Envision Horizons is sharing our Amazon Accelerate conference Recap with our team’s expert opinions on key updates.
Amazon Launches Free Email Marketing Capabilities
The Amazon Accelerate brought news that Amazon is launching free email marketing capabilities that will allow sellers to reach their Repeat, Recent, and High-Spend Amazon Customers.
According to the official press release:
“For the first time, sellers can now expand beyond brand followers when sending free marketing emails to reach their most loyal customers, such as repeat customers, recent customers, and high-spend customers. Amazon Customer Engagement’s Tailored Audiences also allows sellers to monitor the impact of their email marketing campaigns and customer engagement with performance and reporting metrics, such as open rate, click-through rates, emails delivered, opt-out rates, sales, and conversion.”
These new audience types will be within the Amazon Customer Engagement tool and will be provided at no cost. These audiences also allow sellers to monitor the impact of their email marketing campaigns and customer engagement with performance and reporting metrics, such as open rate, CTRs, emails delivered, opt-out rates, sales, and conversion.
Amazon’s New Tailored Audience Beta
Amazon Accelerate also brought the announcement that Amazon is testing Tailored Audiences in a beta program, and the company plans to make it available to all U.S. sellers in early 2023. Through this tool, sellers select the customer audience types and Amazon sends the marketing email directly to those customers. The tool will be available at no cost. Amazon plans to enhance the messages’ design capabilities with custom HTML content and improved templates.
Amazon’s new Tailored Audience beta
- Brand followers – Brand followers have clicked to follow this brand on Amazon
- Recent customers – The most recently purchasing 20% of brand customers in the last 12 months
- High spend customers – The highest spending 25% of brand customers in the last 12 months
- Repeat customers – Customers who have purchased more than one order from this Brand in the last 12 months
Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD)
At Amazon Accelerate the company announced Amazon Warehousing & Distribution (AWD), a new service that will grant sellers access to its massive warehousing and distribution network. The pay-as-you-go offering allows sellers to ship inventory to new facilities for bulk inventory storage and automated distribution.
Amazon Warehousing & Distribution (AWD) is a new third-party logistics (3PL) solution offered by Amazon Supply Chain. AWD provides flexible and low-cost upstream bulk inventory storage and distribution for your business. AWD empowers you to:
• Manage, store, and distribute your inventory using Amazon’s world-class logistics network
• Integrate and automate your end-to-end inventory management operations
• Optimize inventory levels across your supply chain
• Utilize your stock to unlock business growth through Amazon and off-Amazon channels
“Pending specifics on pricing relative to industry standards, this is a big development from Amazon in terms of warehousing & distribution. Coming out of the pandemic, brands are acutely aware of the complication, costs and impact of having consistent inventory (or not) can have on the success of their eCommerce business. AWD allowing for automated fulfillment not only to Amazon DCs, but to other retail stores should bring fear to 3PLs as brands look for better, more seamless ways to handle their upstream warehousing.” – Todd Piechowski, Envision Horizons
Growth Opportunities: Listing Quality Dashboard and Customer Reviews Insight
Opportunity Explorer: New Listing Quality Dashboard
- Starting Oct 31 certain US categories will see a Listing Quality Dashboard
- Impact estimator guides towards most effective growth drivers for your business
The Listing Quality Dashboard is a tool on Seller Central that highlights important product information for customers. These recommendations are focused on helping you improve the discoverability of your products, enabling better customer experiences like Product Overview or Tabular Spec view, and reducing returns on your products.
Opportunity Explorer: New Customer Review Insight Tool
- New feature launching today on Opportunity Explorer shows positive / negative review snippets.Tool displays which product features are liked/disliked, shows changing trends, and gives insight into which features affect your star rating.
- Also see how product reviews/ratings stack up against category competitors.
