The results of the Remazing Amazon Merchant Survey

A few weeks ago, Amazon announced that it has acquired film production company MGM Studios for $8.45 billion. This is the second largest acquisition that Amazon has completed to date. Why it makes sense for an e-commerce company to take over such a big entertainment business gets explained in our todays commentary.

We also proudly present the results of our first “Amazon Merchant Survey”, for which we spoke with the responsible managers of 82 vendor and seller accounts about their expected development on Amazon for 2021. Find out more directly in the following paragraph.

Our Amazon Merchant Survey 2021

We are very proud to present the results of our Amazon Merchant Survey for the first time. This project was made possible to a large extent by the support of our newsletter readers. Thank you for the numerous responses over the past months!

The results clearly show a continued positive development on Amazon: Most companies see even more potential for their brands on Amazon in 2021 than last year. About 96% of respondents expect to increase sales on Amazon and 72% of participants plan to invest more in product optimizations on Amazon.

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General Updates

Prime Day 2021 will take place on 21 & 22 June

It is now officially confirmed that Amazon Prime Day 2021 will take place in less than two weeks. At the same time, other retailers like Walmart and Target are planning their own Deal Days to counter Amazon’s biggest deal event of the year. Their sales promotions will run longer and also start one day earlier on 20 June. The sales promotions are to run longer and start one day earlier on 20 June. Are you already prepared for Prime Day 2021? If not, check out our tips for this year’s edition of the sales event here.

Will Amazon open brick-and-mortar pharmacies?

An unconfirmed report broke the news that Amazon plans to open brick-and-mortar pharmacies – which sent the share price of US pharmacies corporations down by up to 3.5%. According to the report, Amazon plans to open stand-alone retail pharmacies or add them to its existing “Whole Foods” infrastructure. Even though there are some significant differences between the healthcare systems in the US and Germany, we believe that it is at best only a matter of time before Amazon Pharmacy also will come to Germany and the UK.

Amazon’s share of the American e-commerce grows

Although the e-commerce sales of many of Amazon’s competitors such as Walmart and Target are increasing in the US, Amazon is far ahead: Amazon’s e-commerce will grow from 39.8% in 2020 to 40.4% in 2021 in the US, and with an increase of 0.6 percentage points, this growth will be greater than that of any other company this year. This means Amazon will exceed all expectations.

Jeff Bezos steps down July 5th

In less than a month, Andy Jassy will become Amazon’s new CEO. While Jeff Bezos had the pleasure to announce numerous successes at his last shareholder meeting before stepping down as Amazon’s CEO, he acknowledged that the company still has a lot of work to do in order to address climate change and workplace safety issues. It is questionable, however, how much will really change after his departure, as Bezos will become the Chairman of the supervisory board.

Jeff Bezos to send himself to space on board of Blue Origin rocket

The Amazon founder announced on Monday that he will fly into space on July 20 with the rocket “New Shepard”. He will be accompanied by his brother and another seat will be offered via auction. The last bid is currently at 2.3 million euros. According to Bezos, he has dreamed of traveling into space since he was five years old and is now fulfilling this dream with his space company Blue Origin, which he founded 20 years ago.

Amazon plans to develop an own tracking cookie

Amazon wants to take advantage of the tracking vacuum and build its own identifier so that companies can track the behaviour of users outside the website. However, the identifier will only exist within the Amazon ecosystem. Amazon is thus expanding its advertising focus and, in our opinion, ADSP will become even stronger in the future.

Soon better conditions in Amazon’s department stores?

Amazon is now revising its productivity targets as they are blamed for high injury rates in its warehouses. The company’s decision to revise its productivity targets coincides with a series of news reports that injury rates at Amazon warehouses are higher than at other companies in the logistics industry. According to employees, the high pace of work is often to blame.

What caught our attention

Prime Day 2021 appears to have been completely cancelled in Canada, not just postponed. This is according to a message from Amazon to Canadian sellers asking them to delete their coupons and deals. The reason: a still high number of Corona cases.

For Sponsored Products, there is a new budget report that contains valuable data to better allocate and adjust budgets. However, it seems that the report is not yet available for all sellers in the console.

Comment:Amazon acquires MGM

End of May, Amazon announced that it has acquired the globally known movie production company MGM Studios for $8.45 billion.

While this acquisition is the second largest Amazon has closed so far (after paying $13.7 billion for Whole Foods Market in 2017), it might look somewhat random for some people at first. Why would an e-commerce company buy such a large entertainment business?

Our team at Remazing is convinced that the investment will pay off sooner than later though.

By adding 17,000 shows and 4,000 movies (such as the iconic “James Bond” series) to Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service, Amazon is surely gearing up to further compete with Netflix, Disney+ & Co. as a streaming platform. But in our opinion, the heated “streaming war” is not the main reason for the acquisition.

What makes this deal much more significant and intriguing: The e-commerce and cloud giant adds another layer to its quickly growing ads business.

In the US, Amazon also runs the ad-supported streaming platform IMDb TV. MGM’s large collection of movies and shows could be shown there as well – which in return would make IMDb more attractive for advertisers. Like this, Amazon would definitely boost it’s (video) ad business.

Additionally, Prime Video is not just a streaming platform but Amazon’s priority delivery service. More than 200 million Prime subscribers worldwide are very important customers for Amazon: As they pay for the service, they are more likely to buy goods on Amazon preferably. By adding MGM’s films and videos to its streaming platform, Amazon creates even more incentives to subscribe to Prime, which means more stable, subscription revenues plus more sales through the “lock-in” effect.

Remdash: Amazon Label Tracking

With Remdash, you can track your current status and historical development for different labels:

• Amazon Bestseller
• Amazon’s Choice
• Climate Pledge Friendly

Interested in Remdash? Schedule your personal product demo here!

Top 5 Amazon Keywords

The Corona pandemic seems to be losing more and more interest in the Amazon cosmos, as no Corona-related keywords are being searched for the first time since last summer. Instead, Amazon customers from all countries are preparing for the upcoming summer and higher temperatures: There are more searches for pools, umbrellas, fans and summer shoes. It also seems that it is still difficult to buy a PS5.