Report: Rivals Funded Campaign To Battle Amazon

To criticize the business practices of Amazon approximately 18 months ago, a nonprofit dubbed the Free and Fair Markets Initiative (FFMI) rolled out a national campaign.

While the group claimed to have grassroots support, it did not admit it has the backing of some of the main corporate competitors of the eCommerce retailer, The Wall Street Journal noted in a report.

Those reportedly include Walmart, Simon Property Group and Oracle, per unnamed sources “involved with and briefed on the project” WSJ reported. Walmart is competing in regard to retail sales with Amazon, Simon Property is working to keep shoppers that would rather buy from Amazon, and Oracle is fighting Amazon in a Pentagon cloud-computing contract.

FFMI declined to disclose if it has a chief executive or directors, or reveal its funders.

“The bottom line is that FFMI is focusing on the substantive issues and putting a spotlight on the way companies like Amazon undermine the public good — something that media outlets, activists, and politicians in both parties are also doing with increasing frequency,” the group told WSJ. “If Amazon cannot take the heat, then it should stay out of the kitchen.”

In June, a report surfaced that Amazon’s second-quarter revenue came in at $63.4 billion, a bit ahead of the $62.5 billion analysts were expecting. That is a 20 percent increase over last year. But profits were a miss, with Amazon bringing in $2.6 billion on an earnings per share (EPS) of $5.22, below the $5.57 on $2.8 billion analysts were expecting.

That marks the first time in four years Amazon has failed to beat its earnings forecast. However, the miss was largely attributed by Amazon to the cost increase incumbent on shifting a sizable part of the eCommerce retailer’s inventory from two-day Prime shipping to one-day Prime day shipping.