Amazon News and Trends –

Episode Summary:

Upgraded success metrics for sellers – 

The new version started rolling out in August to sellers in the US and Canada with plans for the remaining global markets in 2023. The updates are as follows: 

-A revised version of the “Account Health Rating” was announced to help sellers better align with Amazon’s policies and maintain a positive seller rating. The new rating provides an overall score along with the translation of the overall account health to be either “healthy,” “at-risk,” or “unhealthy.” 

-A new holistic policy violation metric was introduced that will indicate a seller’s current stance with Amazon’s policies and will be the determining factor for suspensions or other disciplinary measures.

-Sellers can now see how severely a violation can impact their seller score with the new level of impact for violation insight. 

-A new Amazon support team of account health specialists will be included to support sellers via email or phone.

More details about the Account Heath Rating program here.

Recent legal action against 10,000 Facebook group administrators – 

As a continuation of their proactive commitment to protecting stores and shoppers from bad actors, Amazon announced that they are suing the admins of more than 10,000 Facebook groups for facilitating the posting of incentivized and misleading product reviews in exchange for money or free products. 

In the last six months, Amazon has ramped up its legal activity including a lawsuit against AppSally, Rebatest, and Extreme Rebate. With over 12,000 employees dedicated to shopping protection, Amazon has:

– Stopped over 200 million suspected fake reviews in 2020 alone.

– Proactively stopped over 200 million suspicious reviews in 2021.

– Reported over 16,000 abusive groups to social media sites resulting in 11 million members removed.

Amazon’s private-label business – 

Amazon reduced the footprint of its private-label business and is evaluating the long-term efficacy of the program. We recommend brands that compete directly with these private-label products to closely monitor the coming months’ trends, as there could be opportunity to regain share in certain subcategories. With 243,000 products across 45 different house brands as of 2020, Amazon’s private-label program has been a point of contention over recent years due to its poor sales and regulatory pressures.

Amazon retail executives have directed teams to reevaluate their brand and item rosters, advising them to not reorder as many of the products with slow sales and/or operate on minuscule margins. Indications are that they plan to reduce their current assortment by over 50%.

Prime Day 2022 – 

Results from this year’s Prime Day, which took place July 12-13, are as follows: 

– Biggest Prime Day ever with sales over $11.9 billion, an 8.5% growth over last year’s event.

– Prime members worldwide saved over $1.7 billion. 

– Shoppers purchased more than 300 million items.

– Over 100,000 items per minute were purchased worldwide (60,000 items per minute in US).

– Amazon’s small and medium third-party sellers outpaced Amazon’s own direct retail purchases.

– Top categories: Amazon devices, consumer electronics, household essentials, and home.

– Peak purchasing period: 10-11am PST during the first day of the event (July 12).

– Amazon Live Prime Day streams had more than 100 million views.

Chargebacks – 

Starting August 1, 2022, sellers are able to view ASIN-level information in Vendor Central for products that have resulted in oversize and overweight chargebacks. This is great for reviewing orders with multiple products as it allows sellers to identify and research the product that acquired the chargeback fee.

New beta program: Amazon Marketing Stream – 

Now available to AAN partner network, this push-based model delivers Amazon Ads campaign metrics and ad data to advertisers via Amazon Ads API in near real-time to avoid technical implications (i.e., API throttling) and API call limits. 

This new model provides hourly reporting compared to the traditional daily reporting, which historically has been the lowest-level of data granularity available. Prior to this, daily segmentation did provide visibility into day-parting capabilities but now with the new hourly performance metrics, advertisers will have access to intraday insights for effective campaign optimization.

Currently this beta is only available for Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns, and not Amazon DSP.  More to come in this space as this tool and tech evolves but feel free to reach out with any questions. You can contact an Amazon Specialist here. 

Video builder for Sponsored Brands video placements – 

Advertisers can now build videos for Sponsored Brands video placements using a selection of ready-to-use customizable templates within the Amazon Advertising portal. Within the tool, you can: 

– Build videos by pulling product images and copy from product detail pages or by uploading lifestyle or other images from creative assets 

– Access the different themes to customize the look and feel of the video 

– Edit the color, font, and music options within the video 

– A/B test different creatives to identify the best mix for your product

Available to those in North America, India, and a handful of EU markets, this feature came as a direct result of marketer feedback to Amazon regarding the difficulty of creating and obtaining videos that meet Amazon’s technical requirements for this placement type. 

Customize Sponsored Display creatives – 

With this launch, advertisers can combine multiple creatives to customize by adding a headline, logo, and/or lifestyle image. This allows brands to have more creative control over their Sponsored Display activities, which allows for a more dynamic presentation to influence an increase in conversion rates. Advertisers will also have the ability to A/B test different media mixes for optimum efficiency. 

That wraps us up for the month of July 2022! Thanks for tuning in on this week’s episode. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future releases!