Amazon's business development has changed significantly this year. What are the trends?

This year, the trend of Amazon's new store recruitment has changed dramatically! According to official internal information, the 2022 accounts will be issued starting in October, and sales can be carried out normally after the account is activated!

This is very different from the investment policy of previous years. In the past, accounts for the second year were issued in October, but the accounts were not available for sale until the second year. This year, the accounts can be sold directly without waiting until the second year. This is equivalent to a seamless connection with this year's investment and store opening. Sellers can apply for an account as long as they prepare the materials. This is an unprecedented big change.

It is definitely good for sellers. New stores can be used directly, which makes sellers more flexible when setting up multiple stores and formulating sales plans, and they don’t have to wait for several months to use them. It is good, but to be honest, the benefits are not too great. Generally, new stores have planned the time for preparing materials, opening stores, registering and selling them. Two months in advance can allow some sellers who plan to open new stores to sell seasonal products to make arrangements in advance. Moreover, new stores basically cannot catch up with the Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday peak season at the end of the year, so for non-seasonal products, the advantage of being able to sell them in advance is not very obvious.

However, releasing the sales rights of new stores in advance is a good signal from the perspective of the overall platform environment.

Amazon has been very active in closing stores this year. From May to July and August, it closed wave after wave of third-party stores for various reasons, including those that faked orders, used small cards, and were authorized by brands. According to official statements, 600 brands and 3,000 stores were closed in the mid-year store closure campaign, and according to statistics from third-party media, the number may be as high as 50,000 stores.

There are so many differences between official data and media statistics. Except for some stores that have successfully appealed and regained their accounts, there are definitely many stores that are still banned. To put it bluntly, there are not enough sellers during this peak season.

Last time, the famous Amazon seller Ze* was suddenly banned a few days before the Prime Day promotion. Several of its top products in the categories could not be sold, and it was forced to miss this year's Prime Day, causing huge losses. From another perspective, most of these best-selling products account for the top few sales in the category, have thousands of reviews, and must have a certain stickiness among the consumer group. The absence of these top products is bound to affect the traffic and order conversion of the entire Amazon market.

Now that the recruitment strategy has been changed, allowing stores in the second year to sell directly, it means that there are fewer new sellers and new products on Amazon, and the competitiveness has declined, and a wave of fresh blood is urgently needed to replenish it. Amazon hopes to attract more sellers to join by reducing the threshold and interval for opening stores and opening a wave of registration, so as to provide new products to restore traffic to the platform.