FBA inventory levels have generally increased! Amazon's Q4 sales grew by 9% against the trend

This is an excellent window period for sellers. Whether developing new products or restocking popular old products in preparation for Prime, you should seize this opportunity. Sellers who are constrained by inventory capacity should quickly check the backend to see if their inventory capacity has increased!

The storage capacity is great news, and Amazon’s Q4 financial report released last week also revealed a lot of valuable information.

In the past two days, Amazon released its financial report for the fourth quarter of last year, showing that Amazon’s total revenue in the fourth quarter reached US$149.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 9% compared with Q4 2021!

Amazon also mentioned that due to the sharp drop in the US dollar exchange rate at the end of the year, its international sales worldwide suffered heavy losses. In terms of US dollars, Amazon lost at least 5 billion US dollars due to the fall in the exchange rate at the end of the year. If this 5 billion is included, Amazon's Q4 sales growth rate has reached 12%! Compared with previous years, this is a good growth rate.

And a very interesting point is that the growth of Amazon's own stores has bottomed out. Compared with 2021, Amazon's own sales growth was only 2% last year.

Self-operated stores have been in a long-term slump since the pandemic, with very low growth rates, while Amazon's revenue from third-party seller services (commissions, etc.) and advertising fees has grown significantly, both exceeding 20%. In the fourth quarter of 2022, Amazon's revenue from third-party seller services reached US$36.3 billion, an increase of 24%, and Amazon's advertising revenue reached US$11.5 billion, an increase of 23%.

In general, Amazon has been transforming vigorously in the past two years to reduce self-operation and increase multi-channel revenue. We can see that self-operation has been in long-term low growth or even decline. Amazon's other revenues have been soaring, supporting Amazon's annual revenue. In this environment, it is still very beneficial to third-party sellers. Without the competition of self-operation, they have to rely on third-party sellers ' service fees to make money. Amazon naturally wants sellers to make more sales, so that the commission can be higher. Therefore, it is foreseeable that Amazon will support and tilt traffic to third-party sellers more and more in the future, so as to increase more revenue from peripheral services and advertising.

There are many favorable policies this year. In addition to the warming of the overall platform environment, there are also favorable policies in China.

Recently, three departments in my country jointly issued the "Announcement on the Tax Policy for Cross-border E-commerce Export Return Goods", providing cross-border e-commerce companies with a tax-free policy for unsaleable returned products.

In short, if the product is returned to the domestic customs in its original condition within 6 months after export due to returns or unsale reasons, the import tariffs, import value-added tax and consumption tax will be exempted, and the relevant taxes already collected will be refunded.

For a long time, it has been a problem for cross-border sellers to return overseas products and ship back unsalable products. Many sellers are forced to choose to clear out the goods at ultra-low prices or even abandon them on the spot or give them away for free due to extremely high costs. Now the new policy has reduced the tax cost of returning goods to China to a certain extent, which can be regarded as the country's support for our cross-border industry.

Please note that this policy only lasts for one year, so if you want to get these tax-free dividends, you have to do it as soon as possible.