[ BDSN ] 🕵🏻 Amazon the Spy: Inside a Covert Operation

🕵🏻 AMAZON the SPY: INSIDE a COVERT OPERATION

Big River Services International, a covert operation nestled in Seattle's Denny Triangle and orchestrated by Amazon under the guise of a bustling e-commerce business, has been engaging in stealthy corporate strategies since its inception in 2015 under code name "Project Curiosity."

This secret Amazon subsidiary was designed to infiltrate e-commerce platforms by creating and selling products under fictitious brands, enabling Amazon to gather critical intelligence on competitors.

Initially, Big River scooped up products from local Seattle retailers undergoing liquidation sales—items like Saucony sneakers and Tommy Bahama beach chairs—to sell under its proprietary brands across multiple marketplaces, including those run by direct competitors like Walmart.

One of Big River's more ambitious goals was penetrating Walmart’s marketplace, a task requiring a significant sales volume history. By pumping its products through Amazon.com, Big River artificially boosted its sales figures to meet Walmart’s thresholds, eventually gaining entry and listing products under the guise of another brand, Atlantic Lot.

This brand, crafted by Big River, was used to sell and ship products using Walmart’s logistics services, all while gathering data on Walmart’s shipping times and processes without Walmart’s knowledge of Big River’s true ownership.

In Japan, the operation extended to creating a streetwear brand called Not So Ape, inspired by Tokyo's urban fashion but entirely fabricated by Big River. This brand, along with others, allowed Amazon to gain a foothold in the Japanese market, selling on platforms like Zozotown while collecting data on local e-commerce operations.

The depth of Big River's espionage extended into logistics, particularly with FedEx. Big River, under its disguised identity, became a customer of FedEx's fulfillment program, designed to compete with Amazon’s own logistics offerings.

This partnership allowed Big River to obtain early insights into FedEx’s pricing and operational terms, which were then discreetly relayed back to Amazon, informing its competitive strategies.

Not just content with external operations, Big River's employees operated in a cloak-and-dagger manner, often working "off the grid" with non-Amazon email addresses and meeting in private areas of Amazon's offices to ensure their activities remained confidential.

Big River also made its presence felt at eBay’s seller conference in Las Vegas. Representatives attended under their Big River identities, gathering exclusive information intended for eBay sellers, which was then funneled back to Amazon to enhance its understanding of eBay’s seller policies.

Throughout its operations, Big River launched multiple brands, continually evolving its strategy to maintain cover and gather extensive data across no fewer than 13 different e-commerce platforms globally.

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🏴‍☠️ SELLER MANIPULATING REVIEWS - REPORT ‘EM

Sometimes I order a product from Amazon from my competitors to check their quality and to reverse engineer their post sale process.

Often times I discover they are up to no-good and attempting to manipulate reviews with their inserts.

Some people scream “that’s not fair” on social media. Others, like me, simply report them and 9 times out of 10 the problem child disappears.

Here’s where you can officially report them that actually gets look at.

LAST TWO BDSN NEWSLETTERS …
April 15 → 🔎 Blatantly violating Amazon TOS
April 11 → 💰 Crush Amazon product launches

🗣️  AI SECRETS TOP E-COMMERCE SELLERS are USING

If you are an e-commerce seller, you cannot afford to miss this FREE webinar.

It’s called the AI E-commerce Success Summit and it's hosted by Marketing Misfits Norm Farrar & Kevin King.

If you don’t master AI Marketing now, you are at a major risk of being left behind.

18 cutting-edge AI experts have been carefully curated by Norm & Kevin to share tactical and actionable strategies, each in six minutes or less, that can have a profound impact on your e-commerce business.

A few of the topics being shown:

• Maximize Amazon Storefront Impact - Quickly boost sales.

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Don’t miss your chance to gain a massive unfair advantage over your competitors and take your e-commerce business to the next level using the latest AI techniques.

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🧳 TO TRAVEL IS TO LIVE 
→ here’s looking at you kid

My “why” has led me to visit 94 countries and all 7 continents. I create my business around my life. Not my life around my business.

I hope to inspire you in your journey of business and life with photos, a short video I filmed, and a brief description of my time there.

The most beautiful island in the world

At some point in our lives, we’ve all encountered a place that we immediately knew was special, even if we couldn’t quite identify the reason.

I have been to Kauai more than a dozen times. And it is still one of my most favorite places in the world.

It’s truly stunningly beautiful at every turn, as the participants in the Kauai Scramble Road Rally will see during the second day of BDSS 10 in May.

Only about 73,000 permanent residents live on the island (Meta’s Zuckerberg is one of them), and there are no freeways. It’s laid back, and nobody is in a hurry. The speed limit tops out at 35 mph on the island’s two-lane roads.

Kauai has a miniature Grand Canyon, deserts, 10,000 waterfalls, stunning bays, powdery beaches and a breathtaking Napoli coastline.

There's also something about Kauai that I can’t quite explain. Every time I’m there I dream vividly. Perhaps it’s because Kauai has seven main sacred sites, corresponding to the seven energy vortexes or chakras in the body.

Some believe that energy vortexes tend to occur at critical intersections of ley lines, which are straight lines that connect sacred sites around the world and align with the earth’s electromagnetic energy.

Here are 10 mysterious energy vortexes around the world (the bold ones I have been to):

1. Stonehenge, England

2. Sedona, Arizona

3. Machu Picchu, Peru

4. Table Mountain, South Africa

5. Great Pyramid of Giza. Egypt

6. Mount Shasta, California

7. Es Vedra, Ibiza

8. Haleokola Volcano, Hawaii

9. Uluru, Australia

10. Lake Rotopounamu, New Zealand

See you again Monday.

The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
63%