What does the "Top Brand" badge from Amazon really mean?

The biggest asset of Amazon can also be a headache for its customers. The so-called "all store" really Is sell almost any item that consumers might want, but it is often tedious and tedious to sort them out. To avoid "overload of choice", the retail giant has developed some signals to help users distinguish high quality products from others. They include star ratings and product reviews, as well as "Amazon's Choice", a mysterious badge assigned to certain items, which has recently been the subject of close scrutiny by legislators. Now, Amazon is testing a new signifier, called "Top Brand". But no one seems to know exactly what is a "Top Brand" and Amazon will not say it.

Amazon has long been offering customers the ability to perform a search according to "Top Brands", but the products did not previously distinguish themselves by a special badge in the search results. Now, if you're looking for "swim goggles", for example, Amazon may return multiple Speedo pairs whose photos have a "Top Brand" badge. Here's the strange part: the long-standing search filter "Top Brands" is not enough the same as the new "Top Brand" badge. Here is an example: if you search for "women's belts" on Amazon and filter the "Top Brands", you may notice that not all results actually receive the Top Brand badge. How can a company be a Top Brand in one way but not in another?

According to Amazon, this difference exists because the Top Brand badge is only a feature of Amazon Fashion, the part of its website dedicated to clothing, accessories and luggage, while the Top Brands search filter is available on the whole market. So it makes sense that Amazon is testing this new badge feature specifically for fashion, as consumers are typically brand-aware when they buy items such as handbags and shoes. But since not all women's belts are in the fashion category, they are not eligible for the Top Brand badge, even though Amazon might consider them Top Brands in general. Confusing, no?

At this point in history, you may be wondering: is a superior brand? Are the best brands selected by humans? Or is the metric controlled by an algorithm? Amazon, for its part, says that the Top Brand badge simply highlights the brands that customers love, but does not go into the details of its determination.

Wired has contacted four Amazon experts to ask them for explanations of the logic behind the pre-existing Top Brands filter, including two former employees. Fred Dimyan, CEO of Potoo Solutions, a consulting firm for ecommerce companies, says that Amazon takes into account two factors when awarding this honor: the number of products sold by a brand and the number of different products offered at the start. In other words, companies that manufacture a limited range of products, but sell a large number of them, are probably Top Brands. Dave Bryant, an Amazon salesman and blogger, thinks that the distinction can be tied to overall customer satisfaction with regard to purchase, which may include such parameters as the number of returns of customers. items.

James Thomson, a former Amazon employee and partner at Buy Box Experts, a company that consults with independent vendors from Amazon, says Top Brands probably has high sales volumes and high conversion rates, which means that many people who consult their product lists ultimately choose to buy from them. Chris McCabe, another former employee of Amazon who now consults Amazon sellers on eCommerceChris.com, said Top Brands was the most profitable product in a given category. All experts agreed that "Top Brand" was not a promotional title that companies could pay to post on their Amazon product listings.

At least anecdotally, Top Brands seems to encompass the house names you might find in a mall, like Steve Madden, Oakley, Under Armor and IZOD. Perhaps the most important thing is to report the names you already know in physical stores, so that you can quickly buy from a trusted company. "I would not be surprised if the idea was to ensure that this feature is verified on social platforms," ​​said Juozas Kaziukénas, founder of the e-commerce information company Marketplace Pulse, which has for the first time alerted the badge Wired to the Top Brand. But there are also a lot of unknown companies that stand out for the Top Brand distinction, and each of Amazon's home brands also seems to be referred to as Top Brand.

After Wired contacted Amazon for this story, something odd happened. Most of the Top Brand badges present in the Wired Drives search results have disappeared, including in an incognito browser window on multiple computers, browsers, and phones. Amazon says that because the feature is a test, it may not always be visible.

US lawmakers began to look at how Amazon evaluated products sold in its vast market using signals such as Top Brand. On Monday, Sen. Bob Menendez and Senator Richard Blumenthal, both Democrats, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, asking for a "detailed explanation" on how the Amazon's Choice badge is awarded, after a Buzzfeed investigation revealed that it was sometimes given what had appeared. to poor quality items. The Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is also worried that Amazon may favor articles from its own brands compared to those of its competitors. And the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have each recently announced that they are studying online market business practices, including Amazon.

In a statement, a spokesman for Amazon did not respond directly to the senators' letter. Rather, the company has emphasized its efforts to detect false product reviews and has stated that it believes that 90% of non-genuine notices are computer generated.

Opaque features such as "Top Brand" recall that Amazon is not a traditional retailer, although it often wants look as one for consumers. It's a huge market where millions of independent traders from around the world sell their products. Amazon must not only fight the bad actors, but also direct customers to the brands with which they probably know how to be happy, or risk being overwhelmed and going elsewhere. The challenge for Amazon, as for all online platforms, is to find a way to manage chaos without taking full responsibility for the consequences of its management choices.

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This story originally appeared on wired.com.