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Those sellers have helped Amazon create a store with roughly 500 million items for sale, said Juozas Kaziukenas, chief executive of Marketplace Pulse, a business intelligence firm focused on e-commerce. Amazon has built its catalogue by making it easy for sellers to list goods, an approach that makes it difficult for the company to police every item for potential safety concerns.

“In many ways, Amazon has built themselves into a corner,” Kaziukenas said. “The building blocks of Amazon prevents them from fixing it.”

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The site had 2.5 million merchants with items for sale at the end of 2018, estimates e-commerce-intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

Target and Walmart have created online marketplaces for third parties to sell directly to consumers. Target’s site, launched earlier this year with several sellers, is invitation-only. Walmart had around 22,000 sellers at the end of 2018, according to Marketplace Pulse.

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At least 40% of sellers on Amazon.com, the company’s U.S. marketplace, are based in China, according to Marketplace Pulse, and some share little—or misleading—information about what they’re actually selling.

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Amazon has developed a new "Top Brand" badge, affixed to several items in various categories but mostly to apparel and footwear, according to a blog post Friday from e-commerce marketplace platform Marketplace Pulse that was then reported by other news outlets.

"Given how large the Amazon catalog has grown and the millions of brands it consists of, it's an attempt to help established brands stand out from the competition," Kaziukėnas wrote. "In the future, the badge might function similar to how verified accounts work on Instagram and other social networks. Brands which would get verified on Amazon, and thus receive the Top Brand badge, would rank first and command more trust from shoppers."

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The new badge was first spotted by Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse. The testing was confirmed to Bloomberg by an Amazon spokesperson, who said it was to denote brands that are popular with customers.

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“I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea is to make this function like being verified on social platforms,” says Juozas Kaziukénas, founder of the ecommerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, who first alerted WIRED to the Top Brand badge.

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The company appended a “top brand” label to products from Speedo, New Balance, Under Armor and Fruit of the Loom in some product search results, Marketplace Pulse, a New York e-commerce research firm, said on Friday.

In a blog post on Friday, Marketplace Pulse Chief Executive Officer Juozas Kaziukenas said that the top brand label could act much like the account verification badges used by Instagram or Twitter, which are designed to connote legitimacy. The label, if implemented, could have “substantial impact on how shoppers decide which products to buy,” or how brands compete against cheaper private-label products, Kaziukenas said.

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The act of altering listing information is not unprecedented on the Amazon marketplace, according to Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse. But it's very rare for people to attack listings for purely political reasons as in this case. Only Amazon and sellers have the authorization to change product information. So, it’s unclear how people find loopholes to manipulate the listings. Many of the attacked listings were from Merch by Amazon, a program that enables individual creators to design T-shirts and pop sockets. Under Merch by Amazon, Amazon takes over the manufacturing and fulfillment work and designers earn commissions from each sale.

“It’s fascinating to see a foreign country’s battle played out on Amazon's marketplace,” said Kaziukenas. “Ideally, Amazon wants to be a politics-free platform, and they just sell products. And in this case, the original merchants support one political ideology, which upset a different part of a group of people who decided to act on it and fight it. It’s not something Amazon wants to deal with.”

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The growth of working capital options for small-scale sellers is the results of banks’ inability to serve this market, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. “It’s the issue of being too small for a bank and, even if they talk to you, you don’t have enough history of business execution to be a bank client,” he said. “[Alternative lenders] have better data than a bank would have and can offer loans to sellers who would have no access to funding.” In addition, by integrating with e-commerce platforms, these platforms can acquire a better line of sight into merchants’ capital needs.

“[The loans] are not meant to be used for just anything,” said Kaziukėnas. “They’re usually meant for buying more products to sell in the future, and the payment terms are built around how much lead time you have for product manufacturing and how soon you expect to sell.”

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As Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, explained it, “It’s probably a much better approach to have a Chinese company to deal with Chinese sellers, Obviously JD has much more experience in this. They have existing local relationships. They have an existing local experience.”

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