Yes, the very reason for Apple to create the "store-in-store" concept was that they thought that the buying experience for their products was inadequate (both in presentation of the products and qualification of the staff): https://web.archive.org/web/19990210163227/http://product.in...
The Amazon storefront simply seems to be an extension of that concept from brick and mortar to online stores. I'm not sure what's supposed to be unlawful or unethical about this.
[Disclaimer: I work for Apple, but not in a retail oriented role, nor as a spokesperson]
There's store-within-a-store, but it's not really the same thing as a marketplace, and not the type of thing where any provider dominates the market enough to have a monopolistic power on it.
Amazon has more than a third of all online retail and is close to surpassing Walmart as the largest retailer in the world, online or physical.
Best Buy is not in the same league.
Also, Apple appears to be the only company in the world that can get this deal from Amazon. Apple's competitors can't get it. So this seems to be an artificial restriction on competition.
Sure, Apple is sometimes a beta customer of new features in Brand Registry. But in general is not the only company that gets this treatment from Amazon and Apple’s competitors can sign up and use almost all the same services through Brand Registry.
Source: Its been a few years but I built many of these counterfeit detecting systems from greenfield.
The biggest problem really has been brands not wanting to engage with Amazon or Brands not being anywhere close to organized enough to help. In many cases simple questions like “Please give us a CSV of all your products. We will not add them to Amazon’s catalog” was met with “we don’t have such a CSV or database”, “ok we pulled together many products into a CSV by searching years of emails and Dropbox files but if you want the products from our European and Asian divisions please message them separately”.
I can tell you, Apple does not have these same organizational issues. They know every product they have ever made, they are happy to share, and they are happy to leverage experimental features.
> But in general is not the only company that gets this treatment from Amazon and Apple’s competitors can sign up and use almost all the same services through Brand Registry.
This is not true. From the article:
"I'm surprised — that's strange," a former senior Amazon advertising manager told Insider, referring to Apple's clean product and search result pages. "I wouldn't have the discretion to offer something like that."
At least half a dozen salespeople on Amazon's advertising team told Insider that they were not able to extend this Apple-style special treatment to their clients. Large advertisers on Amazon constantly ask for this type of exclusivity, but the company usually denies those requests because it wants a diverse set of search results and ads, one of the people said. To create Apple's clean product and search pages, multiple teams at the most senior levels at Amazon would have had to get involved, this person added.
"We balk at companies that want to buy all the ad slots," this person said. "I have never seen, nor do I have the control to give, that type of right."
Correct this protection is not offered to advertisers. Advertisers have no legal rights to leverage to get access to such a feature.
However, it is offered to Brands that own legally protected Intellectual Property. Through Brand registry Brands can have their search pages protected when the customer searches for legally protected keywords (eg AirPods).
Context: I was the lead engineer that worked with the Ads teams and designed the architecture to integrate Brand Registry and Ads systems.
Even when I worked there (ie while the feature was still in Beta), Apple was not the only Brand to get this treatment. There were many other Brands in the beta for this feature.
The Amazon storefront simply seems to be an extension of that concept from brick and mortar to online stores. I'm not sure what's supposed to be unlawful or unethical about this.
[Disclaimer: I work for Apple, but not in a retail oriented role, nor as a spokesperson]