Amazon Summit! Official strategic layout for 2020

Today is an important day. The annual Amazon Official Seller Summit opens grandly in Shanghai!

Based on past experience, the official summit is not only a good opportunity for sellers to get to know each other, exchange experiences and resources, but also a time for Amazon to officially release some future trends and strategic layouts. Sellers can often get them from official speeches.

A little clone of me also came to the conference to give you first-hand reports.

As soon as you come out of Xujing East subway station, you can feel the strong atmosphere. Amazon's promotional materials are everywhere, and the venue is already crowded with Amazon sellers (and service providers) before you even get to the venue.

When we arrived at the venue to sign in and exchange tickets, there was an enormous crowd. It seemed that the number of participants in this year's Amazon Seller Summit would hit a new high.

The location in the exhibition hall is slightly different this year. There are fewer booths for suppliers, and more booths are occupied by Amazon's various services, such as official payment services, AGL global logistics, and brand accelerators.

It has to be said that Amazon's ambitions are growing. It wants to get involved in every field involving third-party sellers. And it seems that it is getting more and more aggressive and wants to dominate the world. The global strategy conference later also confirmed my idea, but let's continue to watch the scene.

You enter here first, and soon you will enter the first part where a big shot speaks.

The session where the big names spoke was held simultaneously in Halls A and E. The themes of the two halls were different and could be roughly divided into traffic themes and product selection themes.

This year's content was unexpectedly good. Compared with previous summits, there was more practical information. In Hall A where I was, several big sellers shared their product selection and analysis strategies.

I have summarized two tips that we small sellers can use.

1. When selecting products, you should not only consider the market capacity and prospects of the product itself, but also have a full understanding and research of similar competing products and upstream supply chains to avoid problems with payment terms and stagflation.

2. When researching seasonal products, you can use the data from Google Trends and Brand Analytics to locate the product's hot-selling window through seasonal keyword search volume throughout the year, and then start planning for these seasonal products at least half a year in advance.

This morning, we mainly introduced various official services of Amazon. We have already made separate articles analyzing brand accelerators and official payment collection. We will not repeat them here. Let’s focus on the highlight - Amazon’s 2020 Strategy Conference.

Let me first talk about my feeling of watching the entire press conference. The number of participants this year has definitely exceeded the historical record, which was also confirmed by the official staff in their sharing. The entire press conference had thousands of seats full, not to mention that there were even more people who did not attend the press conference but were sitting in the square outside.

The press conference began with a presentation by Amazon Vice President Eric

The opening speech is actually a summary of Amazon's past and a look into its future development direction. This part is a bit empty for us small and medium-sized sellers, so I will just give a brief summary.

Amazon's third-party seller business accounts for 58%. During Prime Day in 2019, the sales of small and medium-sized sellers exceeded 2 billion US dollars. Amazon will continue to increase its construction and investment in logistics, including one-day delivery upgrades, more efficient and cheaper automated logistics systems, and so on.

In short, just get on board our Amazon ship!

Next is the sharing from official personnel including the head of Amazon’s European site, the head of seller experience and the head of global logistics. I will summarize the key points here and share them with you all.

1. The Japanese site is definitely the official's new favorite this year. While waiting before the opening, the big screen showed the development status of various best-selling Japanese sites, as well as a lot of Japanese site consumer and market research.

In their sharing, the heads of various aspects of Amazon often mentioned the market of the Japanese site. One head even said that the Japanese site is the world's third largest site, with a size and potential of about one-third of the sum of the five European sites.

2. The person in charge of the European site and the person in charge of the Asia-Pacific region both stated that the pan-European plan was a very bold attempt by Amazon in Europe, and that Amazon is now trying to unify all 13 sites to achieve one-stop global sales. The previous pilot of opening 10 sites in a row and charging only one monthly rent is an important step.

3. A high proportion of consumers still do not have a clear brand preference in Amazon's search sources, and most buyers are still willing to trust high-quality but unknown brands. Even in the very mature US site, categories such as toys and beauty products can still maintain strong growth.

4. As the highlight, Amazon China also released four strategic priorities: continue to develop operational tools, provide more diversified business models, enrich logistics and inventory management solutions, and provide more brand promotion and protection tools.

In my opinion, it can be summed up in one sentence: launch more service businesses for sellers.

To sum up, the theme of this year's strategic conference, "A World Without Borders", seems to be a very literary theme, but in fact it is very consistent with the content of this conference.

This “boundless” implies two meanings. One is Amazon’s tendency to unify its global sites. The other is that Amazon will be involved in more supporting services and cross the boundaries between industries.

The above two points are Amazon's ambition and outlook. 2020 will surely be the year when the official clutches extend to more fields. We third-party sellers are likely to see the "Three Heroes Fighting Lu Bu" staged by the official and third-party service providers.

Finally, it was very surprising that Amazon officials also prepared a knowledge contest as the key project of the Cross-border Wonderful Night in the evening. Those who are familiar with us know that we held a knowledge contest in Shenzhen in the middle of this year, which can be said to be the first knowledge contest in the cross-border industry. We didn’t expect to get official recognition so quickly.

Amazon will release more new policy information in the future. Sellers who want to join our seller group to get more official information can scan the QR code below to join~