Monthly Amazon Update – June 2019

Amazon changed european selling fees in the categories baby products, furniture, grocery, health and watches, among others. Additional to reduced referral fees, new fee types have been added. Link

Amazon has started a project measuring volunteering customers with the help of a 3D-Scanner, using its 2017 acquired startup Body Labs. Die data of these measurements might help reduce product returns in the clothing and fashion category by suggesting customers their best fitting size while shopping online. Each return costs online vendors 15 Euros on average. Link

According to Thinknum Data, Amazon is on a hiring spree in China: Since January 2018, the number of job offers grew 475% and could be an indicator for rising future activity in the Chinese market. After the failure of Marketplace in China, Amazon now tries to grow differently: through Amazon Global Store, Global Selling, AWS, Kindle Devices and content. Link

Starting July 15 2019, Amazon will begin to take down product listings that do not follow the Requirements for product titles. Until then, sellers have time to readjust their product titles to meet Amazon’s Guidelines. Link

How exactly does “Amazon’s Choice” work? For getting the algorithmically distributed badge, different factors of a product might be important: not only immediate availability is a big factor, but a product’s low return number and being fulfilled by Amazon might be important ones as well. Other interesting insights: “Amazon’s Choice” is highly depending on keywords and tends to make disadvantageous suggestions for branded keywords of brands not sold on Amazon. With editorial recommendations, Amazon is following the trend of human-made Suggestions. Link

Amazon locks down seller accounts using fake reviews: the rules ensuring legitimate customer reviews will be enforced more strictly now. According to an Amazon spokesperson, a considerable amount of money will be invested into examination teams and automated systems for tracking down faked reviews and locking down their originator’s accounts. Accounts of different review agencies have been reportedly taken down as well. Link

The Amazon-owned service IMDb TV will be launching in Europe at the end of 2019 and will be providing movies and tv-shows for free. The Ad-supported service will reportedly triple the number of offered content. Link

The previously US-only observed feature of ‘Expert recommendations’ is being rolled out within a larger number of product categories, indicating a successful testing results of the new feature. These Review-snippets are being shown on the SERP, linking to detailed product reviews of third-party professional review services, offer users more insights into product information additional to user reviews. Link

Motors: starting now, users can rent cars on Amazon Spain. Link

The Amazon Early Reviewer Program has been rolled out in the UK: Buyers of newly released products lacking a sufficient number of reviews, who have a clean review history, will be incentivized to write an honest review with a £1 – £3 credit towards their account. This can profit new products immensely: customers are 53% more likely to buy a previously unknown brand on Amazon, 88% of customers trust online reviews just as much as personal ones, they spend five times as much time on a product with reviews and are more likely to convert to buyers in 85% of cases. Link