Good news: Amazon now owns digital audiobooks on the internet. This morning Amazon announced that it has agreed to purchase Audible.com for $300M (adding $90 to the recently-reported $15 billion annual revenue). Read more
Amazon announced today their Q4 2007 results and it was another (expected) blockbuster quarter:
- $14.8B full-year sales in 2007, up from $10.7B in 2006
- Fx-neutral about 37% world-wide growth, 40% growth just in the United States
- Non-media grew 58% and now represents almost 40% of sales
- Over 300,000 developers on the AWS platform
Great comment on Fortune’s Techland blog on a disappointing, short earnings call: Read more
Help! There are too many listings for my products on Amazon!
Filed Under Amazon Challenges, Seller Insight | Leave a Comment
Amazon’s mission is to offer Earth’s Biggest Selection and the best online shopping experience. An important part of this experience is to give buyers great search results with a single, authoritative listing for each product (a challenge eBay is trying to address). Amazon’s UPC / EAN enforcement (required to list) is designed to build this mother-of-all-catalogs but there are legacy problems
Last week I spoke to an Sports & Outdoor online retailer that struggles with duplicate product listings: Read more
Amazon Webstore Review
Filed Under Amazon Webstore | Leave a Comment
Randy Smythe over at Blog Utopia has a good review of Amazon’s eCommerce product Amazon Webstore and how it stacks up against eBay’s and Yahoo!’s products. Highly recommended if you want to understand its current capabilities as well as what may be missing from an online retailer’s point-of-view.
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Amazon credit card chargebacks vs. A-Z claims
Filed Under Amazon 101, Amazon Announcements | Leave a Comment
Amazon has posted updated information on chargebacks for Amazon Marketplaces sellers. The Amazon UK team posted a while ago a clarification on the differences between a credit card chargeback and Amazon’s A-Z guarantee to ensure sellers understand how to process them. But how do they differ? What’s better for a seller? Read more
Help! My products are not selling — Strategies for growing your sales on Amazon.com
Filed Under Selling Strategies | Leave a Comment
By far the best part of my job as a product manager is speaking with online retailers about the Amazon opportunity (if they’re considering broadening their multi-channel footprint), optimization (get more sales) and various Amazon challenges. Earlier this week I spoke to a frustrated merchant with the following, not-so-uncommon problem:
Dear Amazonman,
I have been selling in the Sports category on Amazon now for almost 9 months with a few hundred products (high ASP) and have had about 12 sales. Yes, that’s right: a dozen sales after spending a significant effort listing my products. I am about to throw in the towel.
What should I do?
Sincerely,
Online Retailer
Let me come right out and say that this is clearly not good (sorry for killing the suspense). Amazon has grown sales 35% last year (of course lots of its growth was in media, consumer electronics, toys and jewelry) and even for this product line I would expect to see significantly more sales then 12 (even if it was 15 or 20) over the course of nine months. What could be wrong?
- The prices of your products are too high relative to your competition
- There’s too much competition and your piece of the pie is naturally low (unless you’re the low-price leader)
- Your products are poorly merchandised, ill-described (and as a result rank low in search results)
- You have no feedback and consumers are shying away from what appears to be an untrusted merchant
- There is a conspiracy
I am going on a limb here and suspect that it’s probably not a conspiracy. I have never heard of a “United Front Of Amazon Sellers” that targets sellers but it would make for a good Grisham novel. So here are a few best practices that I recommend for figuring out what may be going on and, more importantly, growing your sales (somewhat in order of priority): Read more
I am going to start a Thread Of The Week series to highlight sellers discussions around Amazon that are worth noting for online retailers interested in or active on Amazon (from various seller boards). Most of the times these exchanges are educational, at times disturbing and on rare occasions even funny (unintentionally). To kick this off I have chosen to start with the latter category and present to you the new socialist Amazon North Korean marketplace. Or so some sellers would have you believe. Read more
Amazon announced Monday that it has re-opened its toy category in the US which was restricted (”gated”) in September 2007 to pre-approved sellers only. If you are a toy seller but NOT on Amazon, now is the time to strike the iron: sign-up at www.amazonservices.com, list products and build a solid history (good customer service, 90%+ feedback) so that you can participate in the 2008 holiday season.
Thanks to Ina at AuctionBytes for the tip.
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Amazon offering software downloads
Filed Under Amazon Features | Leave a Comment
This is not a surprise following Amazon’s successful launch of their MP3 marketplace and considering it has been offering packaged software for a while. Now Amazon has partnered with Intuit to offer the popular tax package TurboTax for download from Amazon. Available via the new Software Download Center, users must first fetch a small application onto their desktop before they can get started. Read more
It’s the customer, Stupid!
Filed Under Amazon in the News | Leave a Comment
Need more evidence why Amazon continues to see phenomenal growth (and needs to be a top channel for any online retailer)? Today’s New York Times has a great article on a Christmas saved by Amazon. The author ordered and had delivered to his door step a PlayStation 3, but it was stolen. He calls Amazon, explains the incident and receives a replacement just in time to be a hero for his sons. Read more