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Last month, the company published a new product collection that highlights viral products. By curating this collection, Amazon is acknowledging the importance that TikTok has amassed in driving retail sales, especially for products that stray toward the unconventional.
For the latest installment of Digiday Media’s Amazon U series, experts zoomed in on a topic many brands are struggling to get right: retention.
Amazon is continuing to try and enter the cloud gaming space. But it isn't the only one. Here's why retailers and platforms are making investments in it.
The company's growing arsenal of streaming rights underscore Amazon’s pivot into becoming a full-scale ad company -- not just one that exists to make extra profits off of its existing pool of third-party sellers, but one that will draw in businesses and brands that have nothing to do with Amazon’s core product.
As both Amazon and Walmart launch more private-label products, few top search result slots are going to third-party sellers. That reality not only underscores the success of private-label products for both Amazon and Walmart -- it also shows just how tight the window has become for third-party sellers to get their products seen in the highest-trafficked parts of Amazon.
If a customer left a five-star rating, the sellers offered to refund them in full for their purchase. In most cases, they offered the reimbursements through PayPal, not Amazon, so that Amazon moderators wouldn’t be able to pick up on the links. Safety Detectives said it found evidence of at least 200,000 reviews that are the result of a refund scheme.
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.
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.
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.
Every interaction a customer has with a brand is an opportunity to nurture the customer-brand relationship. This report highlights tactics that top brands are using to improve the customer experience.
While other states have had conflicting rulings over Amazon's liability risk -- a court in Texas last month said Amazon wasn’t on the hook for a battery sold by a third party, for instance -- the growing number of legal authorities who are holding Amazon accountable is a concerning sign for the company. The U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission lawsuit is only the latest.
Read MoreAt Modern Retail’s Livestream Commerce Trends, we’ll explore how the growth of livestream and video shopping trends are transforming how retailers, brands and marketing teams are engaging with consumers in-stream and live across social and owned-and-operated websites.
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