Amazon News: Prime Deals Exposed, Social Selling Boom & Inflation Impact

Amazon News: Prime Deals Exposed, Social Selling Boom & Inflation Impact Unknown Speaker: Welcome, fellow entrepreneurs, to the Amazon Seller School podcast, where we talk about Amazon and how you can use it to build an e-commerce empire, a side hustle and anything in between. And now your host, Todd Welch. Speaker 3: Hello, hello, hello, everybody. Welcome to another Amazon Seller News Live. I appreciate everybody joining me today. We've got Leslie from Riverbend, Danon from EcomTriage, and Noah from MyAmazonGuy, of course. We've got an exciting show coming up. We're going to be talking lightning deals. We've got a cool Voice of the Amazon Seller Report from SmartScout with a lot of good data. Some Amazon Haul news and some inflation rate news as well that we're going to dive into. Appreciate everybody out there joining us. If you are watching live, feel free to throw some comments, questions, concerns in there and we'll bring them into the show live and get them answered for you or talk on them, whatever. The situation presents itself, but yeah, I appreciate you guys all joining me. If you're ready, we can go ahead and dive into the news. Good to be here, buddy. Speaker 4: Let's do it. Speaker 3: All right, let's do it. So, a couple stories actually from SmartScout today. Scott Needham, of course, is putting out some good data lately. This one caught my attention, and it's Amazon Deals Breakdown, Key Insights for Sellers. So Scott Needham analyzed over 14 million Lightning Deals and 29 million Prime Exclusive Deals, revealing that Lightning Deals average a 19.6% discount, which is a pretty good discount, while Prime Exclusive Deals came in at 16.9% on average. Apparel dominates both deal types big time, but here is the surprising or maybe not so surprising. Chinese sellers account for nearly 80% of all promotions that are run. In those two deal types. Brands like Pretty Garden and Dream Paris use an always-on promotion strategy to drive click-throughs and conversions, a tactic also leveraged by premium brands like Jackery. Needham highlights that running frequent deals not only boosts visibility with badges, but also creates urgency, making promotions a powerful tool for Amazon sellers. 80% are coming from the Chinese sellers. What do you guys think? Are the US sellers and other places, Europe, Canadian, missing the ball on this? What are your guys' thoughts on these deals? Speaker 4: I have one thought. The Chinese sellers can afford to do it. Speaker 3: Very good thought, yes. Speaker 1: It's not even surprising, honestly, that it's that high. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if you said it's like 95%, right? I mean, the big thing at the end of the day is that they can afford to do it like Dan said. It's just easy for them because they're already putting in a price that is way lower and they're like, yeah, let's just throw an extra discount. The thing that I will say is kind of surprising is the And I'm here to talk about the always-on strategy, because typically speaking, that's supposed to, at some point in time, lower your average selling price, which is supposed to then, after a certain period of time, become your selling price. And you're not supposed to be able to keep a promotion on all the time. I'd be curious to see how they're doing that. Maybe they're switching it through like different ASINs and that's what they mean by like always on, but. Speaker 4: Yeah. So I know that there are a number of companies out there that there's a new deal every single week and it's not always 20% off today, 20% off tomorrow. And they definitely, they run through different inventory doing different deals so that they don't get caught in that, well, your average price is actually $10, not 20. So you need to sell it for 10. Or if they're doing a lightning deal, it has to be, what is it? Some percentage below your lowest price, average price in over some period of time. I don't remember the details, but something like that, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. You usually have to have, I believe it has to be a minimum of 5% below your average selling price within the last 60 days. Speaker 4: Okay. Okay. So it's not so bad. Speaker 1: No, I mean, it's not horrible, but it's still, I mean, if you're on like an always on price and that's it, I've ran into issues in the past with sellers who do like that long-term always on promotion discount and it does exact to that. And then when they want to raise it back up, it's a real pain in the butt, right? Cause if you've been for six, eight, 10 months on one price and your average price is now that, Trying to raise it up even eight to 10% every week. Eventually you get to the point where it's like, oh, we're raising it, you know, five cents a day to try and get back to where it needs to be. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if they're just rotating through the different deal types, like using lightning deals and prime exclusive, and then maybe just doing a sale and then running a coupon and kind of looping back through them to, to hack the system a little bit. Speaker 1: I would imagine they are because things like promotions and coupons don't actually necessarily always affect the average selling and rather they will affect some things along the lines of your like reference price, right? So like reference price and your average selling are going to be different than like your was price, for instance. Speaker 3: Yeah, that'd be interesting to find out. We might have to throw that question over to Scott and see if he can find any data on that, you know, how they're, they're managing to continually running discounts without Amazon popping up and saying, hey, this isn't actually a discount. But of course, we know, Amazon doesn't always equally enforce the rules. So that could be part of it. Speaker 2: Well, this also shows a very different mindset between the Chinese and how they sell and a lot of American sellers and how we sell and have sold. It's kind of like the dollar tree versus department store mindset that sellers in the US are really trying to have value pricing. So that means they want to give a good value, but they still want to make a profit. And they want to use the discount strategically. So, you know, you launch a product, you do a discount, you want to build, subscribe and save, you do a discount. There should be a goal. And it'll be interesting over time to see if the U.S. sellers feel like they have to start abandoning these long held retail business principles because they are competing against the Dollar Tree Chinese strategy on Amazon. Speaker 3: It's definitely a good question and we'll have to wait and see. I think in my opinion there's always going to be A market for a strongly built brand and a brand that you feel like you can trust, even though, you know, we're in an age where Amazon is basically trying to eliminate the need for a brand, essentially, and just get stuff. I think there's a