It’s so good! Another Amazon feature is exposed, and 6 million sellers may see a surge in orders

Among all cross-border e-commerce platforms, Amazon has become the preferred platform for many sellers due to its high market share, mature platform mechanism, and large user base.

However, after a series of events such as the "account blocking wave" and the increase in platform fees, the number of Chinese sellers on the Amazon platform began to flee. Some of these cross-border sellers who withdrew from the Amazon platform flowed to other cross-border e-commerce platforms such as Walmart, eBay, and AliExpress.

In the context of weak consumer demand, how to win back those lost third-party sellers and improve the platform's traffic accuracy and conversion rate has become Amazon's top priority.

According to Marketplace Pulse, the number of third-party sellers on Amazon's platform exceeded 6 million in 2021. However, the proportion of Chinese sellers has already dropped from 48% at the end of 2020 to 42%.

While Chinese sellers are constantly leaving Amazon, Walmart is seeing a steady influx of new sellers.

Marketplace Pulse's research report shows that nearly a thousand new sellers are joining the Walmart marketplace every week , which is four times higher than before and almost as fast as the rate of new sellers added in Amazon's US marketplace.

Like Amazon, Walmart also offers some favorable conditions for sellers who join the WFS delivery service, and also provides sponsored ads to help sellers sell better .

According to Xiaozhi, currently on the Amazon platform, an average seller can connect with 48 customers , while on the Walmart platform, the average number of customers a seller can connect with is 1,918 . The difference in data is still very obvious.

The 2022 Walmart Seller Status Report released by Jungle Scout shows that 95% of small and medium-sized sellers are profitable on the Walmart marketplace , of which 54% have annual incomes exceeding six figures , and 33% of small and medium-sized sellers have profit margins of more than 20% .

As Walmart continues to launch attacks on Amazon in an attempt to shake its unbreakable dominance, Amazon has begun to adjust and improve some policies, such as this feature that is anticipated by countless sellers: Amazon will open its product selection data to sellers .

Recently, it was reported that Amazon is opening data to sellers on a small scale through invitation only, and it is expected that the official product will be officially launched at the end of this year or early next year . This move is aimed at facilitating product selection and effective advertising.

In fact, since last year, Amazon has gradually opened up some of the product selection data that was previously "exclusively available" to VC suppliers to third-party sellers.

In February this year, Amazon once again launched an official product selection tool, "Business Opportunity Detector", for some merchants. People familiar with the matter said that this product selection opportunity is to do keyword search in the segmented market, so as to gain insight into consumers' search needs and competitive product information.

People familiar with the matter pointed out that the scale, scope, and depth of measurement that Amazon will release this time are unprecedented. " This is a dimension that most product selection tools on the market cannot reach at all. "

It is worth noting that in Amazon’s recent promotion of its upcoming first brand summit, the official also stated that the tools and support policies for third-party brand sellers will be upgraded in 2022.

Amazon also mentioned that it will provide all-round support for brands to go global, from innovating consumer insight data, optimizing brand position tools, to providing new user experiences and analyzing big data on product selection opportunities .

All this reveals an important signal: Amazon is about to open up its product selection data.

Cross-border e-commerce practitioners have different opinions on Amazon's move to open up its product selection data.

One seller said that once Amazon opens its product selection data, it will inevitably impact the direct interests of many third-party product selection tool service providers on the market .

The seller pointed out that this is Amazon's disapproval of unofficial product selection tools , because the platform has determined that sales estimates and category data obtained through crawlers from extraordinary channels are illegal.

Coincidentally, some sellers have questioned the data provided by many domestic and foreign product selection tools. In his opinion, these third-party product selection tools are not very reliable, and the data provided by any product selection tool is not necessarily accurate and can only be used as a rough reference.

Of course, more small and medium-sized sellers are still happy about Amazon's opening up of its product selection data. They generally believe that Amazon's opening up of its product selection data will benefit sellers like themselves who understand data and operations, and can help these sellers cross-verify the feasibility of their product selection ideas and reduce the cost and time of developing new products .

In addition, for integrated industrial and trading sellers, this move can help them avoid detours when switching to cross-border e-commerce business and eliminate competitors who do not have supply chain advantages .

However, the head of operations for a brand seller who has been engaged in Amazon store business for many years holds a different view. He believes that since the company attaches great importance to brand development, its product categories are relatively vertical, and it has also accumulated some of its own user operation methodologies, therefore, Amazon's opening of product selection data will not have a big impact on it, and it is more of a new track for service providers to make money .

A leading product selection supply chain service provider confirmed the above statement. He believes that if Amazon starts to widely summarize third-party data and tightens its policies in the future, it is very likely to join forces with several larger third-party product selection tools to monopolize the product selection SaaS market . After all, Amazon's current CPC advertising revenue alone is not enough to support it to achieve greater revenue plans.

For product selection service providers, what they need to do is to expand more business directions and business types and deploy a wider range of businesses in order to maintain their survival.

We all know that doing business on Amazon depends 70% on product selection and 30% on operations. Only if you choose the products well will you have a chance of booming sales.

When Amazon opens product selection, sellers can use Amazon's big data analysis and artificial intelligence algorithms to understand the target site trends and buyer needs in advance, improve product development plans, and save the cost and time of developing new products.

However, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Is Amazon opening up its product selection data to “take more advantage of sellers”? Let’s wait and see.