[Crew Review] Amazon drops key policy to address deleted shipments

Controversy

It’s 2022 and Amazon’s restock limits are still a pain in the behind for a lot of sellers. To get around it, some sellers are creating shipments, canceling them, and then sending them in anyway.

Amazon has caught wind of this and will implement a policy in April to stop this.

Learn about Amazon deleted shipments.

Amazon Top Terms

Good news! We’ve merged our Amazon Top Movers update and Crew Review, so you can now check out the hottest Amazon terms of the week and other juicy ecommerce news all in the same place.

Here are 10 biggest terms that have jumped the ranks on Amazon from January 2 to January 15.

Taking our #1 slot in today’s top 10 movers is “ida b wells barbie.” Barbie is continuing its ongoing "Inspiring Women" series with its new doll, which debuted at select major retailers on January 17. We’ve seen this product earn a drastic increase of 239 units per day in the last few days.

And it seems like a lot of people are still staying at home binge-watching Euphoria and Unexpected and relaxing with #4 on the list.

Under the Table

Newly unredacted documents in a state-led antitrust lawsuit against Google and Facebook (now Meta), alleges that the Big Tech companies colluded to manipulate online advertising sales, according to the Wall Street Journal. Worse, the documents reveal that the head honchos of the respective companies were aware and signed off on the agreement.

One agreement in particular was entered into in 2018 that allegedly guaranteed Meta subsidiary Facebook to both bid in—and win—a fixed percentage of ad auctions.

According to the complaint, “Google understood the severity of the threat to its position if Facebook were to enter the market and support header bidding,” it continued, “To diffuse this threat, Google made overtures to Facebook.”

This news comes as other players are starting to gain a foothold in the digital marketing space, particularly Amazon, whose digital ad shares rose at Google’s expense in 2020.

The antitrust lawsuit is accompanied by a separate antitrust case by the Justice Department and more than three dozen state attorneys general, the latter focusing on Google’s search services. Both cases are set for trial in 2023 or later.

Psyche!

Unsurprising to many, Amazon took a U-turn on its plans to ban Visa credit card payments for Amazon orders in the UK earlier this week.

Last November, the ecommerce giant boldly announced that its UK customer base will no longer be able to use their Visa credit cards to pay using their Visa credit cards beginning January 19, 2022, citing Visa’s high transaction fees as the main reason for the now-cancelled ban. The following month, we reported that this move would have cost Amazon at least 1.4 billion pounds in revenue from its UK-based shoppers, as an estimated 89% of UK households shop regularly on the ecommerce marketplace.

Visa seems to have called Amazon’s bluff, with Amazon now going back on its threat and stating that it was working closely with Visa on a potential solution that will enable customers to continue using their Visa credit cards on Amazon.co.uk.

Thieves Raid Amazon, FedEx Cargo

Recent shocking images reveal Amazon packages, among others, among debris in a constant cargo train raid that has been going on for months in Los Angeles County.

According to numerous reports, thieves have been raiding and looting Amazon packages as well as parcels handled by Target, UPS, and FedEx.

Source: The Independent

Dozens of freight cars are being looted every day, preventing thousands of shipments, a lot of which are ecommerce orders, from ever reaching their destinations. The thieves ransack the cargo, take the easily sellable items, and just leave items that are hard to sell or cheap items (such as COVID-19 test kits) in the tracks.

Rail operator Union Pacific says theft like this has soared 160% since 2020, with the recent spike being in line with the holiday shopping seasons. Damages from such thefts in 2021 were pegged at roughly $5M, with police and Union Pacific’s own security agents having apprehended more than a hundred people over the last three months of last year.

The Rollup Fever Goes Global

Thrasio, one of the biggest ecommerce aggregators operating in the US, is committing half a billion dollars to acquire leading digital-first brands in India, seeing a massive opportunity as India has become one of the fastest-growing regions in terms of participation in online marketplace like Amazon. 

According to Marketplace Pulse, Thrasio may be considered a top-5 seller on the Amazon marketplace if we add all of its brands together, having acquired more than 200 brands and raised over $3.4 billion in funding.

With Thrasio being considered a front-runner in the ecommerce rollup space, it might be safe to assume that other aggregators will follow suit and hunt down profitable brands outside of the US.