This repository contains data related to our story, "Amazon’s Enforcement Failures Leave Open a Seedy Back Door to Banned Goods—Some Sold and Shipped by Amazon Itself".
Our methodology is described in "How We Investigated Banned Items on Amazon.com".
The data for our findings can be found in the data folder.
This folder contains the data we created in reporting our story.
Our findings consist of a spreadsheet of the prohibited product listings we found, and a collection of timestamped screenshots for the listing pages. Links to the individual screenshots are in the spreadsheet. The screenshots of all of the prohibited product listings we found are included in their entirety so that you can see the listings as they appeared to us in our reporting. We have also included a second, short spreadsheet of banned items that did not meet one aspect of our criteria but we mention in the story and shared with Amazon.
You can grab the full collection of screenshots from this repository: https://github.com/the-markup/investigation-amazon-banned-items-screenshots
amazon-banned-items-findings.csv A list of the items we found on Amazon.com in the course of our investigation.
amazon-banned-items-additional-items.csv Additional banned items mentioned in story.
Column | Description |
---|---|
restricted_product_category | The Restricted Products category that the prohibited product falls under. |
prohibited_policy_text | The specific text of the prohibition from the Restricted Products policy page. Bulleted list items include the text at the top of the list. |
policy_page | A link to a timestamped screenshot of the Restricted Products policy page that covers this prohibition. |
item_type | Description of the item. |
asin | The Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) is an alphanumeric unique identifier for products in Amazon's catalog. |
screenshot | A link to a full page screenshot of the product listing. |
listing_url | The URL of the product listing that we found. |
Main findings link: Formatted | Raw
Additional items link: Formatted | Raw
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