By Alnoor Peermohamed
Amazon India admitted that it faced a technical glitch on Sunday, which exposed the tax reports of some of its sellers to others.
The company said this affected a minuscule number of the 400,000 sellers on its platform, and that the issue was rectified soon after sellers flagged it.
“On Sunday, some sellers who attempted to download Merchant Tax Reports for the month of December 2018 experienced a technical issue. Our teams identified the issue and resolved it on priority and sellers were soon able to download the correct MTR reports,” said an Amazon spokesperson.
A source in Amazon said that only around 0.2% of the company’s seller base was exposed by the data breach.
Sellers who were affected said they were able to download tax reports of different vendors up until late Monday. Amazon then took down the section for sellers to download the reports, before reopening it to them a few hours later with the issue seemingly fixed.
When Ankit (alias) who sells smartphone accessories on Amazon logged into e-commerce site on Sunday to download his tax report for December, he was shocked to find that the inventory reflected in it did not tally with what he had sold. Upon closer inspection, he realised that the Goods and Service Tax Network (GSTN) on the report was someone else’s.
“I was surprised to see that several of my clients had uploaded reports that were not their own. Being a seller myself I saw that the MTR wasn’t my own when I downloaded it. Most of the sellers who sent me the reports faced the same issue,” said an Amazon seller who also runs a service of filing GST returns on behalf of other e-commerce sellers.
Amazon has faced multiple data breaches over the past year. Last month, the e-commerce giant had said it was investigating allegations that some employees in India and the US are sharing internal company data with merchants. It also reportedly dismissed several employees in India and the United States for allegedly accessing internal data that was being misused by merchants, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
This was following a probe into allegations that some of its employees had sold confidential customer data to third party companies for bribes in September last year.
The e-commerce giant was also hit by a technical error in November 2018, that disclosed customer names and email addresses on its website. At the time, Amazon had told ET that they have fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been impacted, without disclosing any additional details.
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