PALM SPRINGS, Calif. (KESQ) – Bobo Palm Springs, a boutique stationery store off N. Indian Canyon, is sounding the alarm for other small businesses after they claim they found their shop’s products listed on Amazon without their knowledge or consent.
The shop owner, Angie Chua, says she first noticed the items listed earlier this week and contacted Amazon to take them down. The online mega-retailer removed Bobo from the program, but she now worries her small business isn’t the only one being listed without the owner’s knowledge.
“Our entire catalog was listed on Amazon without our permission and without our consent. It was a combination of products that we had, products that we’ve long deleted, that don’t exist on our site or on our back-end, as well as leveraging AI images that we didn’t create or use,” Chua said.
For Chua, who says she’s spent years curating trusted relationships with her customers, she feels like the listing without permission was a violation.
“We spend a lot of time building trust with our customers. It takes a long time for us to earn their dollar, and for Amazon to come in and undercut us and just step in under the guise of, ‘we are supporting these small businesses,’ is like appalling,” she said.
Chua believes she was opted into an Amazon beta program called ‘Buy For Me,’ that lists outside businesses’ products on the site.
“We were starting to see an increase of these orders for items that were out of stock, items that were like a single item, which was very out of the norm for what we would normally see. Every single one of those orders had a jumbled Amazon email address titled ‘@buyforme.amazon.’ It was there that we realized that those orders were actually coming from Amazon and being fulfilled through our Shopify account.”
The cost? Chua says she’s had to refund orders for items that didn’t exist and worries this could interfere with her direct customers relationships.
News Channel 3 reached out to Amazon, who said in a statement they are piloting a ‘Buy For Me’ program that lists several products on the website, including some ‘additional relevant products’ from other vendors. Shoppers can then click ‘Buy For Me,’ that’s when Amazon makes the purchase from the website on the customer’s behalf using AI.
When asked if shop owners give consent to list their products online, Amazon responded that they ‘proactively introduced’ several shops they thought would benefit from the program, and owners can opt-out if they’d like.
Spokespeople say the goal is to increase small business visibility and sales. However, Chua disagrees and points to recent collaborations Amazon did with other small creators.
“Having a one off $11 or $3 sale from Amazon is not enough to cover the fact that this is a long game for them. They had a platform called Amazon Handmade, where they recruited thousands of independent makers to sell their products on Amazon Handmade as a competition to Etsy. They ended up finding what items did really well and then created dupes for those items,” Chua alleges.
Chua’s products have since been removed from Amazon at her request, but she says shell items of her products still exist with special SEO keywords that could divert traffic from her own website.
For this small business, the incident is another notch in the belt of Amazon’s global market dominance.
“There is this constant, villainous behavior that happens from these large companies and it is always at the expense of somebody else. It doesn’t matter who it is, and for us, it’s small business and they continue to exploit us,” Chua said.
She believes e-commerce retailers that use Shopify or Woo Commerce could be unknowingly opted into the pilot program and is now encouraging all business owners to check for themselves.