In its recent lawsuit against Amazon, the Federal Trade Commission accused the company and former CEO Jeff Bezos of flooding the e-commerce site with irrelevant “junk ads” to boost profit.
One part of Amazon’s vast marketplace appears to be exempt from that move: Apple product pages.
Apple’s latest products directly sold by Amazon have a much cleaner page layout on Amazon with no ads or recommendations until the very bottom of the page, an Insider review of the e-commerce site shows. Most other brands don’t get this special treatment, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Other companies’s product pages are cluttered with a mix of ads and product recommendations from competitors or sometimes irrelevant brands. For example, Samsung Galaxy and Microsoft Surface product pages on Amazon have multiple banner ads, including a list of sponsored recommendations under tabs like, “Products related to this item” or “4 stars and above.”
The latest Apple product pages on Amazon have none of this extra marketing. The discrepancy has drawn ire from some of Apple’s biggest competitors, including Samsung, one of the people said.
Clean iPhone searches
Search results for “iPhone” and “iPad” on Amazon also offer a similarly clean experience. The top banner is always an Apple ad, and only one banner ad appears at the very bottom of the page, according to Insider’s recent review.
In contrast, Amazon search results for other brands, such as Samsung and Sony, show at least two or three sponsored ads from rivals. Amazon also shows a fewer number of search results for Apple’s products compared to its competitors.
“It’s clear Apple made a deal with Amazon that is not available to other brands,” Juozas Kaziukenas, CEO of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, told Insider. “I can’t recall any other brand with the same setup.”
Private demands
The unusual arrangement follows the iPhone-maker’s private demands to Amazon to only show its products in results when an Apple term like “iPad” is searched, according to an internal email previously shared by the House Judiciary Committee. At the time, Apple also asked Amazon to make its product pages clean, without any non-Apple product recommendations.
The email, titled “WW framework terms,” shows a list of discussion points prior to a broader partnership deal struck between Apple and Amazon in 2018. That deal for the first time let Amazon directly sell a broader range of Apple products, including the iPhone and iPad, and put in anti-counterfeit measures like only letting authorized merchants sell Apple products on Amazon’s marketplace.
“We understand that Apple does not want to drive sales to competing brands in search or detail pages,” Amazon’s retail CEO at the time, Jeff Wilke, wrote in the email.
Apple’s request is particularly notable given how Amazon has increasingly put more ads across its marketplace, as the FTC lawsuit alleged. Amazon’s advertising unit is a key growth and profit driver, with over $38 billion in revenue last year. But stuffing its website with ads risks alienating brands and imposing extra costs on merchants. It also has the potential to confuse consumers — something that Apple was likely trying to avoid.
Amazon/Insider
In an email to Insider, Apple acknowledged that a 2018 agreement with Amazon prevents other brands from buying ads on the e-commerce site for “very limited spaces responsive to specific Apple-related brand queries.” The company added that third-party brands are still able to buy ads on Amazon for generic keywords containing an Apple name. Marketplace Pulse’s Kaziukenas said that means brands can buy ads on general terms, like an “iPhone 15 pro case,” but not for specific queries like “iPhone” on Amazon’s marketplace.
“Apple’s goal for the Agreements was to create the best possible customer experience, and others are free to do the same,” Apple’s representative said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Amazon and Samsung didn’t respond to requests for comment.
‘Counterfeit and safety issues’
Apple also told Insider that the 2018 agreement with Amazon “sought to address significant counterfeit and safety issues” on Amazon’s marketplace. Prior to the deal, Apple sent “hundreds of thousands of take-down notices” to Amazon to reduce counterfeits, and the company conducted test purchases on Amazon that “consistently returned high counterfeit rates,” Apple added.
By providing “accurate, relevant and qualitative content on Apple Product pages,” Apple has been able to address much of the counterfeit issues on Amazon, the iPhone maker said.
