After hovering at around $10 consistently, the price of a five-pound bag of Nishiki medium grain rice shot up to $30 on Amazon.com in March and hit a peak of $59.99 at 9 p.m. on Saturday, March 21, according to the Amazon price tracker Keepa. As of Friday, April 24, the bag of rice was priced at around $20. Prices on Amazon have been volatile since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. By the end of March, Keepa's data revealed, an eight-pack of Barilla spaghetti, whose price normally hovers around $10, shot up to $49.25. The cost of an eight-pack of Skippy Superchunk Peanut Butter nearly quadrupled, from $12.52 to $45. COVID-19 has made the public more aware of price fluctuations on basics like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and dried goods, as demand for those products surged beyond expectations.

Amazon is cracking down price gougers on its platform who are looking to make a profit from the coronavirus that is wreaking havoc across the globe. The tech giant has pulled more than 530,000 listings from the site and suspended over 2,500 US sellers. The firm announced on Friday it is working with state attorneys general to identify and prosecute third-party sellers who are taking advantage of fears of the spreading coronavirus to engage in price-gouging on the Amazon website. Amazon also said it has begun manual audits of products in its online stores to spot sellers that evade its automated systems, which check for items that are'unfairly priced.' Amazon is cracking down price gougers on its platform who are looking to make a profit from the coronavirus that is wreaking havoc across the globe.

Amazon is taking additional steps to stop counterfeit sellers. Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon's vice president of consumer trust and partner support, told CBS News that the e-commerce giant has made'progress in reducing the amount of counterfeit' on the site. But Mehta admits the firm is still a long ways off from eradicating the issue. So far, Amazon has added 500 brands to its invite-only Project Zero initiative, which was rolled out in February and aims to give sellers greater controls over fake goods. Amazon has announced new steps to combat fake listings on the site.

"The question here is about the data," Ms. Vestager said, adding that the investigation was in its "very early days" and that her office has "no conclusions" about whether to open a formal probe. A spokesman for Amazon didn't have any immediate comment. As the EU's antitrust chief, Ms. Vestager has emerged as one of the world's major technology regulators, helping inspire investigations into tech companies from Brazil to the U.S. Most recently, she fined Alphabet Inc.'s Google twice, for a total of €6.76 billion ($7.9 billion), for allegedly abusing the dominance of its search engine and Android operating system to favor its own services--decisions the company has either appealed or said it would appeal. Under her watch, the EU also ruled that Amazon must pay some €250 million in allegedly unpaid taxes to Luxembourg, an order that the Seattle-based company has appealed. Amazon is also drawing increasing scrutiny in its home country.

Few people rely on Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, to shop for them, according to a pair of recent reports. If Alexa is to become a truly successful sales-bot, it'll need to find a way to convince shoppers it's getting them best deals. According to UK digital marketing firm Code Computerlove, a survey of people who own smart speakers – more than 70 percent of which are powered by Alexa – found only seven percent have used them to make an online purchase. It might be worse: tech news site The Information reported that only two percent of Alexa-enabled device owners used the voice assistant to shop this year, citing Amazon's own internal data. Amazon disputed the numbers in that report, saying "millions of customers use Alexa to shop."

We've got some simple tips you can take to keep Amazon's Alexa from eavesdropping into your conversations and potentially sharing them. Amazon shipping horror stories put the onus on the shopper to be careful when buying. For most Amazon shoppers, the experience is likely a seamless one: you search for a product, perhaps read reviews and see related items, and if you're an Amazon Prime member, you'll likely have it delivered quickly. It should be that simple – especially when Amazon's $178 billion in annual sales rank the company as the largest Internet retailer and marketplace in the world. Alas, shopping on Amazon doesn't always go smoothly.

In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos instituted a rule: every internal team should be small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas. The goal wasn't to cut down on the catering bill. It was, like almost everything Amazon does, focused on two aims: efficiency and scalability. A smaller team spends less time managing timetables and keeping people up to date, and more time doing what needs to be done. But it's the latter that really matters for Amazon.

The digital economy has transformed the way we communicate with each other; the way we consume information, products, and services; the way we entertain ourselves. It's revolutionized seemingly non-digital industries--think of how different financial services, for instance, are today from what they were two decades ago--and investors expect it to soon transform others, which is why Tesla Motors is worth more than General Motors despite making a tiny fraction as many cars as GM makes and earning a tiny fraction of the revenue. This phenomenon explains why the so-called Big Five of the digital economy--Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook--have, at various points over the last year, been the five most valuable companies in the world. So you might say that the digital economy has lived up to the expectations people had for it 20 years ago, in the early days of the Web. In other important ways, however, its consequences have been smaller than you might think.

It's no longer a big deal for people to see some form of artificial intelligence in the products they buy. But AI doesn't just have to be within products. It can play a critical role in connecting you to products and saving you money, too. The company's products allow third-party sellers to automatically adjust prices, predict product trends, recommend sourcing, and demand planning options and optimize additional factors. That enables the sellers to better understand and direct consumer behavior.