E-commerce eBay has officially filed a lawsuit against the giant Amazon, accusing it of using a scheme to poach its biggest sellers.
It started in a situation where eBay discovered that its sellers were contacted by an Amazon representative. In an early investigation by the company, eBay found that at least 50 Amazon representatives from all over the world, including the U.S., UK, France, Spain, Italy, Australia and Singapore, had been sending hundreds of solicitation messages for years.
They do that by using the company's direct messaging system to contact hundreds of its high-profile sellers, in a strategy to convince them to switch platforms.
The lawsuit also said that Amazon coordinated those efforts straight from its headquarters, seeing that a lot of the accounts were created using Amazon's IP address. According to eBay, most of the messages follow similar patterns, and were also identical.
The company sent a cease-and-desist letter to Amazon outlining its claims. The Amazon representatives, eBay said, seemed to know that their use of its messaging system violated the company’s terms of service.
Part of the eBay's lawsuit reads:
"eBay does scan for key terms and they don’t exactly like us poking around," one message read. "Honestly the easiest way to communicate about this would be on the phone."
Other messages involved phrasings that seemed intended to evade detection, such as avoiding the use of the word "Amazon," and instead used "a-m-a-z-o-n Australia" or "A.M.Z.N."
"We have demanded that Amazon end its unlawful activity, and we will take the appropriate steps, as needed, to protect eBay."
eBay called the effort as an "orchestrated, coordinated, worldwide campaign" to "illegally lure eBay sellers to sell on Amazon."
eBay was the pioneer in online auction. But since then, it has moved to e-commerce sales, making it a direct competitor to Amazon. According to the company, 89 percent of products bought from its platform are at a fixed price, and because of this, it's adding concerns that its rival Amazon would be poaching its sellers.
Meanwhile on Amazon, the e-commerce titan has been adding more products on its websites by attracting third-party merchants. This would allow Amazon to be less tied to its own resources in holding inventory waiting to be sold, but at the same time puts extra pressure by the company to attract more and more sellers.
Over 50 percent of the things Amazon sells comes from these outside sources, and with them, Amazon makes more money than from its own sales.