lot of people that are still gonna want something that they trust and a brand that they trust. So if you can build that, then you're going to be able to have that premium price and you're not going to want to be seen as discounting all the time. It's going to be more, you know, something special when it happens than always discounting. Speaker 4: Yep. Speaker 1: Great. Speaker 4: I agree. Speaker 3: Yeah. So the other thing that caught my eye here too, which I don't think is really surprising, a percent of lightning deals from first party brands, 0.6% with an average discount of 22%. So almost no discounts are being run from 1P brands versus 3P. Almost everything is 3P, so not too surprising, but I would think it'd be a little bit higher than that, but apparently most of the brands when they're doing 1P, they kind of look at it as selling to like a retail store. They're not worried about the promotions. That's up to the retail store more than anything. Speaker 2: I was gonna say real quick that they already feel like they're getting hammered by the co-op and they are, right? So they're already getting hammered by the co-op and all the other negotiated fees in air quotes that Amazon hasn't negotiated for the last several years and they keep jacking up the fees on 1P just like they have on 3P. So I think a lot of the 1P guys, also they don't really know how to You know, run great ads, run great promotions, run great deals on Amazon. They aren't really that educated in the Amazon space just because they are a vendor. That's never been their goal. If they wanted to do all that, they'd probably be 3P. Not saying that they're not great sellers, just it's not where they spent their time and effort learning those strategies. Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I would definitely agree. I think a majority of the 1P brands are just kind of set it and forget it kind of mindset, you know, send me the purchase orders and we're good to go. And they don't really want to care about Amazon, which can be to their detriment. I think a lot, there's a lot of really good brands that do that and they lose a lot of market share to the Chinese sellers, especially that way. Speaker 4: But that's why people like us exist. Speaker 3: Yes, for sure. Yeah, all of us really. I mean, we all do it in one way or another helping brands that We're selling on 1P. That probably should be 3P. We can help them do that. That's why there's a market for it because Amazon is difficult. Speaker 4: I'd wager that Leslie, you probably deal with the greatest number of 1P sellers out of, if I had to guess, out of anyone in the industry. Speaker 2: I don't know. We have quite a few that we do work with and you know what's fascinating, Dayna? We have actually used this particular talking point as a strategy to try and get someone's 1P account back when they were suspended for quote unquote business reasons. That's when Amazon just won't tell you why they've suspended your 1P account or the ones that they've just said, we're not gonna deal with y'all anymore. And we've actually used the strategy of, hey, we've actually been running ad campaigns. We've invested this much in ads. We've been doing this many deals. We are building the brand on Amazon over and above the co-op. And so you should let us sell. And it's actually worked. Not every time, but it has worked sometimes because you're showing them you've actually got skin in the game and they're making more money off of you. But it's, it's been a fun strategy because like, like we were talking about most 1P, they just don't bother. They don't, they don't want to go there. Speaker 1: Yup. Speaker 4: Yup. Speaker 3: Yeah. It's, uh, It's awesome data for sure. I don't do a ton of lightning deals or prime deals myself, just occasionally. I'm definitely in that camp. I'm definitely not in the Chinese seller camp with the always on promotions. I'm more sporadic every once in a while for special events kind of thing. Or like you said, Leslie, if you're doing a launch or you need to boost your ranking for whatever reason and using it in those ways more than anything. And so, you know, maybe that's one of the reasons that Amazon likes the Chinese seller so much because they're paying them all those fees for the running the lightning deals and prime exclusive deals. Speaker 4: I mean, let's be honest. They didn't open up the floodgates. What was it back in 2018 or something like that, Leslie? When they opened it up to the Chinese sellers, something around there. Yeah, they didn't do it because they thought that they were going to play by the rules or knew that they were going to play by the rules. They did it because they knew that they'd be able to go, okay, we're making a Five billion dollars off of all these 3P sellers that we have. But we could make 12 billion dollars if we open it up here and, you know, existing customers or existing 3P sellers be damned, which it did in many cases for a lot of them. So between Amazon Basics and Amazon Essentials and then opening up the floodgates to direct from China sellers, it definitely It affected a lot of people. It changed the game in a big way. It made what used to be profitable products unprofitable and competition stiff. It was around that time that You know, you started seeing a whole lot of fraudulent products coming in, which led to the transparency program and brand registry and all this. All these Amazons, I think, got four programs to protect your brand and each one of them Not each one of them, most of them cost you some extra dollars or cents here and there. And all of them have been introduced when basically when it was opened up that you could go China direct with the exception of, I think brand registry might've come earlier, but this is just, this is for profit for Amazon. They got enough griping from us, said, hey, these guys are literally breaking the law. And we're like, oh, well, cool. I mean, we're in Seattle and they're in China. We don't recognize the law. And like, no, no, no. Yeah, you do. And so they come out with this program and it was broken the first time they got it out, literally did nothing. I'll stop griping. All I'm saying is it was a profit play. They opened it up because they could probably more than double. I think what, more than 60% of the 3P sellers are direct Chinese sellers. I'm not saying they're all bad either. Go ahead Noah. Speaker 1: Well, I, to kind of agree with your point, I think it was not only a profit play, but also a market share play, right? Because you know, back in 2018 when they had initially announced it, right? And it wasn't really until like 2019 when you started to see them come onto the market. But it was very much a situation where I think Amazon was forward thinking with it because I will say, I think that in general, if Amazon had not opened those floodgates, someone would have, right? There would have been this change, I think, in the e-commerce marketscape, regardless of Chinese sellers coming through. We saw companies in the past that had tried it