Some sellers are hijacking listings of discontinued Amazon private-label products to sell their own wares, using the pages' old reviews to appear trustworthy
Under the surface, Amazon is a scene of constant warfare. A growing share of goods on the platform are sold by third parties, who compete viciously for limited real estate.
Context & Ripple Effects
Listing hijacking is the latest move in a seller arms race that has been escalating for years: one seller's fight with a rival over stolen images and fake negative reviews in 2017 showed the tactics early, and by 2018 sellers were running click farms and reviewers-for-hire to beat the ranking system. The new twist exploits Amazon's own strategy — its aggressive private-label push, documented when it began pitching its own brands as customers add rival products to baskets, left behind discontinued listings whose accumulated reviews are now orphaned assets.
First-order effects
- Buyers on hijacked pages see a review history for a product they are not actually getting, so Amazon's core trust signal — the review count — stops meaning what it says.
- Brands behind the discontinued private-label items lose control of pages carrying their review equity, while the hijacking sellers get an instant credibility boost they did not earn.
Second-order effects
- Legitimate sellers face rising defensive costs — monitoring their listings and paying for protection against takeovers — because the same page can be captured by any third party once the original item lapses.
- Every documented scheme, from review buying to hijacking, pushes more scrutiny onto how much of the catalog Amazon itself controls, sharpening the criticism from coverage of its top-left search slot favoring private labels.
Third-order effects
- If hijacking keeps working, reviews stop functioning as a decentralized trust mechanism and the platform has to substitute centralized verification — gated brands, verified-purchase weighting — concentrating more power with Amazon itself.
- The pattern points toward marketplace competition being fought over reputation infrastructure rather than price, with regulators increasingly likely to treat manipulated reviews as a consumer-protection issue rather than a platform housekeeping matter.
The trend: Marketplace trust is becoming an arms race between sellers who game reputation signals and platforms forced to harden them, with each exploit shifting more verification power to the platform owner.