EcomCrew - [Crew Review] Amazon fires back

Ramping up

Birds of a Feather

We reported about Amazon’s staggering 87% growth in advertising revenue in our breakdown of its Q2 earnings. 

Walmart seems to be taking cue from its fellow juggernaut in terms of advertising business, boasting a 95% growth in advertising sales in the second quarter of 2021. GeekWire says that the brick-and-mortar giant’s number of active advertisers increased by 175%, indicating that more and more sellers are willing to pay to advertise on their online marketplace and in stores. 

Needless to say, even marketplaces outside of Amazon have become increasingly pay-to-play, making ballooning ad spend the biggest threat to your ecommerce businesses. 

If you’re selling on Amazon in particular, there’s a plethora of advertising methods available, and we have a piece outlining some of our own advanced PPC strategies to help you keep that ACoS to a healthy minimum.

Going on the Offensive

Amazon recently launched its counterattack against antitrust pressure from Congress in the form of a website.

This comes after it started emailing third-party sellers to “warn” them about how these proposals can potentially affect their online businesses.

The website claims to provide small and medium business-owners a way to communicate their concerns about the antitrust bills and lets sellers key in their contact information if they want to receive updates from Amazon’s Public Policy Team.

One of the bills would have Amazon break up its marketplace business from its business as an online seller, so this begs the question: Does Amazon actually care about sellers? It remains to be seen whether the bills are ultimately good or bad for third-party sellers, so probably not. 

The more Amazon-esque reason would be that it’s trying to get third-party sellers on its side of the aisle to protect its own private label brands. Stay tuned for our analyses on future developments over on the EcomCrew Blog.

Some Updates

A key update from Amazon this week is the new Holiday Settings widget under the General Shipping Settings page in Seller Central. This gives you an overview of upcoming holidays, and you can customize them according to your fulfillment capacity. 

By customize, Amazon means you can override a predefined public holiday and set it as an  operating day to ship orders faster for your seller-fulfilled orders. However, the reverse is not true. There is no option that lets you add a holiday or indicate days when you are closed.

As with most Amazon “improvements,” this one is most useful for sellers who want to make their own lives harder, almost in the same way that Amazon encourages weekend operation. 

Another update is that starting October 1, 2021, Amazon will now require you to key in your carrier tracking information for orders fulfilled outside of Amazon Partnered Carrier Program and Amazon Global Logistics. 

Leave it to Amazon to impose added requirements and make it sound like a benefit. 

About Chinese Sellers (Again)

Amazon’s campaign against sketchy sellers from China rages on. We’ve seen tons of reports about big Chinese sellers being hit with account suspensions and having their goods frozen over violations of platform rules, including using fake reviews to edge out competitors. 

According to TechCrunch, the Chinese government has started to take this issue more seriously, with the Minister of Commerce saying that the government will help these sellers comply with international trade standards. 

Adherence to policy by these Chinese gets rid of a lot of headaches. Also, since the vast majority of Amazon third-party sellers source their products from China, improved product quality from exporters in the region is a welcome development, too. Here’s to hoping this rising tide lifts all boats.

Getting Physical

Speaking of Amazon trying to put people out of business, the ecommerce giant is planning to put up its own brick-and-mortar department stores. That’s right. It wants in on the very industry that it disrupted.

The obvious twist is that these department stores will try to blend Amazon’s e-tail technologies with in-person shopping experience, although Forbes highlights a growing concern about good old Amazon collecting even more data from consumers, say, how long customers look at certain items and what areas they visit most frequently in stores. 

As for third-party sellers, it is unclear which brands will get spots in these department stores, but it’s safe to say they’re gonna be mostly Amazon’s own private label brands. However, with these Amazon-owned brands constantly coming under fire, there might be some space there for third-party sellers to showcase their products to in-person shoppers.

FBA Is Still Where It’s At

Amazon is undoubtedly getting more complex by the day, but FBA is still one of the most profitable options for ecommerce sellers. That’s why we developed a new full-length course, From 0 to 100 - Amazon for Absolute Beginners, which is already accessible to Premium members and is also available a la carte. 

 We designed this course for:

• New sellers who need a no-nonsense guide to Amazon FBA
• Experienced sellers coming from non-Amazon platforms
• Amazon sellers looking for a course to train up their offshore VAs

If you’re any one of those, check out the course here.