and whatnot. I mean, there's always going to be the Shein's and everything of the world, right? I think that there was probably back door talk of what company was going to allow it first and foremost and how it was going to happen. And Amazon didn't want to lose that market share, right? Which to be fair, they have only grown in market share since then, substantially more so. I think back in like 2018, Amazon only had just roughly under 30% of the total e-commerce market share. Nowadays in 2024, 42% of all online sales happen through Amazon, right? So it definitely was a profit play, sure. But it's also a, I think Amazon could have been stagnated if someone else came in and, you know, tried to take that specific end of the market. Speaker 4: I don't know about that one. I mean, you look at Look it likes mexico mercado libre south america recalibri amazon can even. Is having trouble even getting in there and widespread adoption so i. I disagree with you partially to the degree that what it also did and what they must have knowingly allowed is just a flood of junk products. It changed. It changed the the the the entire product research. for buyers to have to become professionals at determining if this is Man, back in those first couple years, three years, there was just so much absolute junk. Batteries catching on fire. Speaker 1: You remember the hoverboards exploding everywhere? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: That was the really big one, I think, is hoverboards. There was a million companies came out with them and people, all the US companies got screwed because they started it and then that's right when the Chinese started to come in. There was tons of hoverboards in the news that were having batteries explode and it was a huge problem. Speaker 3: I'm definitely not the normal buyer on Amazon, but I do 90% of my shopping on my desktop computer so that I can have my Helium 10 plug-in open and I can see what country the seller is from so I can just skip past anything that's not in the US or the EU or something like that to try to find something that is hopefully going to be decent for whatever I'm looking for. I always have to shake my head when I get a gift or something like that and it's like, The name is like Zhilong or something like that, you know, and it's a gift for the baby or something like that. I'm like, I don't know if I really want to give that to her. Speaker 4: Who here remembers the toggle at the top right of Amazon where you could toggle it to only buy from U.S. businesses? Does anyone remember that? Speaker 3: Etsy still has that, which is nice. I wish Amazon would bring that back in. That'd be awesome. It would be very helpful, but that would just draw attention to the problem and I don't think they want to do that. Speaker 2: I do think that they are though seeing some concerns on certain categories, which I find really interesting because when all of this started, like Dana had mentioned, they went over to China and they were helping all of the sellers over there with things that here you get no help with. And allowing a lot of suspensions to very quickly be overturned, reinstating products, you know, your Amazon rep in China will help you with that stuff that does not happen here. Even when it was problems with, let's say, you know, legal issues with the product, because it was violating some law here, they were just, you know, click, click, click, helping everyone in China. With the new product liability lawsuits and all of that is still a little bit up in the air there. The Supreme Court hasn't heard that yet. But, you know, there's an appeals court that assigned product liability responsibility to Amazon for products that were sold by a third party seller. And as you all know, when someone is in China, no one here can sue them effectively. That just doesn't work. And so where I'm seeing a little bit of a shift, not much, but a little bit of a shift when we're helping sellers is with topicals and consumables. Amazon is afraid of some of these China based topicals and consumables. I have a client right now. Who sells a consumable that is in a really super hot supplement category. And they are off the platform right now. They were suspended and you would not believe the number of knockoff products that have appeared on Amazon. And when you go through and you click on each one, they're all from China. And y'all, these are not something that you would feel comfortable having on or in your body or like you mentioned, Todd, your child's body. You need to trust me. This is not something you'd be like, Oh, cool. I'll just get that from China. There's no way you would be okay with this. And it looks like it is my client's products. And Amazon is starting to get a little bit of fear around, at least in that category, some of this stuff from China because they know that if something happens and there's a lawsuit, that the Chinese company is going to be nowhere to be found and all of the liability will only attach to Amazon. So I'm interested to see if that has any impact at all and helps out the US seller over time. I don't know, but it's just an interesting trend for us to watch. Speaker 4: Yeah, I will. I sure hope so. Yeah, go ahead, Noah. Speaker 1: I'll counterplay that with, I think Amazon doesn't care at all. And my favorite example of this is last year and actually continuing into this year, we had a client and whatnot with supplements, actually. We had to purchase hundreds, and when I mean hundreds, I mean I have probably an entire pile of around 150 plus of these bottles sitting next to my desk. Speaker 4: Send pictures of them. Speaker 1: Yeah, send pictures. Every single one is a different seller. It is a client who, they do not. Speaker 3: Hey Amazon sellers, tired of losing money on storage and shipping fees? Well, Amazon Storage Pros is here to take the headache out of logistics. We manage everything from inventory and creating efficient shipping plans to working with 3PLs and Amazon's AWD so that you can focus on growing your business. Start with a free storage cost audit and discover exactly where you're overspending and how to fix it. Don't let logistics eat into your profits. Visit AmazonStoragePros.com. That's AmazonStoragePros.com to get your free storage cost audit and start saving today. And now back to the show. Speaker 1: I sell their product anywhere else and the only places that they do are retail and they know exactly all the time. I don't think Amazon cares about their liability when it comes to things like this because, you know, there has been lawsuits threatened, there's been situations because at the end of the day, Amazon just views it as, oh, somebody is selling this other product, right? And they don't care if a new seller is popping up every other day, doesn't matter how many For reference, we have taken down from this specific listing well over 500 different sellers who were selling the product. Right. And it's every single one is a counterfeit fake version of the product, all supplements. And I think