have determined that your account is related to accounts that have written Amazon customer reviews for products that you have a financial interest in. This may include products that you or your competitors sell. Family members, close friends, or employees of a seller on Amazon may not write reviews for the seller’s items or negative reviews for items sold by that seller’s competitors. Sellers are not allowed to manipulate ratings, feedback, or customer reviews.”
Apparently, your algorithms are so good that you not only know our family members, but also our friends, all of whom we have requested to BUY our products on your website (having paid the full price for them, which includes, if we may point it out the obvious, your full commission) and then REVIEW them honestly, with zero inputs from us.
To begin with:
- We have NEVER reviewed any competitor products, positively or negatively, not only because we don’t roll that way, but also because we don’t want to give them our money!
- Not only have our friends and relatives bought the product at full price from your store, but one of our co-founders, Karthik Natarajan has too (yes, at full price) whenever he wanted some fruit spread to gift his friends or for himself. And he has bought several hundred times from your shop, of which only a few were Tasha & Girl products. That too because he stays in Bengaluru and we are in Pune, and your store is the most convenient way for him to get some of his own company’s products. And yes, he did review it. Once. On one product. Which he had paid full price for. On behalf of a friend who requested him to do so because the purchase was in his name. ONE REVIEW. For a legitimately purchased product. Out of the 37 we have listed. And thousands of sales we have had on your store till date.
Now, just to put it on record, we have the following problems with this policy of yours:
- There is no way for you to know who our friends and family are and it is quite likely that people having similar-sounding names and staying in similar areas in the world may not be related. And this is just family. As for friends, even WE don’t know all their full names or addresses, and if you had asked us to make a list of them, we’d probably miss out on quite a few and not be able to offer you a comprehensive one. Be that as it may, and we are assuming your software is smarter than us, how does it matter that they are our friends or family or employees if they buy a product at full price and review it honestly?
- Even if we could have a comprehensive list of our family and friends, and forbade them to buy our products, and if they buy our products, forbade them to review them, how the f*** are we going to enforce this? How can anyone enforce this? And ditto for employees, of which we have none.
- How is a 3-people company like us going to “manipulate ratings, feedback, or customer reviews”? And please tell us that you will deactivate brands such as ITC and HUL if they were to attempt to do so, so we can laugh at a bad joke.
- When are you going to see and take notice of all the manipulated and fake reviews that have been submitted against us and for literally every third brand that sells on your site? I know this is ‘whataboutery’, but we have several obviously fake reviews on our product and several hundred obviously fake ones on our competitors’, and it is affecting business.
- Let us assume we can stop our friends, relatives, and employees from reviewing our products. Are you going to waive off your fees for their purchases then? Because we have people staying across India who like to order our stuff and if they cannot tell the world how much they like things they bought for a full price from your store, can you at least do the courtesy of not charging your commission and fees? Because it seems like you want to treat every purchase as a legitimate sale on your store while not offering the buyer the same rights and privileges as another one buying from the same store at the same price and terms.
You know that we are too dependent on you to remove ourselves from your store. You also know that your competition, Flipkart/Walmart now, and Jio/Facebook/Google soon, will have similar coercive rules, and the seller has nowhere to go. We are neither strong enough to sell just one product on our website, nor do we have the kind of logistics you possess, nor have the clout you have, nor the resources to take this up strongly against your patently unfair policies, nor leave and take our business elsewhere. You are, in fact, the perfect definition of monopoly, and the government can do nothing.
So, no, we won’t be going anywhere, we won’t be sending you a reverse ‘Notice’, we won’t be taking this one-sided ‘Terms of Service’ to court, we won’t be doing jack-shit. We’ll swallow our pride and keep our products listed. In fact, we’ll go out of our way to spend whatever paltry money we have to send even more traffic to your store so people can buy our products.
But let us end this with a simple message to you: You want to build the world’s most customer-centric company without considering your sellers as customers, though we are literally 50% of the deal? That is impossible. Without us, you’d have nothing to sell. And if you will not treat us at least on par with the retail customer who visits your store, you will suffer in the long run. Hundreds and thousands of small businesses like ours will come and go. We will rise, we will fail, and your world will be unaffected; your business will go on. But mark our words: One day, soon, you will suffer because you forgot that the sellers are half your customer base.
Consider this free advice from a concerned stakeholder (not just in our business, but in yours too).
With the warmest,
The good folks from Tasha & Girl.
Now, to the non-Amazon readers: Do note that as a small startup, our initial (and for quite some time) traction is going to be friends and family. To claim that by us not having huge marketing and ad budgets and by the sole act of leveraging our social capital of contacts and networks built over years, as well as that of our loved ones and family members, it all somehow makes what we do illegal is to skew the playing field against us before we have entered the ring. And that is an unfair trade practice.
We are sure that (as some claim), once we explain this to Amazon, they will understand it and view us sympathetically. But we do not seek largesse or charity. We seek our right. You cannot take commissions and fees from us and then tell us that those who buy legitimately are to be discriminated against based on whether it was our huge ad spend that brought them there or our connections and affection for us, our brand, and our product. The whole world’s monopoly laws are based on levelling this very playing field. We are asking for nothing unusual.
Once again, to repeat: The problem really isn’t that they have a rule that discourages people from gaming the system. The problem is how they define ‘gaming’ immediately puts every MSME at a disadvantage. For example, imagine if every Tasha & Girl employee and their immediate family member (including toddlers and senior citizens who refuse to touch a computer) were to somehow write a review on every product of ours, do you know how many reviews that would be totally? Perhaps 20, or maybe 25 tops. Now imagine the same with an HUL (18,000 employees) or ITC (27,000 employees) or P&G (97,000 employees). Who do you think is more capable of gaming the system here? But who do you think is more likely to ask their friends and family and employees to buy their product and write a review? So, who do you think this particular rule is written for? An HUL or an ITC or a P&G can afford to spend billions of US$ on selling their products (and, not to put too fine a point on it, manipulate reviews and ratings, if they so wish), while all a small startup can do is to exhort the friends and family or its founders and of its employees to buy, try, and write about the products they so painstakingly make and put out there. So, who do you think this little rule of Amazon harms more?
Lastly: This is not really Amazon’s problem to resolve though, if you think about it. It is a commercial entity and if it could strip you of every last penny and put it into its own pocket, it would do it. This is actually the regulator’s problem. Such coercive ToS should have been disallowed by law to begin with. But given the government we have, and have had (no, this is not about the NDA or UPA…since both are equally clueless), such an expectation is, unfortunately, an expectation too far.
One more thing before we sign off: Since you are already here, may we interest you to try our 100% natural, 0% synthetic fruit spreads made from 100-year-old recipes passed from great grandmother to grandmother to mother to daughter (Tasha) to granddaughter (the Girl) and packed (the fruit spreads, not the lineage) in the cutest glass bottles this side of Andromeda? We have some brilliant flavours in Strawberries, Mangoes, and Figs. Check out our Amazon shop here.
And yes, apparently asking you to try them out and give your opinions as reviews & ratings on the very store you bought it from is against the terms of service of Amazon. So, we won’t ask you to try them out and review us on Amazon. To repeat: please do not review us on Amazon. Please please do not write your honest opinion about your legitimate purchase on the store you purchased it from. That would be unfair. It could get us deactivated. And also, don’t give us your opinion on our Facebook page. Just. Don’t. OK? Whew! That was close. Wasn’t it, Amazon India? Almost had us there, you did.
