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In the past year, cross-border sellers have experienced a turbulent time: some have achieved success in multiple areas, successfully standing out from the crowd; some have seen sales plummet, and can only hold on to the few profits; some have been complacent and swayed by the trend of account sweeping; and some have boldly laid out new platforms and successfully soared...
Now that we have entered the new year, the unpredictable Amazon has once again become a hot topic. After being reported to have strengthened the review of the association of payment accounts and required "one-to-one payment", Amazon has recently once again pointed its finger at the bank statements of the beneficiary's account.
It is learned that recently, a seller on the North American site reported that he received an email from Amazon after triggering the video verification. The email content shows that the relevant sellers need to provide the following information to complete identity verification:
- Withdrawal records of third-party collection within the past 6 months;
- The bank statement of the beneficiary of the third-party payment collection within the past 6 months.
▲ The picture comes from the seller’s disclosure The seller said that the account that triggered the video verification was an old account, mainly because the balance had not been withdrawn from sites such as Canada for more than half a year, and there was no binding for payment. At the same time, the third-party payment information and credit card information of the seller's store were not the legal person's. As soon as the news came out, it sparked heated discussions: “Is Amazon tightening its review again?” “Bank statements are personal financial information, right? Does the platform have the right to view them?” In fact, during the video verification wave in August last year, Amazon also required sellers to provide bank statements of credit card payment accounts to verify their authenticity, but this time the requirements were for the bank statements of the beneficiaries. For sellers with multiple accounts, the beneficiary information of many accounts is often not the legal person information, and there may even be actual beneficiaries of multiple accounts. Therefore, some sellers believe that Amazon is now tightening its review of payment accounts and may determine account associations through the payment beneficiary and bank information provided by the seller. In addition, some sellers revealed that their account collection managers informed them that Amazon will implement a new policy before May and collect payments directly from corporate bank cards. ▲ The picture comes from the seller’s disclosure Due to the wide range of impact and deep influence, the news was questioned by many sellers when it spread in the cross-border circle. Some sellers believed that the news needed to be verified and foreign exchange could not be directly transferred to the legal person's bank card; but some sellers also said that the US site and the Japanese site can now pay directly to the legal person's bank card in China, and Amazon is likely to use this measure to strengthen the verification of the authenticity of the legal person's information. However, as of press time, Amazon has not responded to the above news, so the above discussion can only be used as a reference. But there is no doubt that these revelations have released a signal: Amazon's account risk control will be further upgraded, especially the collection account will be controlled. It is worth noting that, judging from the recent data, despite the platform’s ever-increasing risk control policies, cross-border sellers’ enthusiasm for entering Amazon has not diminished.
In 2023, despite the rise of many new e-commerce companies, Amazon still holds the top spot. The actual survey data shows that nearly 50% of sellers are mainly based on Amazon. At the same time, the survey data also shows that in the new year, 73% of sellers are still interested in deploying on Amazon. It can be seen that in the context of a sluggish market environment and increasingly fierce competition, Amazon has not seen a large number of sellers fleeing, and the number of new sellers entering the market is even increasing. Data from Marketplace Pulse also shows that the number of new sellers entering the Amazon platform increases by a certain percentage every year, even in product categories dominated by established sellers. ▲ Image from Marketplace Pulse At the same time, although the position of Amazon's old sellers remains unshakable, new sellers have successfully found new incremental entrances, driving the growth of Amazon's third-party market and taking away some sales from old sellers. According to Marketplace Pulse data, more than half of Amazon's US sales (GMV) currently come from sellers who started selling five years ago, 5% of sales come from sellers who joined ten years ago, and the same 5% comes from sellers who joined in 2023. From the above, we can see that although the Amazon market has now turned into a red ocean in the fierce competition, and new sellers are often trapped in the growth siege and difficult to escape, but in horizontal comparison, Amazon is still the platform with the most development potential and still has a strong appeal to most cross-border sellers.
At this stage, cross-border e-commerce is in a period of industry transformation: On the one hand, the frequently changing platform policies tell us that the era of wild growth has long ended, and the core of the platform's survival rules now lies in compliance and adaptation;
On the other hand, the upgrading of internal competition and shrinking profits mean the necessity of building core competitiveness, that is, sellers need to create their own unique competitive barriers while complying with the rules. This can be product strength, brand strength, or more innovative sales strategies. For Amazon sellers, there is no room for the weak to survive in the overseas journey in 2024. The only way out is to continue to become stronger, not only in terms of operations, but also in terms of the improvement and continuous improvement of all-round capabilities such as supply chain, management, and mastery of new AI technologies. What do you think about this? Will you continue to build or improve Amazon in 2024? Welcome to discuss in the comments section~
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