Order volume drops to 20%, sellers: I won’t do business with Amazon anymore

At the beginning of 2023, sellers set performance goals and were ready to work hard, but a large number of sellers found that the reality was not as good as they imagined. Since February, there have been voices in the seller group that "the number of orders is decreasing", and some sellers even plan to leave. In addition, low prices are still the main theme at present. Some sellers are grabbing rankings by low prices, and some sellers are clearing out their inventory.

Orders keep falling, sellers: I can’t bear to watch it!

When talking about the recent order volume, "decline" has become a hotly discussed keyword among sellers. Many sellers even directly said that they "can't bear to watch it". They thought that last year's slow peak season was over and the order volume would improve after the New Year, but the reality gave them a heavy blow.

The editor interviewed several Amazon sellers, and they all said that the recent order volume is not very good. One seller said: "The traffic on the US site has been very low recently. In the past, we could get hundreds of orders every day, but now it is considered good if we can get more than ten orders a day."

Another seller said: "Since February, the number of orders has been decreasing every day. If this continues, I will have to live on poverty."

In addition, on some social platforms, you can also see many sellers complaining about the recent extremely poor order volume ↓

There are only a few orders every day.

Today's order volume is only a fraction of yesterday's.

Suddenly I feel that the order volume in January is much better.

The order volume is getting worse day by day, and today is less than half of the usual amount.

Question of the Day: Are sales a bit sluggish today?

With a serious decline in orders and poor performance, sellers are reluctant to open the backend because they always face the same disappointing scene: only a few orders. As a result, some sellers do not open the backend and rarely check sales with the mentality of "out of sight, out of mind".

Some sellers began to doubt whether they would be able to sell on Amazon. Some even lost confidence in Amazon and started to give up completely: "The number of orders per day is limited anyway, and all sellers are madly rolling in. The profits have been diluted to the point where they are almost gone. I won't run ads anymore. I'll just leave two links and take orders. I can still make more money. I'll quit Amazon after I've sold everything. "

Within Amazon, old sellers are competing fiercely, new sellers are still pouring in, and the platform is also constantly increasing various fees, such as the cost of expanding storage capacity. Outside Amazon, emerging platforms such as Temu are seizing the market. Some sellers with small scale and low order volume are facing a difficult situation. It is particularly urgent for them to break the current deadlock and find new growth points for order volume.

When asked about the reasons for the decline in orders, some sellers said that it was probably because many competing products emerged on Amazon, which pushed prices to new lows, mainly products priced below $12 . With reduced traffic, some sellers even cut their product prices by half in order to get orders and grab rankings. They used ultra-low prices to grab higher rankings, which had a huge impact on the orders of sellers with similar purposes. However, behind the massive price cuts, whether these sellers can maintain their profits is still an unknown.

In sharp contrast to the above sellers, a small number of sellers said that their recent order volume is similar to that of the previous period, and some sellers even saw a slight increase. However, compared with last week, many sellers agreed that the order volume has decreased. In this case, there are also sellers who are optimistic and say, "This reason is normal. The order volume will always fluctuate. Let's look forward."

But for a large number of sellers, while they look forward, they still have a lot of inventory to clear.

Spring products are on the rise, sellers: winter products have not been cleared out yet

"Spring products are on the rise, but a lot of inventory from last winter has not been cleared out, which is very worrying," said a seller. It costs money to put new products on the shelves, and the funds cannot be used until the inventory is cleared out. The various fixed expenses every day are a headache , and it is almost suffocating.

Sellers who have the same problem are not isolated cases. Last year's peak season was not busy, but many sellers still prepared stocks according to the usual plan. As a result, after the big promotion, some sellers faced two major challenges: one was too much inventory to sell; the other was a surge in return rates. Sellers with too much inventory to sell accounted for a relatively high proportion, which became the most troublesome problem for sellers.

In major social forums, you can often see topics such as "Clearing inventory as soon as you start working", "Troubled on how to clear inventory", "Can you recommend a service provider for recycling inventory?" etc. It is enough to show that for most sellers, there is a problem of too much inventory.

For buyers, as the peak season in January has passed, clearing inventory has become the main theme for some sellers. A few sellers said that their inventory balance is not much, which is relatively easy to clear, and they have already cleared the inventory through low prices + in-site advertising. However, the situation of some sellers is not optimistic. The remaining inventory is nearly 3 times that of last year , and most of them are seasonal products. It may be a bit difficult to clear them all.

Some sellers chose to directly abandon their remaining inventory at the beginning of the peak season. However, some sellers tried to clear their inventory through in-site advertising, but chose to abandon it after little success. However, they now find that the abandonment fee has doubled, so they have no choice but to abandon it at the current price.

A recent survey of 500 US retailers by an institution showed that 46% of retailers are facing the problem of excessive inventory. If they cannot sell this excess inventory, retailers are very likely to face the risk of a broken capital chain. Therefore, many retailers choose to offer discounts to clear excess inventory.

On average, each small retailer, with annual revenues between $100,000 and $1 million, has an average of $48,000 in excess inventory, while large retailers, with annual revenues between $100 million and $500 million, have an even more serious problem of excess inventory. The categories with excess inventory are mainly concentrated in baby products, luxury goods, household goods, gardening and clothing.

In the US, Walmart and other offline retailers are clearing out inventory through discounts. They are not clearing out unsalable products, but products that were previously hot sellers. As a result, they launched more discounted products with faster delivery times, giving full play to their local advantages, which has led to a cooling of overseas consumers' enthusiasm for the online market. At the same time, the demand for related categories has also changed, which has affected the order volume of some sellers to a certain extent.

2023 has just begun. Although the order volume of many sellers is currently in a downturn, I believe that with the recovery of the economy, the order volume will gradually improve.

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