Brand Analytics Updates
The Brand Analytics search dashboards, Search Catalog Performance, and Search Query Performance dashboards give you new views into your customers’ shopping funnels and the top queries relevant to your brand. The Search Catalog Performance dashboard provides a comprehensive product view of key shopping metrics such as impressions, clicks, cart adds, and purchases. The end-to-end shopping behavior data will help you diagnose sales funnel issues. The behavior and demand data combination will help you improve your catalog quality.
Search Catalog Performance
- Making Search Catalog Performance reports downloadable
- Enhanced with ASIN level view
- Making Search Query Performance reports downloadable
New Search Analytics Dashboard: Search Actionable Insights
- Search Actionable Insights: Uncover insights to improve discovery of your products.
Marketplace Product Guidance
Marketplace Product Guidance has been enhanced to provide Selection Recommendations for U.S. sellers looking to expand to France, Italy, and Spain. Selection Recommendations give sellers insight into products in high customer demand that would serve as strong growth opportunities. These recommendations are personalized and ranked based on their opportunity score as calculated by machine learning models that are designed to predict the best opportunities for new selection.
Manage Your Experiments: New Features
Manage Your Experiments is launching new features to optimize your A/B tests and publish your winning content faster.
- Now, sellers can A/B test bullet points and product descriptions.
- New alerts will inform sellers content you want to test is too similar to your current content and may not deliver conclusive results.
- Sellers can now select “auto-publish” for winning content (available for title and image experiments). Amazon will only publish the winning content version if it is at-least 66% better than the other content version.
- The Experiment to Significance feature allows you to run an experiment to the point that the results are statistically relevant, in order to provide the option of shorter test time.
“Something I am excited for with the new feature is being able to automatically make updates once testing is completed. For one of my brands, we did a main image experiment to see if model versus flat-lay images work better. Considering it was apparel and had a lot of SKUs, it would’ve been great to automatically update the content. This will save a ton of time!
I am also excited about shorter test times. The Amazon landscape can change within a weeks time, so being able to cut an experiment if the results are clear will really allow us to be more dynamic in the changes we are making.” – Eve Matten, Envision Horizons
New FBA Dashboard and Storage Limit Manager
New FBA Dashboard
- FBA Dashboard is a new product to quickly see a snapshot of your FBA business including metrics and recommendations for inventory, shipments, growth, and sales. FBA Dashboard helps prioritize tasks and develop immediate action items.
New Storage Limit Manager:
- Request how much additional storage you want for the specified period (up to 20% of your initial limit or 2,000 cubic feet, whichever is greater).
- The maximum reservation fee that you’d be willing to pay for the extra space, if it’s available. This fee can be offset with performance credits earned from sales generated using the additional space. No upfront payment is required.
“The new FBA dashboard groups the different inventory sections into a somewhat easier viewing. It also adds the FBA opportunities section which is great to give clients suggestions on how to grow their business switching FBM SKUs to FBA. Overall not that many changes.
I love the new storage limit manager, since we had to previously go through a seller support agent or an Amazon rep and build our case to possibly get a storage limit increase. This is super useful, specially for clients using flammable or aerosol storage since that tends to be a little tight sometimes. We’d have to see how soon they care of requests since they do it from highest reservation fee bid to the lowest. We are going to have to be strategic about it and do some forecasting to bid the maximum reservation fee possible.” – Henry Polanco, Envision Horizons
Buy with Prime
Amazon Accelerate reminded sellers about the “Buy with Prime” offering, which is a new way for brands to grow their direct-to-consumer store using Amazon’s Prime capabilities. “Buy with Prime” gives sellers the ability to offer fast, free delivery and a checkout experience on your website that shoppers know and trust.
This will allow sellers/brands to increase their DTC Conversion rate, and leverage new advertising opportunities from Amazon.
Envision Horizons CEO, Laura Meyer, states “The Buy with Prime program could be a big opportunity for Amazon native brands to build out their own DTC websites. It could also be great for brands who are having issues with their 3PLs. With this new offering, brands could cut out their 3PL and use fulfillment by Amazon for their DTC website sales”.
