new delhi amazoncom inc has been repeatedly accused of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers the company has denied the accusationsbut thousands of pages of internal amazon documents examined by reuters including emails strategy papers and business plans show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in india one of the companys largest growth marketsthe documents reveal how amazons privatebrands team in india secretly exploited internal data from amazonin to copy products sold by other companies and then offered them on its platform the employees also stoked sales of amazon privatebrand products by rigging amazons search results so that the companys products would appear as one 2016 strategy report for india put it in the first 2 or three search results when customers were shopping on amazonin advt among the victims of the strategy a popular shirt brand in india john miller which is owned by a company whose chief executive is kishore biyani known as the countrys retail king amazon decided to follow the measurements of john miller shirts down to the neck circumference and sleeve length the document statesthe internal documents also show that amazon employees studied proprietary data about other brands on amazonin including detailed information about customer returns the aim to identify and target goods described as reference or benchmark products and replicate them as part of that effort the 2016 internal report laid out amazons strategy for a brand the company originally created for the indian market called solimo the solimo strategy it said was simple use information from amazonin to develop products and then leverage the amazonin platform to market these products to our customersthe solimo project in india has had international impact scores of solimobranded health and household products are now offered for sale on amazons us website amazoncomthe 2016 document further shows that amazon employees working on the companys own products known as private brands or private labels planned to partner with the manufacturers of the products targeted for copying thats because they learned that these manufacturers employ unique processes which impact the end quality of the productthe document entitled india private brands program states it is difficult to develop this expertise across products and hence to ensure that we are able to fully match quality with our reference product we decided to only partner with the manufacturers of our reference product it termed such manufacturer expertise tribal knowledge advt this is the second in a series of stories based on internal amazon documents that provide a rare unvarnished look in the companys own words into business practices that it has denied for yearsamazon has been accused before by employees who worked on privatebrand products of exploiting proprietary data and manipulating search results to increase sales of the companys own goodsin sworn testimony