[Crew Review] Amazon’s £1.4 billion potential loss

Fees, Freight, Facebook

Visa’s high transaction fees are apparently too much for Amazon. Last month, the company announced that starting January 2022, it will stop accepting payments from Visa credit cards in the United Kingdom. But because of the significant number of Visa users in the UK, Amazon is set to lose around £1.4 billion when the ban starts.

Will this news affect US sellers?

Amazon’s Answer to the Supply Chain Crisis

Ports are clogged, freight rates have soared, and sellers are stressed out. Nowadays, cargo ships have to wait for up to 45 days before they can unload, and Amazon can’t be part of that mess if it wants to fulfill its promise of fast delivery and availability of more options. So just like a strong, independent woman, Amazon has thought of ways to mitigate the effects of the supply chain crisis by making its own containers and chartering private cargo ships.

This move has two major benefits. First, it ensures that Amazon will have containers readily available. Second, these containers don’t have to be immediately sent back to Asia and can be used in their US operations in the meantime.

According to an ocean freight analyst, the thousands of containers Amazon is using to send goods from Asia to the United States weren’t originally made for that purpose. They were supposed to be vessels for agricultural products and chemicals, but the company got creative.

For some goods, the company is avoiding ports altogether by using long-haul planes. They carry smaller amounts of products, but they deliver much faster.

Amazon is doing everything in its power to get its products in time for the holidays. But while it’s already handling 72% of its shipping, it still saw a 14% rise in stockouts and a 25% average price increase.

Meta Shopping

“Senator, we run ads.”

This was what Mark Zuckerberg told Senator Hatch when asked how they could sustain a business model where users don’t have to pay for their services. It was followed by a demonstration of the latest smile update to his software.

You can expect more of these ads to pop up on your feed. Or if you’re a seller who advertises on any of the parts of the metaverse (Facebook, Instagram, etc.), then you may find yourself paying more for advertising.

Leaked documents show that Mark’s recently renamed company is focusing on e-commerce. One of those documents called “Commerce Guidance and Priorities for 2022” showed that digital storefronts are the company’s top priority.

In 2020, Facebook’s US digital ads share increased by 1.6%, and it’s about twice as much as Amazon’s. According to Statista, the majority of Facebook users are males between 25 and 34 years old. And since men were found to buy online more than women, their plan looks promising.

AWS Outage

Those who wanted to Netflix and chill on Tuesday weren’t able to do so because of an AWS outage. The interruption affected the US-East-1 region based in northern Virginia and companies dependent on AWS, including Disney+, Netflix, and Slack, experienced disruptions in their operation. Even roombas were affected by the outage because the device’s maker, iRobot, also uses AWS.

But aside from people not being able to binge-watch Modern Family, the outage also affected Amazon’s last-mile delivery services because drivers weren’t able to access the needed app. Unable to scan packages, a lot of them were put on standby and eventually sent home.

Other News

Not in West Covina, Amazon. Community members are opposing a proposed Amazon distribution center for fear of its environmental impacts.

Buy in TikTok. The platform that brought us Charli D’Amelio and Bella Poarch rolled out a seller app in Indonesia.

Delivering the gospel. There’s a viral video of an Amazon delivery driver taking instructions from a doormat very seriously.