[Crew Review] Amazon and Google bankrolled ‘grassroots’ group for own benefit

Control

Google and Amazon don’t exactly please grassroots activist groups consisting of small business owners. Turns out, these two companies have been funding one such group to lobby against Big Tech oversight.

Read the full story here.

Amazon Top Terms

If you're still stuck on what to sell next, don't fret just yet. We've collected data taken between February 13th to 26th to show you what's currently trending on Amazon. Today's top 10 Terms might spark some ideas and bring in those juicy profits for Q2. Let’s take a look!

You can find out what new popular products people are currently obsessed with by navigating through TikTok. Just a few weeks ago, weighted hula hoops were doing numbers on Tiktok, and that led to crazy sales on Amazon for related items. Taking our #6 slot in today's top movers is "fithoop." Sales for this item went up to 984 units per day in the past few days.

Instagram Brings Back Chronological Feed

In a recent update that could change the game for a lot of brands and creators, Instagram brought back the Chronological Feed option.

As the name suggests, this feature lets users have the app display posts in chronological order, instead of letting the algorithm bombard them with its “preferred” content—which consists of largely meme accounts and influencers.

For ecommerce brands, this could mean more real-time marketing on the social platform on top of working with influencers, which could come in handy during major events, such as the slap heard around the world. This could be an opportunity to funnel customers in if you’re churning out good content regularly for your brand and products.

Currently, users can choose between three feed preferences:

• Home (the algorithm-based feed)
• Following (chronological)
• Favorites (based off up to 50 user-selected favorite accounts)

There’s one huge caveat though: Following and Favorites cannot be set as the default option. Instagram believes that users are more satisfied with a ranked feed.

Google Adds New Performance Badges for Ecommerce Brands

Google is rolling out some new features to help ecommerce brands understand how shoppers are finding them, learn more about their buying behaviors, and ultimately boost sales.

The biggest cause for excitement seems to be the Shopping Experience Scorecard, which rewards sellers for good customer experiences and helps them boost their reputations. Rewards can come in the form of free placements on the shopping tab and even a Trusted Store badge that will appear alongside their listings.These features are comparable to ratings programs on more established ecommerce platforms like Amazon and eBay, and it will be rolled out to US-based sellers over the coming months.

Amazon Braces for Historic Union Votes

Thousands of Amazon workers in Alabama and New York have recently concluded voting on whether or not to form a union, which proponents believe will facilitate better working conditions, longer break periods, and higher wages.

It can be recalled that last year, workers in the Bessemer facility rejected unionizing, but Amazon was later found to have violated labor law in that election, and the labor board ordered a second election to be held.

Unionizing is bad news for amazon, whose entire business model of quick shipping and great customer experience benefits greatly from a non-regular workforce especially during peak shopping seasons.

Results from the Alabama vote are expected to be made public later this week, while voting is also wrapping up at Staten Island, NY, with vote counting set to begin March 31.

The Ecommerce of War

Customers on the world’s largest ecommerce platform have pushed traffic for items that are likely to become useful in case the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine escalates further.

Marketplace sellers could be in for some serious profits from military meal replacement kits, bug-out bags, and iodine pills, which you presumably take to mitigate the effects of nuclear radiation (still highly contested, by the way).

This kind of shopping behavior is nothing new, as just a couple of years ago, panic buying emptied shelves of toilet rolls, sanitizers, and even horse medicine over fears of the pandemic.

For its part, Amazon has expressed solidarity with the victims of the crisis in Ukraine. “We are deeply saddened by the events unfolding in Ukraine. The prices on these products were set by third-party selling partners in our store”, says an Amazon representative, “...If we identify a price that violates our longstanding policy, we remove the offer and notify the seller.”