its own vendors and sellers? One of Amazon’s databases, Heartbeat, had all customer reviews across the website; accessing it allowed employees to look for revealing patterns that might indicate how they could improve well-established products. For example, customer reviews in the all-important category of dog poop bags indicated regular confusion about which end of the bag opened. So the Amazon Basics version included a blue arrow and the words “open this end.” Another valuable tool was Amazon’s Vine program, in which influential product reviewers received free samples in return for their
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