Amazon reveals product sales, sellers are about to face a bloody battle

Yesterday, Amazon disclosed the sales volume of some categories of products on the front desk without any warning. This sudden move surprised the sellers and caused considerable concern.

The industry believes that the transparency of Amazon's sales will directly intensify internal competition. In the future, price wars on the platform will become more intense, orders will move closer to the top and middle levels, new products will be difficult to promote or require basic sales, the blue ocean incubation period will be shortened, and the importance of off-site deals that can increase sales will increase. Small sellers will face a bloody battle.

Some categories show sales volume, sellers are panicking

On e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com, it is normal for product searches or detail pages to show recent sales. However, sellers who are accustomed to seeing this data were shocked yesterday because it was Amazon that showed the product sales data this time. In the more than ten years before that, Amazon never made this data public, and sellers could only capture some traces through third-party software.

Now, Amazon proactively displays product sales on the front-end of PC and mobile terminals, covering multiple categories such as toys, clothing, home furnishings, maternal and child products, wigs, etc., such as showing that the product was "purchased 800+ in the past week" or "sold 3k+ in the past month".

Currently, sales data only appears on the US site, and the data display is not yet fully open, and some categories are still not displayed. However, sellers generally believe that sales display will gradually extend to all categories.

Gaming Chair

wig

Toy

Faced with this situation, some sellers said they were "going crazy". On the one hand, the sales volume showed that the degree of involution would rise sharply, and on the other hand, the huge sales gap made sellers restless.

"I just checked it out. I, who sold over 400 last month, was trembling next to a bunch of competitors selling over 2K..."

“Looking at my 50+ bought in the past week and the 800+ bought in the past week next door, I don’t know what to say.”

"My product has not yet shown sales, and when I look at the competitor products next to me that have weekly sales of 200+ or ​​400+, I can't help but fall into deep thought..."

"It's a pity that my new product has been put on the shelves and has not started selling yet."

In online shopping, product sales data is an important indicator. As the seller said, among a row of products with sales of 1k/2k+ and a similar product with sales of only a few hundred, everyone will prefer the product with high sales. However, products with sales of less than 50 seem to have no data to show that new products and old products with poor sales are more difficult to stand out.

Perhaps the sales data is not fully functional when it was just launched. Even if the same keyword is used for search, some sellers can see the sales data, while other sellers cannot see this data even if they log in to their accounts and add zip codes. However, some of the data is visible after changing the browser. In addition, the sales of some products are displayed in the front-end search results, and some products can only be seen after entering the store.

In addition, sellers' feedback on whether the sales data displayed is accurate is also very different. Some sellers say it is "very accurate", while others say it is significantly different. " Compared with my own sales, the sales volume displayed on the platform is not as high as the actual sales volume, but the difference is not big either. " said a seller.

When the sales data first appeared, the industry was still unclear about the platform's statistical method. Some sellers analyzed that if there is a large gap between the sales data displayed by Amazon's front desk and the actual sales, there are two possibilities: one is that the platform only counts the sales of a single variant, and the other is that it only counts the order data of successful payment/successful delivery.

Sellers followed this idea and made a new discovery. The sales displayed on the front end are indeed more like the sales of a single ASIN. "At first, I compared the sales of the parent body, and it felt that the sales displayed were inaccurate. When I compared the sales of a single ASIN, it was almost the same."

If the displayed data is not much different from the actual sales volume, then whether it is completely consistent is no longer the most important thing. What is important is that this change will change the Amazon careers of many sellers.

7 major impacts of public sales volume , sellers will face a bloody battle

The reason why Amazon's public sales volume makes sellers panic is that it will profoundly affect the seller's business in several aspects, including product orders, new product promotion, and operation strategies :

1. The weight of sales volume increases, and price wars escalate. After seeing the sales volume, many sellers' first reaction is that the internal competition will intensify. Data transparency increases the weight of sales volume. When the sales volume of a product is far different from similar products, the most direct way to attract buyers is to lower the price; at the same time, low prices are also conducive to the rapid accumulation of sales.

In fact, Amazon has raised a number of storage fees in the United States, Europe and other sites this year, but competition in the industry is fierce, and few sellers have raised prices to cope with it. Insufficient market consumption is a major factor. According to the Adobe Digital Price Index, in February 2023, the price of the US online retail market fell by 1.4% from the same period last year and 0.3% from the previous month. The US online price has fallen year-on-year for the sixth consecutive month. In this case, a price war among e-commerce sellers is inevitable, and Amazon has now added fuel to the fire.

2. New products are difficult to promote, and the concept of basic sales volume emerges. In the case of a pessimistic market, sellers have been very cautious about promoting new products. Now the platform publicly discloses sales volume. If a product with sales of less than 50 is not directly displayed, then if it is operated in a conventional way, it will be difficult for new products to get out of the novice village. After all, no one is willing to place an order for a product with no sales record, and sellers will face greater resistance to promoting new products.

Next, new products will need to be put on the market. One seller pointed out that in the future, anyone who does not make basic sales will be embarrassed to say that they are promoting new products. Taking the domestic e-commerce market as an example, making basic sales has become a common operation.

3. Off-site sales have become a hot battlefield for "boosting sales". In order to quickly accumulate sales, sellers will not only promote sales on the site, but also increase sales through low prices off-site. This is more obvious in highly homogenized categories and seasonal products. The basic sales of new products in the early stage of listing will also come from this to a certain extent.

4. Top monopoly. Sales data magnifies the advantages of top links. The Matthew effect will make the strong stronger. High-sales products attract more potential consumers to place orders, while orders for products below the waist are taken away, and the survival space for small sellers is reduced. Even if they have to buy volume at a low price through off-site channels, the top sellers with strong funds will still have a crushing presence.

5. Product plagiarism is more serious, and the validity period of the blue ocean is shortened. In the past, sellers selected products through data from third-party software, which inevitably resulted in errors. Now that the official has personally unveiled the sales volume, it will naturally become a new channel for product selection. As the sellers said, product plagiarism will become more serious, and the possibility of hot-selling or potential products being plagiarized will increase, especially in clothing or customized categories; at the same time, the validity period of the blue ocean market will be shortened, and the speed of its transformation into a red ocean will be greatly accelerated.

6. Some BSRs have fallen from grace. After sales became transparent, an interesting phenomenon is that some BSRs that seem to be firmly at the top have tens of thousands of reviews, but their sales are not much different from those of products with only a few thousand reviews. However, this may be because the sales displayed are for a single ASIN.

7. Product selection software faces the risk of being eliminated. Amazon has begun to publish sales data, and some software that relies on this data will have no place to stand. Sellers compare platform data and third-party data and find that there is a clear discrepancy between the two. Which one should be used as the standard? The answer is self-evident. For ordinary sellers, one of the few benefits of publicizing sales is that they can save a sum of software fees. And these service providers will need to find new entry points.

Not long ago, Temu displayed the daily sales of products on the front desk. Some sellers believe that Amazon may have been stimulated by this move and hopes to attract more consumers through considerable transparent data. Temu's new sites are constantly launched, eroding the low-priced product market of online platforms such as Amazon.

Whatever the reason, Amazon has taken the step of disclosing its sales volume, and sellers need to bear the huge chain reaction that comes with it and explore new opportunities.

Amazon US