2019 Summary! What major events happened to Amazon this year?

There are only a few hours left in 2019. I, your little avatar, am here to wish all the sellers to find more hot-selling products of their own in 2020!

In the past 2019, we sellers can be said to have experienced the most turbulent year. Various drastic changes have caused strategic changes in the direction of the entire platform. Today I will take you to review what happened in this year.

In January this year, my brother-in-law contributed a big gossip to everyone. He broke out his extramarital affair and quickly divorced his wife. Sellers have launched a heated discussion on how to divide my brother-in-law's hundreds of billions of assets.

Just when everyone was concerned about my brother-in-law's property, Amazon experienced a serious bug in mid-January, and backend advertising expenses seriously exceeded the budget. Most sellers exceeded their advertising budget by nearly ten times.

Amazon immediately tried to deny the issue, and released a statement saying that the budgets set by sellers were all monthly budgets, and overflows were normal. However, after a large number of sellers criticized it, Amazon admitted the bug and refunded the overflow.

A major feature was tested for the first time in February this year - Project Zero. This feature allows sellers to remove infringing products on their own. This is the first time that Amazon has delegated such power of life and death to sellers themselves, which is of great significance.

At present, the Zero Plan has developed from only allowing big brands to join in the beginning to now allowing ordinary sellers to participate as long as they apply and pass the review. This has greatly lowered the threshold and has gradually been opened to other sites.

At the end of March, it was reported on the UK site that a large number of FBA shipments were unable to enter the warehouse due to lack of import codes.

The reason is that Amazon was required by the customs to compulsorily implement the Warehouse Service Provider Due Diligence Scheme (FHDDS) on April 1. Although Amazon has notified in advance that it is necessary to upload IEN to complete the cargo information, many sellers are still caught and denied entry into the warehouse.

This month, a very bad incident broke out with a huge impact. Even now, some sellers will shudder when they hear the word - pesticide.

A large number of sellers’ products were removed from the shelves because they contained sensitive words and were captured by the algorithm as pesticides and other pesticide products. After that, sellers avoided sensitive words such as insect repellent and antibacterial, for fear of being mistakenly killed by the algorithm again.

Perhaps the most influential event this year, the US President announced in early May that a comprehensive tariff increase would be imposed on Chinese exports on May 10, officially starting a new round of confrontation in the Sino-US trade war.

Trump then announced a new list of $300 billion in tariffs, covering more than 80% of consumer products, including most cross-border sellers' products.

As the year-end Prime Day is approaching, Amazon has taken the opportunity to launch a new free event - Prime special discounts.

Everyone knows the effect. Many sellers who have not signed up for LD have been able to get a share of Primeday's traffic pool because of this free function. This is indeed a great good deed done by Amazon this year.

There is no doubt that the big event of this month is Prime Day. This year's membership day has broken Amazon's historical records in terms of sales and the total number of Prime members.

And with the exclusive discounts, many small and medium-sized sellers also achieved relatively satisfactory sales. However, after the Prime Day, the media revealed that a large number of consumers canceled their Prime memberships, and Amazon was slightly fleeced.

Amazon was exposed this month for selling pro-Hong Kong T-shirts on the platform, which instantly caused a sensation in the seller circle. Under our mobilization, a large number of sellers rushed to the relevant products to condemn the pro-Hong Kong elements.

During this period, some black technology players even used various methods to attack Hong Kong poison listings, changing all the products in the store to patriotic statements. For a while, all cross-border sellers were mobilized just to safeguard national sovereignty. The product was removed from Amazon a few hours after the news broke.

From the end of Primeday to Black Friday in November, this period is also a period for Amazon to adjust important policies. This time, the one that is due for a major overhaul is the Review system, which sellers are very concerned about.

In September, Amazon updated the review display format without any notice, weakening the status of the number of reviews on the detail page and highlighting the display of the average star rating.

This change was not noticed by many people, but after the change in September, Review made several major and minor updates, which was a major overhaul of the entire review system. The change in the display format was the beginning of this series.

Following the above changes to the review system, Amazon also updated the search results page at the end of October. The search homepage has more self-operated products and added the "Editor's Recommendation" with unlimited potential.

Currently, "Editor's Recommendation" is still an invitation-based system, and only approved media/influencers can join. I believe that if it is opened to more KOLs in the future, sellers will have an explosive traffic entrance.

It’s the annual Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday season again. This year, Black Friday not only has Prime exclusive discounts, but Amazon is also promoting free activities such as Black Friday Coupons. This is also the first time that the Japanese site has participated in Black Friday flash sales.

Although Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday still set a historical sales record, the failure of exclusive discounts led to a serious polarization in this peak season at the end of the year. Some sellers began to receive a surge in orders from 0:00, while some sellers received even fewer orders throughout the day than usual.

In the absence of strong activities, it is difficult for small sellers to get a share of the traffic pool of big promotions, which is also a problem that Amazon is currently unable to get rid of.

This year's Christmas season was even slower than usual, as the US had an early holiday, and sellers' orders had already dropped to a very low level after the 18th. However, Amazon gave sellers a big surprise at this time.

On December 9, Amazon announced that it would stop FBA warehousing from December 3.

This misplaced announcement directly exploded the seller community, and a large number of sellers went to the official forum to complain about Amazon's delayed notification behavior. The incident was ultimately characterized as a translation error, because the wrong language caused the sellers to have a misunderstanding.

Look, every month in the past year, Amazon has had a lot of weird things, either bugs or weird policies. This year is really the most difficult year for us sellers.

However, judging from Amazon’s recent actions, next year will still be a year in which policies will be tightened significantly and caution will be required.

Whether you can learn about these emergencies and response methods as soon as possible is directly related to the safety of your store and the fullness of your wallet.