[neilv]

I've been wondering for a while why Amazon has been letting (my impression of) trust in the listings on its retail site be eroded so much.

My best naive wild guess (as a techie, not an MBA) is that a solution is Amazon private brands. Amazon could exercise control over the supply chain, could keep other sellers from piggybacking on a listing, could keep the reviews generally positive (in various ways, including aggressive investigation of suspected fake negative reviews), and could even have customer service treat private brands more favorably than many others. Plus preferential listing and smarter targeting.

Meanwhile, most other brands would still have to be on Amazon, but suffer the current awful environment of counterfeits, reuse of listings for different products, fake reviews on their and competitor's listings, etc.

[tkxxx7]

This is basically already happening. There is a long list of Amazon-owned brands - not just AmazonBasics anymore

[neilv]

The wild speculation part is that a plan for building trust in Amazon-owned brands could explain an appearance of foot-dragging in fixing trust problems hurting other brands.