it's a big thing of I'd agree with you, Leslie, that Amazon probably knows there is some liability there in some capacity. But that's also why they force every single seller to do liability insurance, because at the end of the day, it's just pass through. And Amazon actually doesn't have that liability. And they, as part of their terms of service, I can push that liability completely over to the seller side of things saying, Hey, it's not our responsibility to make sure that, you know, this happens outside of compliance documentation, which if Amazon does everything with compliance, like they did last year, where they started kicking off a bunch of supplement sellers who had, they found that they had, you know, forged documents for compliance. That's the biggest thing, right? Amazon did that last year. That was their big push in the supplement industry is if you forged a document, but if these sellers can somehow have a document that's not necessarily forged, right, quote unquote, in the way that you initially think about it, Amazon's liability goes as far as that, right? That's why they have Compliance Central. That's why they have all these. And so that's where situations like this arise. And I think Amazon doesn't care so much about the liability as much as they care about, you know, at the bottom line, profit margins, right? Unknown Speaker: I fully agree with you. Speaker 2: It depends on the case in the Court of Appeals though. Because there are two, there are competing rulings right now and one of them assigns liability to Amazon and one does not. And so if they lose on that, then everything in terms of service does not matter. None of that will matter and it will attach to both the seller of the product and to Amazon. So, and I agree with you, frontline does not care. Frontline doesn't care at all, but I think some of the people in category, like people in beauty and health, some of those higher ups are starting to care. Also, I think a lot of the push for healthy products, you know, people in the marketplace pushing for healthier products and knowing the ingredients and things that could affect them too. So, so much of it depends on which way that lawsuit goes. Speaker 4: Yeah. Amazon's not going to give two hootenannies until they get slapped hard in the face. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 1: But realistically, they won't. Speaker 3: The fines and the threats need to be greater than the profit margin. Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. Speaker 3: Once that happens, then they will care enough to change. Or public perception. I can be a big motivator as well. So like Leslie said, it all depends on the outcome of those legal cases that are working their way through right now. If it comes down that Amazon is liable, they're gonna care really quick and they're gonna push it all back on us as fast as possible as well. Dance my puppet, dance kind of thing. Speaker 2: That's always the goal. Speaker 4: 100% true. Speaker 3: Yes, for sure. All right, we had a couple comments I just want to throw in here and then we can move on. So Craig Sear says, there's so many allowances Amazon takes for 1P brands that it's hard for them to justify discounts throughout the year. And then he said, the margin hit 1P takes on discounts for these promos, in my opinion, is hard to justify it. So he's talking about running the promotions as to why the 1P doesn't run the promotions at all. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 2: Totally agree. The co-op fees are painful, man. They're huge. And so many 1P sellers feel like they don't get anything out of the co-op fee. Like when you pay the co-op, you expect like, I've been doing a report. Let's pretend that Amazon was accountable to everyone. Right? Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 2: So wouldn't you expect to get some report at the end of the year that's like, you pay this co-op fee, and you got these benefits. And we think this marginal amount of your sales came from this fee. You would want to see they just don't care. Speaker 3: Yeah. That's one tactic that I always try when I'm talking to brands and stuff that are selling on 1P. I'm like, look at your listing. You got like one blurry photo, no bullets, no description, a short little title that doesn't even say what the product is. It's like Amazon doesn't care about you even a little bit. So let me sell your products, optimize your listings. I'm gonna care a million times more than Amazon will ever care about you. Speaker 2: Amen. Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. All right, cool. Let's go ahead and jump on to the Voice of the Seller Report here. So another one from SmartScout. So the Voice of the Seller Report, This report provides valuable insights into current economic trends, emphasizing the increasing importance of social media as a sales channel. Notably, 56% of sales professionals leverage social media to discover new prospects. For Amazon sellers, integrating social media strategies can enhance product visibility and customer engagement. Additionally, the report highlights the significance of customer service, with 88% of customers After a positive service experience. So that one, the AI did not do very good summarizing that. So I am gonna point out some of the really cool things in here myself. So what SmartScout actually did is they sent out a questionnaire to thousands of sellers out there to get their responses on a lot of cool questions like their revenue, They're thoughts on seller support and things like that. So let's just dive into some of these and take a look. Have you guys dug through this report at all yet? Speaker 4: No, no. At all? I'll tell you, Scott and SmartScout. Yeah, their data is always so good. Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. So this first one here is Amazon annual revenue. So this is revenue of sellers. And so you can see a majority of sellers are making less than $100,000 a year on Amazon. So 32.4% less than 100,000. 