Did Apple Cut A Special Deal With Amazon To Keep Its Product Pages Cleaner?

Apple Inc. AAPL has reportedly struck a special deal with Amazon.com Inc. AMZN to keep the product pages for iPhones, iPads, Macs and more clean and relatively free of ads for competing products.

What Happened: Apple product pages on Amazon get a faster and clutter-free experience that results in "potentially higher sales" of its products, reported Insider.

While Amazon does not completely remove ads for competing products from Apple product pages, they are not immediately visible like they are on product pages of other companies.

See Also: Amazon Accused Of Raking In $1 Billion Through Deceptive Practices, According To FTC Suit

For instance, the AirPods product page has no ad for a competing product until the customer reviews section is over. On the other hand, Samsung's Galaxy Buds product page has ads on the top of the page and immediately after the product description section.

The report also states that in addition to this, Amazon also cuts down the number of ads it displays on Apple product pages. In the case of AirPods, Amazon displays two sections – "Customers who viewed this", and "Related to items you've viewed" – both these sections have just one AirPods competitor.

On the other hand, for Galaxy Buds, Amazon starts displaying ads for competing products almost immediately. It also has two dedicated sections – "Products related to this item", and "4 stars and above" – that show competing products from several other companies.

Why It Matters: According to the report, this special treatment is due to a 2018 agreement that Apple entered into with Amazon, allowing it to sell its products directly.

This was revealed in an internal email released by the House Judiciary Committee.

"We understand that Apple does not want to drive sales to competing brands in search or detail pages. On product detail pages, we understand that Apple does not want to see any product placement that recommends non-Apple products," Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s retail CEO at the time, said in the email.

It's not clear yet if Apple pays Amazon to keep "junk" ads off its product pages, but Wilke said at the time that "Apple would need to purchase these placements or compensate Amazon for the lost ad revenue."

This also comes at a time when the FTC has alleged that Amazon used "irrelevant junk ads" to boost its advertising revenue, with the order coming straight from the founder and then-CEO, Jeff Bezos.

The FTC lawsuit also alleges that Amazon raked in $1 billion using a covert algorithm codenamed "Project Nessie".

Read Next: Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro Headset Gets A New Recorder — iPhone 15 Pro With Latest iOS 17 Beta

Photo by Vytautas Kielaitis on Shutterstock