Inside Amazon's Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals
By Dana Mattioli and Sarah Nassauer | Photographs by Grant Hindsley for The Wall Street Journal. For nearly a decade, workers in a warehouse in Seattle's Denny Triangle neighborhood have shipped boxes of shoes, beach chairs, Marvel T-shirts and other items to online retail customers across the U.S.The operation, called Big River Services International, sells around $1 million a year of goods through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon.com under brand names such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss. "We are entrepreneurs, thinkers, marketers and creators, " Big River says on its website. "We have a passion for customers and aren't afraid to experiment.". What the website doesn't say is that Big River is an arm of Amazon that surreptitiously gathers intelligence on the tech giant's competitors.An internal crisis-management paper gave advice on what to say if discovered. The response to questions should be: "We make a variety of products available to customers t