Amazon's front-end search page crashed, and sellers' orders plummeted

Amazon's front-end and back-end systems frequently experience abnormalities, and sellers' orders are no longer guaranteed ...

In recent days, Amazon's search page has displayed abnormalities, causing a sharp drop in orders from a large number of sellers, which has made the already declining order volume even worse. In order to save orders, sellers have escalated their price wars this year, with some selling at a loss and others spending more than $100,000 on advertising in a single month.

The search page crashed and the Amazon front desk was abnormal

Yesterday, many Amazon sellers discovered that there was a bug in the front-end page again. Many pictures on the search page and product details page could not be displayed. Only the title was displayed in the picture position, and the advertising module disappeared.

Many colleagues once suspected that there was something wrong with their network, but they couldn't solve the problem after changing several browsers, and even using a VPN was of no help.

Amazon page bugs have frequently occurred in recent days. Last Friday, many sellers reported that a large black circle appeared when logging into the backend of the US site.

Since last week, the front page of Amazon has been showing abnormalities since the black cookies appeared in the backend. Sellers have been exhausted in the past few days.

“—I haven’t recovered for days, and I thought I was the only one;

——I have been unable to log in to my backend for 3 days, and there is a big black circle every day;

——It’s been several days, and I can’t brush anything out. It’s so annoying;

——It’s useless to climb over the firewall, the pictures are all cracked. ”

In response to this, Amazon customer service replied: It is just a technical issue and has been submitted to the technical team for urgent processing.

The abnormal display on the front page directly affected the seller's orders. One seller said that the number of orders has decreased a lot in the past two days, becoming one-third of the usual number. Another seller had a similar situation: "The number of orders has dropped a lot in the past two days, and the conversion rate is also poor. ACOs are about to go off the charts."

At present, some sellers have explored a solution to the problem: Network and Sharing Center - click Change adapter settings - right-click and select Properties - Internet Protocol Version 4 - Change the DNS server to: 114.114.114.114. You can try to modify it, and some people have successfully passed it.

However, the poor order performance is not the fault of this page anomaly. In fact, many sellers' orders have plummeted, and the sharp decline in orders has continued for many days, which is reflected in Amazon's traffic search.

According to the category search traffic data of Amazon US released by Momentum Commerce, in July this year, the search traffic of Amazon US site decreased by 2.4% year-on-year, continuing the year-on-year decline trend. In June, this indicator decreased by 3% year-on-year, and the overall search traffic continued to decline.

As traffic and orders both declined, sellers had to resort to tricks, the most common of which were: increasing advertising investment and lowering prices. One seller counted the data for August and actually paid 120,000 US dollars in advertising fees to the platform ; some sellers also sold at low prices and fought price wars to grab orders.

"We launched more than 1,000 new products to test the waters, but the price dropped from 27.99 to 14.99," said a seller. This year, price wars in many categories on Amazon have been fierce, and old products have been decimated, leaving little profit. As soon as new products are launched, they are targeted by competitors for low prices, causing many sellers to have to sell out their stocks at a loss.

Even big sales cannot avoid the curse of a sharp drop in profits.

Youkeshu, a well-known seller in the industry, has suffered losses for three consecutive years. In the first half of this year, its revenue was 235 million yuan, and its net loss attributable to shareholders of the listed company was 59.2862 million yuan; Hanwang Technology, the parent company of Amazon's digital painting product brand UGEE, is expected to lose more than 46 million yuan in the first half of this year; Greebo, an Amazon garden seller that just went public this year, had a revenue of 2.581 billion yuan in the first half of the year, and its net loss attributable to shareholders of the listed company was 53.91 million yuan...

Sellers' way to survive: digging for gold in new markets to maintain profits

Obviously, as competition intensifies, even big sellers who have worked hard for many years cannot guarantee profits, let alone many small and medium-sized sellers. In order to keep their business, sellers must change their business thinking.

When it becomes difficult to make profits in the American and Asian markets, many sellers have turned their attention to other markets, among which the economically developed Australian market has become everyone's first choice.

In 2022, 9.4 million households in Australia will shop online, accounting for 82% of the total number of households. Currently, Australia's Internet penetration rate is as high as 96.2%, and the e-commerce penetration rate is 74.0%.