22.4% more than 5 million. So that is kind of cool to see that size number there, which is nice. Speaker 4: I'd wagered a lot of those are wholesale. I should say it wouldn't surprise me to learn that a lot of those that are doing 5 million plus are wholesale sellers rather than private label. Speaker 3: Yeah, probably leaning that way. And actually they've got that on the slide here, I think that we're going to come up to. But the other graph here, kind of cool breakdown. So 21% of sellers are private label, 28% retail ARB, 39% wholesale, 10% agency or service provider. Speaker 4: That kind of, that sort of answers the question right there. The majority of sellers are wholesale. Speaker 3: Yes. Now, it kind of surprises me that wholesale is so much larger, almost double, I should say, than private label. I would have thought private label would have been higher. Speaker 1: I think it could theoretically be, but I think a lot of people are moving more still towards that wholesale because 60% of the top 6,000 sellers on Amazon are You know, reseller wholesalers, right? Just from the aspect of, I mean, think about when's the last time you've seen Nike sell their own products? You know, it's not, it's a bunch of people who are selling it. So it's like Nike is definitely a brand doing well over, you know, 5 million, but on Amazon per year, but every single product that is sold is sold from a wholesaler of some kind. So, I mean, this graph makes a lot of sense. I think the, The hardest thing from working with sellers over the years is breaking that $100,000 realm. So that 32% is not even slightly surprising if you think about the idea of what small percentage of Brands end up hitting over 100,000 at the end of the day. It's not really all that surprising. I would love to see this breakdown from a what percentage of each of that zero to 100,000 is each of the four types over there as well. Speaker 3: Which I do believe they have. Speaker 1: We got all the data, huh? Speaker 3: Yeah, we've got lots of different data. Let me see if we've got... I think it's somewhere in here. I remember seeing it, but let's just go through this and we'll probably come to it. So the people who responded, 86% Amazon is their main business, 13% is not. Speaker 4: That surprises me. Speaker 3: 61% say they dictate their own salary, 38% say they do not. I'm not 100% sure what they mean by that. They're thinking that Amazon dictates their salary. Speaker 4: I think that means basically, are you the brand owner or do you work for the brand? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: No, that's true. Yep. Somebody who's working for someone versus a business owner kind of thing probably. Yeah. But kind of cool. Unknown Speaker: Cool. Speaker 3: Could be risky, you know, Amazon is your main business. So that means you live and die by Amazon changes, right? Speaker 4: I mean, there's four people right here that, there's four people right here that we are in that category too, you know? Like Leslie and myself and Noah and you, Todd, we're all service providers and sellers, you know? Speaker 3: Well, like Warren Buffett, I think, has a good quote where he says, put all of your eggs in one basket and watch it very carefully. Speaker 2: Yeah, so Dana, do we even count in being diversified if we sell on Amazon and we're a service provider for Amazon? Speaker 4: No, I don't. So I don't think so. I think that those of us that are sellers and service providers just went, hey, I'm going to diversify away from only being a seller and also help sellers, right? Because based on your experiences, like you are one of the If not the premier agency that helps sellers get their stuff straight and back on Amazon and stuff like that, right? And if they didn't have you, there are a lot of businesses that would no longer be here without Riverbend Consulting because sellers don't have the experience or knowledge to fix this stuff. And when they, even if they do, Sometimes even then it doesn't get fixed. I should have come to you when this happened back in 2020, whatever it was, when all four of my Seller Central accounts got shut down and it took me four months to get them back. Speaker 2: Nightmare. Speaker 4: Yeah, it killed our business. Now, granted, there's a lot of things that I knowingly don't do correctly, like I don't run ads and stuff like that, but we did not recover from our sales velocity. We never recovered from our sales velocity on that. Part of that's due to, well, it doesn't matter what it's due to, just like getting slapped after being always, I've never had my account suspended in In 15 years except for that one time and it killed us. Speaker 2: And you know what? Part of this survey talks about fear of suspension. And thank you for the kind words, Danan. But part of this survey actually talks about how afraid are you to be suspended and what would it do to your business, which I thought was fascinating. Speaker 4: 100% of people are afraid and the rest are lying. Speaker 3: Have you been suspended on Amazon? 64% no, 35% yes. Speaker 4: Have you been suspended? Speaker 3: Yes. So 35% of sellers have been suspended. Speaker 1: I think it's like there is to see like what, what the percentage breakdown here as well for like how many people have been suspended, but, uh, how many of that percentage as well who have said, yes, uh, we're able to like break out their suspension. Right. So like, for instance, we, we deal with like kind of suspension all the time and we hit like a 94%. You know, success rate in getting suspensions lifted. But I'm kind of curious, is that like standard across the board? Like how many people are really realistically getting suspended, having their account revoked entirely, and then just We're just needing to start up a new one, right? And I think it's a common concern that everyone has because so many people, I mean, I've had my account deactivated before, right? It's a terrifying thing if you don't know what to do and you have people like Leslie over there and ourselves who are constantly dealing with this and seeing all of the different reasons Amazon will do it every single day. The average seller, I think, just doesn't even know how to deal with it. So it's interesting to see that kind of number and what the success rate those sellers might even have dealing with it themselves versus seeing success rate of other businesses as well. Speaker 2: So I wanted to point out some, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Dan. Speaker 4: No, go for it. Okay. Just a quick comment. Just look at this. He knew that everyone's afraid of being suspended. So he asked them what percentage out of a scale of one to 10, how afraid are you? And everything is above the 50% mark. So for me, I'm rounding up everyone's like, diarrhea afraid of being suspended, like poop in their pants, like it's gonna happen. I just know it. I'm being a little facetious there. But it's kind of like, it's not a, it's almost, it's almost like, it's not about If it's about when. Speaker 2: Well, and I also wanted to point out the seller suspension by annual revenue size, because there is this myth out there that people think if you're smaller, they're more likely to come after you. Or, and then other people think if you're bigger, they're more likely to come after you. Um, and really this shows where it shows the people who say, yeah, they've been suspended. It's, it's pretty, pretty even, uh, and the bigger sellers actually have had a higher rate in one. Yeah. On the yes. Um, let's see, it's like 28% for really small and then jumps to 44% and then back to 32% and 32%. So, um, Yeah, it's not like there's some dramatic difference. There it is. There's not some dramatic difference in size of who is getting suspended. And I can attest that I've worked with some of the largest sellers on Amazon, like enormous that sells so much that it blows your mind kind of sellers who've been suspended. And they're good sellers, good people. They're not shady. They just, they had errors that were made. I came by their team and Amazon