Amazon starts showing product views

Amazon starts showing product views

Last month, Amazon suddenly disclosed the sales volume of some products on the front desk, causing sellers to worry that the price war on the platform will intensify, the top links will obtain more orders and form a monopoly, and new products will be more difficult to promote.

Now Amazon has made another big move, and the front desk has begun to display product views. The data is becoming more and more transparent, which makes sellers sigh that they are more competitive. Are buyers sensitive to the data of views? What impact will this have on the business of sellers? We interviewed some sellers.

Amazon starts showing product views on the front page

Following the display of sales volume, some sellers discovered yesterday that Amazon had made another big move – the number of page views began to be displayed on the front desk.

(Photo source: seller)

From this screenshot, the two skirts are shown as "viewed 3K+ in the past month " and "viewed 400+ in the past month ", while the two products below them show the sales volume in the past month, which is 200+. The seller said that the front desk currently displays both the views and sales of products, but the views are no longer displayed for products that display sales.

According to sellers' previous speculation, the sales volume displayed on Amazon is the products with relatively large sales volume in the past week/month, while the products with lower sales volume (e.g. less than 50) are not displayed at all. Now, perhaps in order to add some highlights to the low-selling products, the front desk displays the number of views for them. After all, with a label of hundreds or thousands of views, the product is not too different among the high-selling products of the same type.

Naturally, Amazon’s move has also attracted the attention of sellers. Wang Ge, a cross-border seller, said that his peers were discussing this matter yesterday. Knowing the number of views and orders can tell you the conversion rate of the product. The data is becoming more and more transparent, and it will be even more competitive in the future.

"The categories that display page views are relatively random now, but you can only see one of the page views and sales of a product, so you can open another page to see it." Xiao Wang said. However, according to his observation, the page views and sales displayed on the platform are not accurate enough, and the impact on sellers' operations is relatively limited. But Amazon has all the data, so "inaccurate data" is not reasonable, but we have no way to explain its specific statistical logic.

So are buyers sensitive to “product views” data?

Taking the two products in the screenshot with 3K+ and 400+ views respectively as examples, consumers have a herd mentality, and products with higher views do have the opportunity to obtain more traffic, especially when the data of products in the same category vary greatly; but among products with smaller data gaps, pictures, prices and discounts will also affect buyers' click tendencies, and the impact of views on sales will be relatively limited.

From the seller's perspective, they naturally agree that the better the data, the more competitive they are. Some people joked that soon there will be service providers offering the service of inflating page views.

Will showing page views further exacerbate internal competition?

Senior seller "Cross-border Lao Zhang" believes that from the perspective of the Amazon platform, the purpose of displaying page views is similar to that of displaying sales of some products in the past week or month. The platform hopes to present data of products with better performance and further improve customer conversion rate. The impact of displaying page views on sellers will be much smaller than that of displaying sales.

“Because it shows sales volume, it may lead some sellers to ‘do’ sales volume against the trend, but when the platform policy is relatively tight, it is obviously not worth the effort to specialize in ‘sales volume data’. As for the page views, because it does not involve transactions, there are many ways to ‘manipulate’ it, and the risks are much lower. If everyone manipulates it, the reference value of the data will deviate from the original purpose of the platform.

Therefore, this kind of display of page views will have a certain guiding effect on consumers in some categories that are easy to follow or form trends, such as fashion clothing and accessories. For other categories, the impact is relatively small . For sellers, the impact should not be significant in the short term. If there is indeed some impact in the future, the impact can be offset by increasing the page views. However, this approach of "data for the sake of data" will eventually deviate from the original purpose that the platform hopes to achieve."

Amazon has taken three major actions in succession to clear out weak sellers

Before the fourth month of 2023 is over, Amazon has made several big moves in succession, displaying the "high return rate" label, product sales and recent page views on the front desk, each of which makes sellers hold their breath and pay close attention. Such intensive action adjustments were unimaginable before, and now Amazon is optimizing the customer experience with visible strength.

For example, regarding the "high return rate" label, Amazon officially confirmed the move and said that the reason was to practice the customer-centric philosophy and to encourage sellers to improve their services. Specifically, through the return rate information, sellers can better understand the product and avoid pitfalls, which can also encourage sellers to improve product quality.

It is understood that Amazon will calculate the average return rate of the category. If the return rate of the seller's product is higher than this, it will be monitored. If it is higher than the bottom 25% of the average return rate, a "high return rate" label will appear on the product details page. For sellers, once this label is attached, the link is almost equivalent to being sentenced to death, the conversion rate will drop significantly, and some products will be washed out.

As for the sales volume, it is a reflection of Amazon's emphasis on products and consumers over sellers. According to Marketplace Pulse, Amazon's sales volume is rounded to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands, with an upper limit of 100,000, and the time length is one week or one month.

“The new metric is a clear popularity signal for shoppers. From the beginning, Amazon products have had a publicly visible sales rank — a relative popularity ranking within the category — that indicated how well they were selling, but most shoppers didn’t know it existed or how to view it.”

Being able to see how many other buyers have bought the product makes it easier for buyers to buy from an unknown brand. Platforms such as AliExpress and Temu have almost the same function.

Wang Ge, a cross-border merchant, believes that from these actions, Amazon hopes that the strong sellers will become stronger and clear out weak sellers and junk products . "To put it bluntly, the platform has no shortage of sellers, and it hopes to do its best to improve the user experience."

As for why Amazon has been so active, he believes that a key factor is the stimulation from Temu.

"Temu brought this Chinese e-commerce model to the United States, and the effect was very good. From Amazon's perspective, they also have to find ways to improve the conversion rate of the page and encourage buyers to place orders as much as possible. It can be said that Amazon is learning directly from them.

So what is Amazon's main purpose? From Amazon's logic, traffic is very expensive, so they hope that customers will place orders as soon as possible. Everyone thinks that Amazon wants sellers to spend more on advertising, which is the perspective of us sellers. From Amazon's perspective, they hope to facilitate buyers to complete transactions as soon as possible, so the high return rate label and sales display operations can be seen as starting from the buyer's perspective to increase conversions.

For us sellers, Amazon is just clearing out some bad sellers and products, but the core of this action is to improve the buyer experience and enhance the competitiveness of the entire platform. ”

These actions affect buyers’ purchasing decisions, and in a deeper sense, they influence sellers’ operations. For example, after Amazon displays product sales, the weight of sales increases, price wars escalate, new products are difficult to promote and require basic sales, the popularity of brushing sales outside the site increases, top monopoly, and more serious copycat products, shortening the validity period of the blue ocean. Big sellers admit that it will push platform operations to two extremes.

Amazon in 2023 will have higher operational requirements for sellers.