Amazon Wants to Own the World's Product Data
Amazon is working on an internal plan to collect data on virtually every item for sale on Earth, whether Amazon stocks it or not, according to an internal document reviewed by Reuters and to people familiar with the matter.
The initiative is called World Product Graph, and its purpose is to keep shoppers from leaving Amazon to research what they are about to buy. "Amazon cannot be the go destination for every shopping mission if customers must leave to research product relationships on Google, brand websites, and review sites," the document says.
And the document frames the gap as a research problem. "These answers exist, but the only way to find them has been to leave Amazon for painstaking research on brand websites, third party review sites and tech forums," it says, and a Morgan Stanley study put the share of shoppers who start research on Amazon at 16 per cent against 57 per cent on Google, a gap that closes once a buyer knows the model, when Amazon leads with 41 per cent.
Building it depends on discovering how brands organise products on their own sites, with some brands feeding Amazon data continuously while Amazon also crawls other retailers' websites, and Reuters could not determine how it would do that or whether it needs permission in every case.
Coca-Cola and Bayer are named as brands that have agreed to contribute product data, and Amazon held a chief executive level summit with Procter and Gamble for a trial. None of the three responded to requests for comment, and the work sits under Robert Tekiela, a vice president in the catalog systems unit, who also did not respond.
But Amazon played down the document's status. "Draft, outdated documents often paint an incomplete picture and the existence of a brainstorming document such as this one doesn't necessarily reflect our current plans," it said, adding that it keeps working on ways to make its catalogue more accurate. The document is written like a press release with a target date late next year, and Reuters could not establish whether that date is realistic or whether the plan proceeds at all.
Part of the case rests on Amazon's own assistant. The document says many answers from Rufus, now marketed as Alexa for Shopping, are wrong or incomplete and that customers cannot spot the errors, with about 83 million searches a week that are expensive to run. Amazon said those figures are significantly outdated and that the assistant is roughly 97 per cent accurate.
The competitive pressure is visible. Amazon's chief executive told investors that few customers shop this way yet and that advertising is barely affected, while Meta's shopping agent has passed 10 million users in the United States and Canada, and Amazon has blocked that agent and is suing Perplexity over a similar tool.
So the plan is a data play aimed at agents that shop on someone's behalf, with a target date late next year and Amazon calling the document a draft.
An internal document sets out a plan called World Product Graph
It would gather product data on items Amazon does not sell
Coca-Cola and Bayer are named as contributors, with a Procter and Gamble trial
The document says Amazon's own shopping assistant gives wrong answers at times
Amazon says the document is a draft and may not reflect its plans
Source: Reuters