took them down. You would think Amazon would say, you do a billion dollars a year on Amazon. We want those feet. No, it still suspended them. Then little mom and pops, they get suspended too. I loved this because it throws out that whole, oh, if you're big, they leave you alone. No. Speaker 1: I can't remember who it was. I think it might have been John Elder on LinkedIn. He had posted a couple of weeks ago, he posted a Reddit thread that someone had put together. Yes. Yeah. And it was somebody who, it was very obvious that it was somebody who works for Amazon Seller Support. And they talked about the process of how they would be punished if they marked something as yes and, you know, reinstate an account or something. And it turned out to be inaccurate and they shouldn't have done that, but they would never be punished if they said no to everything. So they just said no to everything. And that was like a moment where I'm like, yeah, this clears up a lot of information, makes it very obvious, like, why does this happen for sellers in general? And it's because you have somebody who doesn't know Amazon, doesn't actually know terms of service or anything. Get something thrown across their desk and they're like, I could spend, you know, 25 minutes digging into this, figuring out if this is going to be a real thing, or I could just click one button and be done with it. And, you know, I mean, there was a recent story I think we put out as well of a brand that was doing, you know, as like Leslie's saying, huge numbers. I mean, I think they were doing like $40 million a month. Speaker 4: The baby brands. Speaker 3: So this is a cool slide here. Speaker 4: Sorry, we lost you for a second, Noah. Speaker 1: All good. Speaker 3: Yeah, sorry, Noah. I thought you were done talking, but you just glitched out for a second. So I didn't mean to talk over you. Speaker 1: No worries, Todd. Speaker 3: With seller support, I thought this slide was pretty interesting. Has seller support improved or declined? 45% declined, 42% stayed the same, 12% improved. I'd be curious to talk to those people who said it improved. Speaker 4: Yeah, they probably work for Amazon. Speaker 3: Yeah, probably. Speaker 4: Amazon, I hope you're listening to this because you need to know this. Speaker 3: Does Amazon seller support hold you back from achieving your business goals? 60% yes, 40% no. And I would definitely be in the yes camp with that. They frequently hold me back from achieving my goals, that's for sure. Speaker 2: Just because when you upload a flat file because you wanted to change the bullet points for your product because you determined there were better keywords and they wouldn't take even though you had brand registry and so then you opened a case and no one would help you so then you opened a case with brand registry and no one would help you so you re-upload the flat file and it still doesn't work and you open a case and they say you're not the brand owner so you can't change it but you try to anyway. You mean that's holding you back? What's wrong with you, Todd? Speaker 3: I had two situations recently of products that I sell wholesale, so I don't have exclusive on them or anything, but they sell really well for us and we're one of the only sellers that are on the products. Both of them have had hijacking attempts where someone changed the brand name to some just random letters. And so in both of them, I had the exact same problem. So I send a case to seller support saying, hey, Someone is attempting to hijack this listing. They changed the brand name from what it was to this, and I send a screenshot pointing out the brand name on the product, the brand name all over the listing and stuff, and then I say, I'm not trying to change the brand name or anything like that. I'm just pointing out that someone's trying to hijack this. I'd like you guys to look into it and revert it back to the correct brand name. Both times they reply with the email and say, if you want to change the brand name of a product that's not allowed according to Amazon's terms, you need to create a new product. It's like, did you even read anything that I wrote you? Speaker 4: The answer is no, Todd. It's like, I've said this a number of times, I think even on this live stream, but I firmly believe that Amazons like the IRS, the first answer is always an automated no, because it probably eliminates 70% of the work that seller support actually has to do. Speaker 3: Yes, 100%. Guarantee it. Well, like Noah was saying, I mean, they're getting paid to close tickets faster. It doesn't benefit them in any way to actually try to help. Speaker 4: Yeah. So that was another hubbub that didn't really make it out in the news. And maybe, Leslie, you may have heard of this. And Noah, maybe even you too. Well, Todd, who knows? But there was a team somewhere that had the highest close rates of Amazon sellers up in arms and these guys had received awards and probably bonuses for being so awesome. It was found that they were just going click, click, click, click, click, click, click, and just closing cases, no response. And just basically, and I've been the recipient of that many times on many cases where we open up a case and the next day we get a response, your case has been closed and has been completed. And it was like, what the hell? We've never even received anything. So it's, you know, and back to what Noah was saying about that Reddit post, that person, you know, bless them for coming out and saying what happened and shedding some light. But at the same time, like, I don't appreciate that they didn't have the gumption to say, hey, this is wrong. In that post, the person said, I definitely cost at least some millions of dollars. I'll bet you that person has no idea truly what the cost has been to these brands. And mind you, these are families. These are husbands, wives, fathers, mothers with children. We all have kids to take care of. Most of us do. And this person, What they were doing was suspending accounts is what was happening. Speaker 2: Dana, I hate to tell you, but I can actually make that story on that Reddit thread worse. Speaker 4: Oh, okay. I believe you. Speaker 2: So Amazon has for probably as long as they've had enforcement, but for at least 10 years, they have had a metric for the people in seller performance who are frontline handling cases. They've had a metric for did you reinstate someone or approve something that later came back and proved to be a problem? And then there is also a balancing metric, which is did you fail to reinstate someone who it was escalated above you and they were in fact reinstated and then everything was cool for X number of days. But as you can imagine, the first of those is weighted more heavily than the second. And that has been in place, like I said, for at least 10 years. So there is definitely a lot more fear about reinstating someone or approving something that could come back and then let's say that they If someone did some brushing or there was some fraud on the account, they've got