Marketplace Pulse study that examined sales rankings and reviews of 23,000 products on Amazon claims most Amazon-branded goods are flops
Spencer Soper / Bloomberg : Tweets: @seattletimes and @joevc Tweets: @seattletimes : The explosion of Amazon's private-label products prompted concern that the online retailer could promote the house brands at the expense of merchants on the web store. Turns out most Amazon-branded goods are flops, according to Marketplace Pulse. http://www.seattletimes.com/ ... Joe Medved / @joevc : Decades of having private label products on store shelves hasn't destroyed traditional CPGs, just like Amazon's proprietary products are unlikely to dominate most online shelves. Branding matters. http://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Since Amazon quietly launched 19 unbranded house labels across a dozen categories in 2017, the running fear has been that its private-label push would steamroll third-party merchants — amplified by later findings that Amazon pitches its own brands as shoppers add rivals to their baskets and that it ranks house brands above better-selling competitors despite telling Congress otherwise (The Markup's investigation).
The Marketplace Pulse study cuts against the dominance narrative on one axis: measured across 23,000 products by sales rank and reviews, most Amazon-branded goods simply fail to sell. What persists isn't brand strength — it's the placement advantage documented in the related coverage.
First-order effects
- Third-party merchants facing Amazon's house brands are threatened less by the products themselves than by the search slots they occupy — the competitive pressure comes from placement, not consumer preference.
- Amazon's private-label program takes a reputational hit internally: a portfolio built through dozens of undifferentiated launches is shown to be mostly dead weight rather than a CPG killer.
Second-order effects
- Regulators and lawmakers scrutinizing Amazon can shift focus from 'does it monopolize categories with its own brands?' to 'does it self-preference in search?' — a narrower but harder-to-defend question given the documented ranking behavior.
- Sellers competing against flopped house brands gain an argument that shelf position, not merit, decides outcomes — strengthening merchant complaints about paid placement and first-party bias.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, marketplace power looks less like retail-brand dominance and more like control of the discovery layer: the platform wins regardless of whose product sells, which is precisely the structure antitrust frameworks built for gatekeepers rather than retailers.
- The failure of scale-driven private label at Amazon suggests branding still matters online — pushing platforms toward monetizing placement and data instead of manufacturing their own goods.
The trend: Marketplace platforms are discovering that their durable advantage is controlling search placement and shopper data, not winning on their own branded products.