With the Amazon Seller Conference concluded, here are a few final observations (admittedly a week late) from Day 3 at Amazon’s corporate headquarter overlooking downtown Seattle (stunning view). There were 2 items on the agenda for the 100+ attendees:

• Panel discussion with SVP Sebastian Gunningham’s management team (facilitated by VP of Technology Jacob Levanon).
• Four focus groups on Seller Performance, Listing & Pricing Strategies and Amazon WebStore.

Few notes / observations:

• Sellers are asking for historical pricing information to help them determine the right price when listing on Amazon. This used to be offered as a web service for $300+/month (?) but “hard to maintain”. There are some signs that Amazon may be considering a reintroduction of this kind of service.

• Sales Rank sparked a big discussion between sellers and the Amazon team. Essentially a secret algorithm, it’s simply a “relative ranking of one product within its category”. Due to fraud (sellers manipulated the sales rank to artificially drive up sales), Amazon is no longer sharing the exact specifics of how Sales Rank is calculated. There were some questions if placing products into the cart counts towards a product’s sales rank — no clear answer emerged (or I missed it).

• Media sellers currently still on the Marketplaces platform today don’t have a clear support path and there were several requests for dedicated support. Should be significantly easier once media is launched on Seller Central (planned for September) and they may then use the click-to-call feature currently available only to Seller Central merchants. Clear message from Amazon that dedicated support doesn’t scale (”what if someone’s on vacation”) although I do believe that Platinum and maybe even Gold sellers have a higher tier of support available (not to mention better access to category managers). Amazon Seller Support aims to “answer phones between 30-90 seconds and emails within 24 hours.

• Amazon shared that 1-2 feedback is considered a negative, 3 is neutral, and 4-5 are positive. Good comments from sellers that even a 4 is positive (”wish every marketplace had this policy in place”).

• “When the system is down we need to know ASAP.” A central monitoring group at Amazon is focused on communicating site issues. “Sometimes we catch things late.” If there is an issue, merchants are encouraged to call Seller Support right away so that Amazon can aggregate, triangulate and resolve issues.

• Very heated discussion on sales tax. An official statement was read that essentially emphasized that Amazon will continue to work with the legislature to get a fair solution into place. Amazon is taking a “wait and see” to get clarity on what needs to be done before investing any development resources in the design and requirements of functionality. One seller comments “Why can eBay does this but not Amazon?”

One thing that stood out for me was Joseph Sirosh paraphrasing a saying often used by Jeff Bezos:

“Don’t focus on your competition, they rarely ever give you any money. Customers give you money, focus on what they want“.

That philosophy and focus has been fueling Amazon’s success.

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