eBay sues Amazon for alleged poaching of its third-party sellers

After accusing Amazon of running a campaign to poach its third-party sellers, eBay has taken legal action in California to ban the competitor from abusing his platform. The Wall Street Journal. eBay first sent a banning letter to Amazon earlier this month, claiming that its employees were using the eBay messaging feature to attempt to hire third-party sellers on Amazon Marketplace , the competing sales platform of the giant e-commerce.

At the time, Amazon had said "to conduct a thorough investigation of these allegations". WSJeBay is suing Amazon in Santa Clara County to prevent its employees from misusing eBay's messaging platform. eBay also claims unspecified damages for financial compensation for lost sales. Amazon and eBay take commissions on sales sold with the help of its platform, while Amazon in particular earns a lot of money by providing support in storage, shipping and other logistics services. Packaging to these sellers.

According to eBay's complaint, Amazon has orchestrated this poaching effort from its headquarters, with standardized, similar or sometimes identical messages sent by Amazon representatives to the United States, parts of Europe, Singapore and in Australia. According to eBay's terms of use, you can not use its messaging system to direct or promote outside companies or send spam to other buyers and sellers. Yet, representatives of Amazon sometimes sent up to 120 messages with a single eBay account without buying or selling items on the site.

"For years, and unbeknownst to eBay, Amazon has been engaged in a systematic and coordinated effort to infiltrate and leverage eBay's exclusive M2M system on the platform of D & D. EBay to attract Amazon's best sellers eBay, "wrote eBay in its complaint. "The program is of incredible scale – it involves a large number of Amazon representatives, targeting several hundred eBay sellers, and covering several overseas countries and many US states (including California)."

Although the business models of eBay and Amazon may think that the two sites serve very different customers, they have begun to overlap over the years. Amazon has diversified its retail operations to include third-party sellers who can sell products directly to consumers, while eBay has gone from an auction site of used goods to one location. where companies can create complete e-commerce operations. It is now clear that both are in direct competition, at least for online marketers who can only use one of the two platforms to conduct their business. Amazon declined to comment on this story.