[Crew Review] Are Amazon giveaways dead?

Big changes

Are Amazon Giveaways Dead?

A lot of us in the Amazon seller community were shocked when Amazon suspended RebateKey’s API privileges this past week.


RebateKey is one of the most popular product giveaway and rebate tools out there, so this raises questions about where Amazon is heading in terms of its Seller Code of Conduct and if giveaways and rebates are now a thing of the past.

Read the full story here.

Amazon Accelerate 2021

This year’s edition of Amazon’s biggest online conference has revealed a lot of things, including that more than 100,000 brands have registered with Amazon in 2021.

We list down all the highlights and updates you might have missed in our article on Amazon Accelerate 2021.

Speaking of updates, Amazon also released its Small Business Empowerment Report this week, in which the company touts how far its investment in third-party sellers has come.

For instance, the number of million-dollar sellers on the platform have risen by 15% from last year. Also, third-party sellers are now responsible for the majority (roughly 60%) of retail sales on the platform.

2021 Amazon Small Business Empowerment Report

All well and good. Now if only Amazon addressed actual sellers issues like annoying restock limitations and rising FBA costs.

Growth Opportunities

Last week, Amazon added a new tool called Growth Opportunities, which does (or at least aims to do) exactly what its name suggests.

The tool gathers recommendations from various programs and allows you to select the actions to take on certain ASINs on a single page.

Whether or not this actually helps, it’s too early to tell, but it’s there if you ever need it. You can access this new feature by clicking Growth in the navigation bar on Seller Central and selecting Growth Opportunities.

Amazon In Hot Water (Again)

Remember when Amazon said (almost definitively, I might add) that it has not been using third-party seller data to come up with its own products? That whole issue has been thrown wide open last week when lawmakers accused Amazon of either misleading or blatantly lying to Congress.

Last week, five lawmakers, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who was among those who questioned Jeff Bezos in July 2020 Congress hearings, wrote to Amazon executives and requested the ecommerce giant to set the record straight.

This was after two separate reports suggested that Amazon does indeed manipulate seller data to its advantage. According to Reuters, Amazon India systematically copied smaller sellers and rigged its search engine to favor Amazon products. A separate report by The Markup accused Amazon of putting its in-house brands ahead of competing ones.

This is by no means the only bone 3P sellers have to pick with Amazon, but if the company fails to clear things up with Congress, significant changes in favor of independent sellers on the platform might be on the horizon.

Speaking Of Sellers

The growth of Amazon’s third-party seller ecosystem is continuing to attract more companies in the aggregator space.
 According to Business Insider, an estimate of over 1,000 ecommerce brands will be snapped up by rollup companies next year.

Aside from 3P seller growth and more aggregators joining the fray, a lot of rollups who were early to the party have only just finished a period of raising capital. In other words, there’s a lot of money waiting to be spent by aggregators on FBA business acquisitions and even more money coming in.

For sellers running healthy FBA business, that could mean chunkier multiples, better deal structures, and more options when it comes to nailing that graceful exit down the road.