Amazon Glitch Causes Controversy

Amazon has been criticized for its "de-ranking" policy. The company was under attack after de-ranking adult titles which were mostly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender books.

The company had recently implemented a new policy of removing adult-material from search rankings, which would result in their exclusion from best-sellers lists. Amazon came under fire on Twitter after it was reported that the sales rankings of two newly released high-profile gay romance novels had suddenly disappeared from the sales rankings. The twitter community responded immediately and angerly, as tweets flew around and a top-ranked hash-tag ( a hot topic) appeared: #amazonfail. To make matters worse, the next day hundreds of gay-friendly books disappeared from the sales rankings and best-sellers lists! The GLBT community doubted it was a website-glitch and were outraged. Publisher Mark R. Probst, a member of Amazon Advantage sent an email to Amazon about the incident to clarify to followers what was going on. Probst received the following response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
 
Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
 
Best regards,
 
Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

Followers fired back noting that several other adult titles such as a Playboy book were still in the search rankers and bestsellers list while it seemed all gay-lesbian titles were banned. Many questioned whether Amazon was targeting the GLBT community or if it was mistake?

Finally Amazon responded explaining that it was a "cataloguing error" that banned close to 60,000 titles in various genres, not only gay-lesbian. Corporate communications director Patty Smith responded saying, "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error," going on to say..."It has been misreported that the issue was limited to gay and lesbian themed titles. In fact, it impacted 57,310 books in broad categories such as health, mind and body, reproductive and sexual medicine and erotica.This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search." Amazon has reported that the glitches have been fixed and ensure that this will not happen again.

Though Amazon's reputation was temporarily damaged, it appears that all has been forgiven.



 

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