We study seller and product recommendations of the hybrid e-commerce platform Amazon.
Using web-scraped data, we find that Amazon makes the visibility of offers of third-party
suppliers in the "buybox" dependent on prices on competing marketplaces like Walmart and
eBay. Amazon’s own offers are visible regardless of their competitiveness. We find that
the absence of seller recommendations makes recommendations to related products more
effective and Amazon tends to steer consumers in these situations more often to products it
sells itself. We discuss that this behavior is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis of an
independent marketplace operator.