  Interleaving sponsored results (advertisements) amongst organic results on
search engine result pages (SERP) has become a common practice across multiple
digital platforms. Advertisements have catered to consumer satisfaction and
fostered competition in digital public spaces; making them an appealing gateway
for businesses to reach their consumers. However, especially in the context of
digital marketplaces, due to the competitive nature of the sponsored results
with the organic ones, multiple unwanted repercussions have surfaced affecting
different stakeholders. From the consumers' perspective the sponsored
ads/results may cause degradation of search quality and nudge consumers to
potentially irrelevant and costlier products. The sponsored ads may also affect
the level playing field of the competition in the marketplaces among sellers.
To understand and unravel these potential concerns, we analyse the Amazon
digital marketplace in four different countries by simulating 4,800 search
operations. Our analyses over SERPs consisting 2M organic and 638K sponsored
results show items with poor organic ranks (beyond 100th position) appear as
sponsored results even before the top organic results on the first page of
Amazon SERP. Moreover, we also observe that in majority of the cases, these top
sponsored results are costlier and are of poorer quality than the top organic
results. We believe these observations can motivate researchers for further
deliberation to bring in more transparency and guard rails in the advertising
practices followed in digital marketplaces.
