What: Scrutiny on Amazon linked to its scaling back on the number of items sold under its private label.

Why it is important: Congressional investigators framed Amazon’s own brands as a conflict of interest for the company as its private labels are often in direct competition with others selling on its site.

Members of a House of Representatives subcommittee accused Amazon executives of lying about whether the company has used specific data from other brands on its platform in its own private label business, and whether it prioritizes its own brands in web search algorithms. However, Amazon’s private labels have not necessarily dominated its site. Marketplace Pulse has found that some categories of Amazon’s private labels represent less than 1% of sales. The biggest exception found apparel to represent 9% of Amazon’s sales.

Similarly to other retail giants, Walmart and Target, Amazon has been trying to refocus around its most popular private label products after the e-commerce specialist in past years worked to broaden and diversify its private label goods.

Amazon scales back private label business