to blame that on someone. So if you approve them and then they turned out to be a good seller gone bad, which is actually a thing at Amazon, they call it good seller gone bad, then you are the one who could take the heat for that. And then later on top of that, they still have a 20 transaction per hour quota. Tell me how you look at 20 cases of any kind per hour. That's three minutes. And that doesn't include the few seconds to like sip your drink. Speaker 1: Don't you guys miss the days of being able to make up employee Jim Bob who screwed everything up and you fired him for it and now his kids are going to go hungry and Amazon would allow you to be reinstated for that? That was the favorite tactic a decade ago. You can't really use that nowadays, but I think that shows the change, right? The thing that I think a lot of people don't think about when it comes to these paces, seller support in general, is the idea of volume, right? So last year in 2024, there were over 1.3 million new sellers added on Amazon, right? There are millions upon millions of people selling on the platform. The volume of the number of tickets that are coming in is ridiculously high. Amazon decided, hey, let's try and do something where, you know, we help sellers or give sellers the option to get like a priority pass. That's where SAS came out, right? And you could get your own rep to solve things. SAS for like the first 12 months was really, really good. And now it's just back to where it is, where essentially the difference being is that now you're essentially just talking to another person who has no idea what they're actually doing, has no authority to do anything. But hey, at least you can talk to someone on the phone whenever you feel like it. Speaker 4: A dedicated person. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. But the reality is it's glorified seller support now. And I don't think it's ever going to change because the actual manpower resources that it would take to solve the problem that sellers have with seller support is not feasible from any business perspective at the end of the day, right? And training them to be able to understand every single situation. Speaker 4: Now, you're probably right. However, On the flip side of that, if you had a support system that actually supported, you would probably decrease the volume of cases by 70%. Speaker 1: Sure, I think that's more of a situation of it's not, Amazon needs to fix its own system. I mean, think of how many cases you put in that, Leslie said it best earlier, you shouldn't have to submit a support case for updating bullet points on a listing that you very clearly own or are brand registered for, but sadly we do. That just has to do with Amazon's own system being archaic and they haven't actually updated the backend UI in, you know, two decades and so it's impossible to get anything through. Amazon, you know, if they felt like it and they felt like it was actually going to solve something and it was actually going to be profitable for them, because that's what it comes down to. Amazon cares about profits at the end of the day. And, you know, you said that earlier, Dan, that's what they care about. And this is an area where they're not going to make profit. There is no net ROI for them in solving this problem. Speaker 2: I think they literally don't. I think they literally don't understand how to reduce contacts. I think that if they went to people like the four people sitting on this screen right now, and they said, we need to reduce contacts by 20%, We could give them a list of projects that would be short term and small investments. And then we could give them a list of projects that are longer term, bigger investment that they could use to. So I'm sure y'all have all seen, there's this thing that they started where they call it dispute only appeals. So like if you sold something that's a restricted product, or they flagged that way, the only way you can appeal it anymore is to say I didn't do it. And not everything is that black and white. And then if you did do it, they just won't entertain an appeal. All that does is actually increase contacts outside of normal channels. It might reduce contacts to seller performance through account health. It increases contacts that are calls to account health. It increases contacts that are emailing every executive you can get an email address to and doing all the social media, you know, slamming that people do trying to get through to Amazon. So, you know, clearly they do not know how to reduce contacts. And just, just like what Noah just said, if they actually fixed the back end where I upload a flat file for a brand I own and the changes take, How many contacts does that reduce? But they don't know how to be sellers. They don't know how sellers operate and they never bother to find out. Speaker 4: Mr. Jassy, I'm available for hire to come fix your shit. Speaker 3: Yes. Speaker 4: I've got a whole network of people that are on the boots on the ground and I can confer with them and I will come in and I will fix Amazon stuff. Speaker 3: Give me how I'll do it for free if you guys get credit for it forget about that Noah No way, I'll share my salary with you because I'm gonna charge them so much Yeah, I would you know, I would I would disagree with you a little bit no on the ROI, you know the the ROI of fixing that back end like Leslie said would be Decreasing a ton of seller support tickets that you're having to pay someone to go through. So just fixing that alone, I would have to imagine would eliminate a ton of seller support tickets that someone has to touch and look at. How much that ROI would be, I don't know and it's one of those things that's hard to measure and that's probably why it doesn't get looked at, but it definitely would save them money on support, I would think. Speaker 4: I yeah, you know, I actually I actually would go and work at Amazon if they gave me the opportunity to help. Like knowingly gave me the opportunity to help fix this system. I would absolutely go there and do my damn best to make it so that it was easier for Amazon and better for sellers. And I actually think they need somebody like us. They probably need a team of people like us to go into certain areas of Amazon because It could be fixed. It could be improved significantly and it would make everything better. Amazon would operate more smoothly. Sellers would sell more smoothly. Money would flow more smoothly to everybody. I feel like I just said, I've got the world's answers. All you need is me. Speaker 3: We can always dream to live in paradise. Speaker 4: I know, I know. I'll try to look at the bright side of things. Speaker 3: So, real quick, we can touch on this one. What is the hardest part about selling on Amazon? So, 24% said account health, 8% advertising, 36% competition, and 31% increasing fulfillment fees. Speaker 1: I can agree on the increasing fees. I hear the competition thing all the time, and anyone who genuinely says competition is the hardest part of selling on Amazon, to