Data shows that Australia's total consumer retail spending in 2022 was US$353 billion, a year-on-year increase of 9.2%. Online sales were US$63.8 billion, an increase of 1.7% over the same period in 2021. The percentage of online retail sales in total retail sales also increased to 18.1%.

As a developed region for online shopping, Chinese products are also very popular in the Australian market. In 2021, 20% of Australians purchased products from Chinese sellers, and 40% of the purchased goods came from China.

There are many popular online categories in Australia, such as electronics and accessories, household goods, fashion shoes and clothing, gardening, etc. In addition, there is a significant trend of younger online shoppers in Australia. For example, on Amazon Australia, users aged 25-34 account for 30.22% of the total users. It is predicted that in 2023, Australia's e-commerce revenue will exceed US$43.2 billion, with an annual growth rate of 10.4%.

Australia's cross-border e-commerce market is showing strong growth momentum. Amazon Australia has achieved great success in just three years, setting a sales record of over US$1 billion in annual revenue. In 2020, Amazon Australia's sales increased by 99.4% year-on-year.

One Amazon seller once had an average daily visit to the Australian site exceed 300 and a monthly sales of nearly RMB 70,000 without any off-site traffic during the peak season ! The seller said: "Australian consumers are very generous in placing orders, and the traffic is greater than expected."

In April this year , Amazon said that the Australian site had more than 14,000 sellers, many of whom were small and medium-sized enterprises. In the past year, they sold nearly 27 million products, an average of 50 products per minute.

Amazon opens a new 200,000 square meter distribution center to expand into the Australian market

Compared with the severely involutionary US market, the Australian market has brought some sellers a big surprise. According to a recent report released by SimilarWeb, Amazon's website traffic in Australia has more than doubled in three years, making it one of Amazon's fastest growing markets.

In recent years, Amazon has also been vigorously creating opportunities to develop the Australian market. In June this year, Amazon announced that its new distribution center in Perth, Australia will be completed soon and will be put into use later this year to cope with the upcoming holiday shopping season. The new distribution center is more than twice the size of the original one, covering an area of ​​about 200,000 square meters and capable of storing more than 3 million items.

In order to better assist Chinese sellers in shipping goods to Australia, Amazon has also cooperated with high-quality service providers. After strict assessment and review by Amazon, Souma Logistics, which focuses on Australia , officially joined the Amazon SPN service provider network in August this year and became an official service provider of Amazon SPN. In the future, it will be able to better provide cross-border sellers with first-leg logistics solutions.

Sooma Logistics is an international freight forwarding company focusing on China-Australia logistics. Headquartered in Shenzhen, it can provide Australian cross-border e-commerce sellers and traditional B2B traders with domestic collection, FBA first leg, air and sea transportation dedicated lines, China-Australia small package direct mail, international express delivery, overseas warehouse storage and transportation, label change, overseas warehouse one-stop shipping and other Australian full-chain services.

At present, the Shenzhen warehouse is 3,000 square meters, the Shanghai warehouse is 6,000 square meters, and a new warehouse for cargo collection will be opened in Yiwu this month. Sellers can choose Shanghai warehouse, Shenzhen warehouse, and Yiwu warehouse for shipment. We have booking business in Qingdao, Xiamen, Tianjin and other ports, and we have first-hand contracts with shipping companies such as COSCO and EMC. The space is stable, the warehouse and the container are guaranteed, which can better meet the needs of sellers for nearby shipment from different sources.

Not only that, it also has an 8,000 square meter warehouse in Sydney, Australia, which can provide value-added services such as overseas warehouse storage, transit and transportation, label change, and drop shipping.

The company established a professional operation team in 2017 and has a complete cross-border logistics supporting service system. It adopts a pre-customs clearance mode at the destination port and can quickly handle the transportation of goods between China and Australia. Its IT team independently developed the Sooma Logistics Small Package System, Large Cargo TMS System and OMS System, which effectively improved the logistics turnover efficiency.

At present, in order to give back to cross-border sellers, Sooma Logistics has also launched a limited-time discount event: the first successful order using the OMS system can get a 188 yuan freight discount coupon; the first order of an old customer who introduces a new customer can get a 288 yuan freight discount coupon. Sellers with needs can click on the entrance to get more details.

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