“The 2018 Agreements significantly reduced the sale of counterfeit and unsafe Apple products on Amazon’s marketplaces and have materially improved customer experience,” Apple also wrote in a statement to Insider.
‘Compensate Amazon for the lost ad revenue’
Back in 2018, Amazon appears to have initially refused Apple’s request, but left open the possibility of working out a financial arrangement, according to the email shared by the House Judiciary Committee.
“We cannot alter our organic search algorithm to return only Apple products in the search results when an Apple team is searched,” Amazon’s then-retail CEO Jeff Wilke wrote in the email. (“Organic search” refers to pure search results that don’t include ads).
Wilke also wrote that Amazon does not block or limit advertising on product “detail” pages. But Apple could potentially pay up for this to happen, he added.
“Apple would need to purchase these placements or compensate Amazon for the lost ad revenue,” Wilke wrote in the email.
House Judiciary Committee
Some parts of the email were redacted, and the exact details of that deal could not be learned. But the advertising component was one of the many parts of the broader agreement, according to a person familiar with the matter.
This person said Apple is getting a “massive preferential treatment” on Amazon. Apple is extremely sensitive about the brand experience on Amazon and does not want “pesky” competition clogging its product detail page, this person added.
Digital end cap
Retailers have for years offered special promotional spots in physical stores, like end caps, where certain products get exclusive placements. Amazon’s treatment of Apple’s latest products may be seen as a digital version of that.
But it’s unclear if Amazon makes this special Apple arrangement available to other brands selling on its site. An Insider review of some of the latest products from Samsung, Microsoft, Bose, Sony, and LG show plenty of sponsored ads and recommendation widgets on their Amazon product and search-result pages.
A source of frustration
The special treatment is a source of frustration for some of Apple’s competitors. Samsung, for example, complained about this, one of the people said, because it’s not something you can simply negotiate with Amazon’s advertising team.
“I’m surprised — that’s strange,” a former senior Amazon advertising manager told Insider, referring to Apple’s clean product and search result pages. “I wouldn’t have the discretion to offer something like that.”
Amazon/Insider
At least half a dozen salespeople on Amazon’s advertising team told Insider that they were not able to extend this Apple-style special treatment to their clients. Large advertisers on Amazon constantly ask for this type of exclusivity, but the company usually denies those requests because it wants a diverse set of search results and ads, one of the people said. To create Apple’s clean product and search pages, multiple teams at the most senior levels at Amazon would have had to get involved, this person added.
“We balk at companies that want to buy all the ad slots,” this person said. “I have never seen, nor do I have the control to give, that type of right.”
‘Junk ads’
The special treatment given to Apple is very different from Amazon’s broader mandate to accept more ads on its marketplace, even if that hurts the customer experience, a practice alleged in detail in the FTC’s filing last week.
The FTC said Amazon not only increased the number of ads on its e-commerce site in recent years, but also the number of “irrelevant junk ads,” internally called “defects.” It accused Bezos of encouraging the company to do more of this to increase profitability, according to the filing.
“Mr. Bezos instructed his executives to ‘[a]ccept more defects’ because Amazon can extract billions of dollars through increased advertising despite worsening its services for customers,” the FTC filing said.
Amazon has tried to address this issue. In recent years, the company tested a new search offering that worked similarly to Apple’s arrangement in order to get rid of irrelevant ads, one of the people said. For example, if a shopper searched for “Adidas,” Amazon would return only Adidas products because customers complained about unrelated product ads or recommendations, this person said. The test no longer seems to be in place, an Insider review of Amazon’s marketplace search results suggested.
Potential sales boost
The cleaner search and product pages for Apple may have led to one additional benefit: increased sales.
Internal data at Amazon shows faster page loads typically lead to higher sales, even if the difference is only a millisecond, one of the people said. Since Apple’s pages are not clogged by a bunch of ads and product recommendations, its products and search results show up faster on Amazon and lead to a better customer experience — resulting in potentially higher sales.
“Amazon is not neutral,” this person said. “It’s more biased towards Apple.”
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