me that just says they are a very Amazon-centric business and brand. Obviously, Amazon is getting more saturated. There's more competition. We talked about the Chinese seller. Amazon isn't as hard from a competition standpoint as I think people realistically make it out to be. Yes, it's harder from a conversion standpoint. It's harder to get seen, harder to get known. Amazon, actually, at the end of the day, is not all that much harder than, say, getting your product put into a Walmart and getting your product sold in a Walmart, right? It's not harder than opening up and branding yourself in some capacity. It all comes down to brand identity and conversion. So when people say something like competition, I think they actually mean pricing. And, you know, trying to be the person who wins on conversion compared to someone else, especially in the day of the Chinese seller, because competition is always going to increase in the market, right? Competition is always going to be hard. It's always going to be harder to be the cheaper option, the better option. But from a total aspect of it being like the actual hardest thing, I think competition is just a part of business, right? You never get in there. There's no business in this day and age that there isn't competition in some capacity. So it's almost like a I'm not an oxymoron to say it's like the hardest part, in my opinion, because it's like, it's just a part of business, right? That has to be there at the end of the day. Speaker 4: And it'll always occur at some point. Speaker 3: And you got private label far and above every other issue there lists competition. 46.8% competition is the biggest, hardest part about selling on Amazon for private label. Speaker 1: There's just market saturation across products at this point, right? Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: It's hard to break into any niche. Speaker 3: Wholesale and retail arbitrage, you know, you care less, a little less about the competition. You know, you're more focused on, you know, just selling the product, not so much worried about the competition. So it's the fees for wholesale and retail arbitrage that hurts the most. Speaker 1: I think my favorite example of this was I worked with a client years ago who they had, they sold a bread box, bamboo bread box. And they were constantly complaining about competition and not being able to compete when their product was roughly $30. And it was essentially an exact identical, it was a white label product and it was exactly identical to 10 other brands. That had the exact same product, they were all cheaper. And it's like, yeah, your problem isn't really competition there, right? It's your product and what you're choosing to sell more than anything. Speaker 4: And that's where differentiation comes into play. And so you can evolve your products or you can add things to there. You remember the days of eBay, I mean it's still around, where you can either go on eBay and for $200 buy a GoPro or for $215 or $230 get a GoPro with three filters and a floaty thing and a selfie stick and all this stuff and you're like, oh, I'll go for that. $3, but also get the sale, you know, or you do something totally new. So I've got a buddy. His name's Maurizio. I think his company is IDW Innovations. And that's what he does, is he takes a product and he's always going, okay, this, now this, and then release this, and then release this. And so the products that he produces for people are always one step ahead of the competition. And if you think about it, that's what they do in software and electronics, right? The most mind-blowing electronics from Apple or Microsoft to this day. But that's not profitable for them to give us the best stuff and the competition. There's like there's there's this I better I'm better. I'm better. I'm better. I'm better. And so you make more profit on selling to these people that go. Well, I've got to have the latest and greatest. So let me get the iPhone 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, you know, and then you can you can use the same same thing on your products. Speaker 3: I'll date myself a little bit, but I remember in the beginning with the browser wars, the internet browser wars, you had Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, and they would be like Internet Explorer 1, Google Chrome 2, and then Firefox 3, and then all of a sudden Chrome 100. They just skipped all the numbers. They were like, we're just going to go way up, 100. We're so much better than those other guys way back there. Similar thing, you're always incrementally improving. But yeah, you got to stay ahead of the competition, right? Every product has a life cycle. And so you need to be changing, improving your product and making a better product. You can't just lay back and rely on the same product forever and expect that the competition isn't going to come in there, erode your profits and eat your sales share. It's just a part of doing business. You always got to be improving, innovating and coming up with the next thing. Speaker 4: Yep. Agreed. Speaker 1: I sent Ason in there, Todd and whatnot. And that's my favorite example I always use is Ghirardelli chocolates, chocolate sauce. If you guys don't know for years, it's been sold by, you know, before Amazon released that thing where listings could be taken over by brands and everything. The way that this guy essentially owned the entire market of Ghirardelli chocolate sauces is simply by just adding a metal spoon to the sauce. And so he owned all of the Ghirardelli listings with a single metal spoon. And it got to the point where, yeah, so that metal spoon, that was his differentiating factor. And that was enough for him to constantly win buy box or constantly win sales and everything to the point that now he is the sole seller of all Ghirardelli chocolate sauces on Amazon. So it's pretty funny to always see something like this. Speaker 3: Nice. And technically, if someone tried to do that today, that would be a violation of Amazon's terms, right? So he's got a nice garden there that nobody else can recreate at this point. Very cool. All right, guys. Well, this has been a fun episode. I appreciate you guys joining me and I appreciate everybody out there watching and joining us as well. We do this every single Friday, so join us next Friday as well and we'll dive into some new topics. So with that, everybody have an awesome weekend. Speaker 4: All right. See you, everyone. Speaker 2: Thank you. Unknown Speaker: This has been another episode of the Amazon Seller School podcast. Thanks for listening, fellow Amazon seller. And always remember, success is yours if you take it. Speaker 3: Hey, if you made it this far in the show, I really hope you enjoyed it and I'd like to ask you a favor. Could you head on over to Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this and leave us a review? It would be greatly appreciated and would help us continue to grow the show and offer more episodes for you. Thank you. God bless and have an awesome day.