New Beta Features for Multi-Channel Fulfillment
Use Amazon FBA inventory to fulfill DTC orders in non-Amazon packaging. Join the waitlist here.
- Unbranded packaging: Allows you to ship your orders in unbranded packaging.
- International shipping: Allows you to ship media and non-media orders using your US inventory to over 100 countries.
BOPIS: buy online, pick up in-store
BOPIS is an acronym that stands for buy online, pick up in-store. The BOPIS strategy is also referred to as click and collect, curbside pickup, etc. Amazon’s BOPIS offering enables customers to buy your products in Amazon’s online store and pickup in your local store as fast as 90 minutes.
Premium A+ Content
Amazon reminded everyone at Amazon Accelerate that Premium A+ content is now available at no cost for an extended promotional period to sellers who have registered as a brand owner with Amazon Brand Registry.
Premium A+ content offers new and larger module types in the product description section on the product detail page such as video, image carousels, and interactive hotspots. During the promotional period, you can publish Premium A+ content for all registered ASINs using the A+ content manager. If you have a published A+ brand story across your ASIN catalog and have had at least 15 A+ content projects approved in the past 12 months, you are eligible for Premium A+ content for each Amazon store.
Fun Fact: Amazon shared that Basic A+ content on average improves a listing’s conversion rate by 8.5%, however implementing Premium A+ content can increase your sales by 20%.
Account Health Updates
Amazon gave additional information on the Account Health Rating score, and announced the Account Health Assurance program.
- Account Health Assurance will help Amazon resolve issues without account deactivation. If you are eligible you will automatically be enrolled. To be eligible you must have a high health rating and a valid emergency contact number in Seller Central.
- The Account Health Dashboard now includes a “Call Me Now” button to reach a support team.
Amazon Seller App Updates
The Amazon Seller App is adding popular resources from Seller Central: The Seller University Mobile Quick Start Guide introduces the app to new users, and provides guidelines for finding products to sell, tips for estimating profitability, and step-by-step instructions to create listings. The Revenue Calculator is also coming soon to the app. This feature lets you run “what if” scenarios for any product to estimate fees, costs, net profit, and margin, based on size, shipping, and other variables.
- Seller University Mobile Quickstart guide
- Revenue Calculator coming soon to the app
- “Call Me Now” button to reach support team
Veeqo
Veeqo is the Multi-Channel Shipping software that cuts the cost and speed of fulfilling orders with low shipping rates, automation, and hassle-free fulfillment tools. Veeqo available to all Amazon US sellers today for free.
Seller Forums Update
Amazon is launching a revamped Seller Forums with a new look and new features. Amazon has put emphasis on their focus to make the forums more user friendly and personalizing the experience. Navigation and search will be more intuitive with improved content categorization. Users will be able provide feedback on the usefulness and relevance of content with upvotes and downvotes.
Selling Partner Support Update
New “Escalate Your Case” button will raise an alarm to Amazon and brings your case to an “escalation associate”.
List Once, Sell Globally
List Once, Sell Globally enables sellers to create offers across Amazon stores worldwide and automate pricing decisions through new pricing rules.
Amazon Seller Wallet
Amazon is launching Amazon Seller Wallet in 2022 to help sellers manage and move funds from selling on Amazon.com. It’s a digital wallet that makes it easy for global sellers to hold, view, convert, and transfer store proceeds from the U.S. store directly to their bank accounts—all within Seller Central.
Customers Ask Alexa
With ‘Customers Ask Alexa’ on Seller Central, U.S. registered brands will soon be able to answer questions in their product categories that customers ask on an Amazon.com search. With the self-service tool to answer frequently asked customer questions, brands can connect directly with their customers and also improve their visibility. ‘Customers Ask Alexa’ will be available in Seller Central for a select group of brands in October 2022, as an invite-only program, before becoming available to all eligible brands in the U.S. in 2023.
The Customers Ask Alexa feature on your product pages will be similar to the emails sellers receive to respond to questions on your product page that haven’t been answered.
