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The addition of a customer engagement feature to Transparency seems to be a way to rebrand -- and potentially increase the value proposition for -- what has been a largely neglected feature within the company’s counterfeit-fighting service umbrella.
Earlier this month, Amazon quietly rolled out a tool called Manage Your Customer Engagement that lets sellers send messages -- through Amazon -- to certain customers. Offering sellers the ability to send campaigns and product updates to their customers is one step toward allaying those concerns. Yet the new tool comes with a number of important limitations. Sellers, for instance, will not know anything more about their customers than they already do.
A California court just deemed Amazon liable for a faulty product sold by a third-party seller. The ruling, if nothing else, solidifies that Amazon has a real liability risk in California. “It’s going to carry a lot of weight in California,” one lawyer said.
Most people think Amazon's advertising revolves predominately around search. But the e-commerce giant's tentacles expand in many other directions. At Modern Retail's Amazon U event, we drilled down on video advertising. Here's our guide, featuring the top insights from the event.
Over the past few years, Amazon has quietly built out a successful business-to-business platform for haircare businesses as well as individual hair stylists and other professionals. Those, potentially, will become the major beneficiary of its latest store: Amazon Salon. The launch of a physical salon seems much less about capturing the revenue from cutting and coloring hair, and much more about building Amazon’s credibility as a supplier of professional beauty products and beauty technology.
Amazon is reportedly thinking of getting into the furniture assembly business. The new service, if Amazon does eventually roll it out, would seem to bring Amazon’s services offerings more in-house. It also seems to be a defensive play against companies like Wayfair and Walmart, which have offered in-home assembly for years, and which have seen their online furniture sales surge over the past year.
In his investor letter, Jeff Bezos confirmed that Amazon Prime now has “more than 200 million subscribers” worldwide. But beyond that top-line figure, a few other numbers in the Bezos letter illustrate exactly where that growth is coming from -- and largely confirm existing speculation about the ascendancy of Amazon’s third-party sellers, its accelerating logistics footprint and the growth of its Alexa system.
In under a year, Amazon has laid the groundwork for a national, physical grocery chain. And that increased expansion comes right as Amazon shuttered one of its longest-running online food businesses, Amazon Pantry, in January. In general, the company appears to have acknowledged that, in order to gain a foothold in the grocery market, it needs physical locations to complement its e-commerce might.
While the Bessemer loss may be a blow, it isn’t slowing down the numerous worker advocacy groups that have cropped up in recent years, including the Target Workers United, Crew for a Trader Joe’s Union and Amazon’s own worker groups, Amazonians United -- and those groups say they will continue to fight on the ground, even if their companies don't officially recognize them.
Amazon just bought Perpule, an India-based tech company that helps local mom and pop stores -- called kirana stores -- move their product catalogs online and implement contactless checkout. Amazon’s interest in kirana stores goes much deeper than a desire to just make profits from digitizing small businesses -- instead, Amazon sees small stores as both drivers of fulfillment for the company and as sources of growth for other Amazon products, including Amazon Pay.
As competition ramps up on e-commerce marketplaces, brands that have wholesale channels are trying to figure out how to walk the delicate tightrope of growing their presences online -- without forfeiting control of how their products are sold and who gets to sell them. While Amazon offers some services to help sellers control who gets to sell their products, a small group of lawyers are popping up to fill in the gaps.
Nearly half of brands now rely on Amazon DSP today, up from around one third in 2019, according to one study. That market share will likely only grow amid the demise of the third-party cookie.
Amazon is far from the only retailer to encourage its employees to talk about their jobs online. Amazon’s might be the most extreme example, but tapping workers to leverage their social followings has slowly become a mainstream strategy in the retail world -- and cases like Amazon’s may only be the beginning.
At Digiday Media’s “Amazon U: Amazon Beyond Search” event, industry insiders shared current best practices, case studies and tips on how to make Amazon work for your brand in 2021. This was the first of three events focusing on different parts of the Amazon ecosystem.
Financial advances are not a new phenomenon in the e-commerce world. But now they are zeroing in on Amazon sellers. The rise of these e-commerce fintech programs is happening against the backdrop of big investors pouring money into e-commerce businesses -- and the two trends are deeply intertwined. For sellers, these fintech firms are creating a pathway to scale a business fast, right as private equity companies and larger rollups are actively looking to acquire e-commerce businesses.
A California court just deemed Amazon liable for a faulty product sold by a third-party seller. The ruling, if nothing else, solidifies that Amazon has a real liability risk in California. “It’s going to carry a lot of weight in California,” one lawyer said.
Read MoreAt the Modern Retail Virtual Forum, we’ll bring together senior retail marketers to discuss the challenges they’re facing and the solutions they’re seeking in the era of smarter retail.
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