Ever encountered a time when you thought your Amazon store was doing well, only to find it deactivated the next day? This is a problem Amazon wants to solve with a new metric that sellers like you can use to check your account's health.
The new Account Health Rating (AHR) version does NOT change Amazon's current policies. Instead, it aggregates violations of specific policies and tallies them to a single score. From this, the overall account health status would range from "Healthy," "At-Risk," or "Unhealthy."
The AHR is color-coded with scores ranging from 0 to 1,000. It should provide near real-time status of your account's health. Through this, you can quickly identify if your store is at risk of deactivation. Your points decrease if new policy violations are tied to your selling account. You can regain these points if you've successfully addressed these violations.
As a seller, you should be mindful of the following scores:
Prime Day 2022 was a great example of how powerful social commerce can be in the U.S.
This year, videos tagged with #primeday2022 were viewed 52 million times on TikTok, solidifying shoppers turning to social media to discover the best deals and products rather than browsing directly on Amazon.
Much of this year's Prime Day's success can be attributed to the significant increase in views on Tiktok. Views were 30 million and 6 million in 2021 and 2020, respectively, when in 2019, views were virtually non-existent. So it's easy to say now that TikTok is more than just an entertainment app; it's also a growing commerce app!
Amazon's failure to personalize Prime Day
These days, Amazon appears to have given up on trying to personalize Prime Day- a decision that is increasing shoppers' turn to social platforms like TikTok to discover trending products. Ideally, you would think that Prime Day should be the time of the year when Amazon is aggressive with its marketing efforts.
But this wasn't the case this year. Instead, Amazon rolled out hundreds of thousands of products, leaving it to the shoppers to look for what they should buy.
Although Amazon is benefitting from TikTok now, they should watch out for what may be their budding competitor. According to Zheping Huang's Bloomberg report, "TikTok plans to grow its e-commerce gross merchandise volume to $2 billion this year and $23 billion in 2023."
Many entrepreneurs perceived the e-commerce darling Shopify as a potential alternative to Amazon. Still, the company became too ambitious when it increased its recruitments to meet escalating demands from the pandemic. Eventually, last July 26, 2022, Shopify informed its employees of significant personnel cuts and let about 10% of them go.
In a letter to the staff, Shopify CEO and founder Tobi Lütke stated that the company's customers—merchants, entrepreneurs, and small business owners—were already feeling the effects of the current economic crisis.
As recently as February, Juozas Kaziuknas of Marketplace Pulse, an expert in e-commerce, highlighted Shopify's significant growth. He reported that Shopify is about 50% as large as the Amazon marketplace after exceeding $54 billion in GMV in the fourth quarter of 2021.
But now, it has become evident that Shopify's decision to employ more people to accommodate the rapid growth driven by the pandemic did not pay off well. He explained it by saying, "What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point. Still growing steadily, but it wasn't a meaningful 5-year leap ahead."
Shopify resolved this matter by offering laid-off employees a free account on top of generous severance compensation and assistance. This offer is meant for ex-employees who might want to take an entrepreneurship route; however, they did not specify how long Shopify would provide the free accounts.
The Niche Insights Section under Seller Central's Opportunity Explorer tool can help you understand specific dynamics of a niche, such as its level of saturation, launch potential for new products, and overall customer experience.
Here are some tips you can follow to maximize this section: