For a long time, low prices have been in Amazon's interest. However, this year, Amazon has increasingly felt that"The pain of low prices"。Recently, Amazon updated its sales policy and seller's code of conduct, which took effect on November 26.One of the provisions is: "Clearly prohibit price monopoly and manipulation of search rankings.".This clause has a great impact on sellersMany sellers have been warned or even banned by Amazon due to low price sales.
A seller revealed that its product sold for 12.91 dollars,Blocked by Amazon, just because the lowest price in the industry is $13.58, while most sellers price the product at around $15.Amazon's system believed that the seller deliberately manipulated to make its price unreasonably lower than that of other sellers, so it imposed a ban on sales.
A factory seller also said that although its sales cost was lower than that of ordinary sellers, it could not obtain more traffic through price advantage,Because as long as the product is below the so-called "normal price" range, you will receive a warning from Amazon.Another seller authorized his product to other sellers for sale18 dollarsProducts, marked asUS $60In this way, it appears that the seller's selling price"Extremely unreasonably low".As a result, Amazon could not help but say that it banned the seller's links with "price error". The seller has made repeated complaints, and there is still no result.After Amazon's new policy emphasizes the "prohibition of price monopoly", does it mean that similar things will happen again and again?▌Why does Amazon, which has always liked low prices, feel "pain"?Originally, Amazon has always regarded low prices (the premise of ensuring basic quality) as the standard.The core of Bezos' flywheel model is to lower the price, improve the customer experience, increase the traffic, and then attract more suppliers, and then promote lower prices, and then attract more customers.And so on.In the end, in the saturated competition and price competition between sellers, customers and Amazon themselves become the final beneficiaries.
(Amazon Flywheel Growth Model)However, since last year's "Amazonian Wealth Making Myth", a large number of new sellers have poured in, and old sellers have also increased their stores with large investments,For a while, the FBA warehouse was out of stock, causing a huge ecological change in the Amazon station.The sellers started a "big competition" of selling at low prices and making money at a loss.The saying of "Wu San Counter", "one cabinet for free, one cabinet for brushing, and one cabinet for second killing", is intended to be a joke, but more or less reflects the current situation that Amazon sellers are killing each other because of price war.Many sellers did not know much about the systematic operation when they came up, and they could only use blind price reduction, test delivery, second killing, crazy burning of advertisements, etc., almost using the game methods of domestic Taos.Because of the increasingly fierce price war, many sellers complained and suffered terribly.Some new sellers are discouraged and decide to quit Amazon. A Guangdong seller told Blue Ocean Yiguan egainnew that since joining Amazon this year,We have already lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and now we have decided to withdraw and prepare to transfer the American trademark.The seller is not a novice in e-commerce. He has been an experienced domestic seller for several years and has been operating a Tmall store with good profits. However, after entering Amazon this year, he was deterred by the fierce price war.Although low prices do bring benefits to Amazon and its customers, they continue to make the price war last. This is not good for the entire ecosystem of Amazon. Middle and long tail sellers will exit one after another. The rest of powerful sellers are likely to form a unified price front after the market makes room, move forward and retreat together, and raise product prices together, which will hurt consumers and the platform instead.An analyst said: "Although Amazon hopes to reduce its selling price through competition and ultimately promote its goal of" the lowest price in the whole network ", if the result of such competition,It is necessary to eliminate most sellers without resources and retain a few sellers with superior resourcesThis situation is not only bad for the platform side, but also bad for most sellers. For example, after being squeezed out of a group of sellers by low prices, the difficulty of breaking the monopoly situation for less advanced sellers has greatly increased.❑ This behavior of manipulating flow and draining water outside the station will be severely punishedIn the new version of the seller's code of conduct mentioned above, there is an important clause that prohibits "influencing the buyer's search behavior through incentives toIt shows natural search behaviorTo raise the search ranking).Indeed, this method is often used by many sellers,That is to say, people pay money to search for goods (keywords) repeatedly, which makes the system mistakenly believe that many people are searching for the goods and they are more popular, so they are given higher weight and ranking。Amazon has billions of listings, which are mainly managed by systems (robots). The system will record the search situation of a listing keyword and the buyer's search track, and the operator will judge the popularity of the listing and finally determine its ranking.Listing with more natural search traffic is often considered as a more popular commodity.What is natural search behavior? For example, I want to buy a camera, so I search for "camera" on Amazon, plus some words to help filter, such as color, or pixel.Click Search to find qualified products, click to view multiple comparison links, and finally select a purchase.This kind of natural search is often used by some sellers, that is, to disguise themselves by adopting the "artificially guided search, search and purchase mode", which is what Amazon said in the announcement "shows as a natural search behavior"。There is no doubt that this is the focus of Amazon's attack.In addition, Amazon once again confirmed that,Sellers are welcome to use coupons, discounts and other tools to increase sales.However, there is a coupon and discount behavior that Amazon is going to crack down on.On this issue, we can contact Amazon's announcement a while ago, that is, the clarification announcement about "Rebate, Coupon".
First of all, Amazon confirmed in the announcement that the instant kill, Coupon, Amazon social media code, etc. on the site are all official promotional and discount activities launched by Amazon itself,This is not illegal.It is illegal to attract customers to buy in the station through large-scale discounts outside the station,However, there is no trace of any promotional activities in Amazon.That is, the seller pushed the discount promotion outside the site, but no discount was displayed on the listing on the site.There is no doubt that this is a serious violation, which is considered by Amazon to be operational search ranking.To put it bluntly, your sellers should make low prices outside the station and also within the station.The original text roughly means "We welcome and environment couples, counts, deals etc. - but only when those interests are part of the product offermade in our store. ”In addition to this method, Amazon prohibits several specific acts of intentionally manipulating search rankings outside the site, such as: two steps URL (secondary hyperlinks), Super URL (hyperlinks), funds (landing page matrix), treasure hunts (treasure hunting mode), and the search find buy mode mentioned above.Amazon's crackdown on price manipulation and ranking is actually nothing new. Amazon has always adhered to this policy. This new code of conduct for sellers focuses on the control of "unreasonable low prices", especially the head monopoly sellers.❑ Amazon's ambivalence towards the head monopoly sellerIt is understandable for sellers to fear that their competitors are too strong. However, for Amazon, once it detects that the seller is not right, it is OK to directly seal the name? Why do we need such "repeated orders"?In fact, most platforms have a certain degree of monopoly on the head sellers and head sales channelsContradictory psychology.For example, during the recent Double 11, Taobao's head anchor Li Jiaqi and Weiya joined hands to boycott L'Oreal, forcing the international brands as product suppliers to lower their heads.For Taobao, this is a mixed blessing.On the one hand, as a platform to support the two major anchors, Taobao has gained a lot of benefits from the influence of the anchors, such as increasing the stickiness of traffic, and ensuring the sales data of the Double 11.But on the other hand, when the anchor grows enough to shake up large enterprises, it is not far from leaving the control of the platform. In fact, Li Jiaqi once released many videos on Tiktok due to the bottleneck problem of Taobao live broadcast traffic, indirectly forcing Taobao to give him traffic treatment.It can be said that the anchor with the ability of "say go" has had a huge impact on the ecology of Taobao platform, so Taobao has to be cautious.Amazon, as the leader of world-class e-commerce platform, naturally has this consideration.In fact, Amazon has begun to have a head concentration effect.According to Marketplace Pulse data, by the end of 2020, Amazon38800 sellers contributed50%Number of product reviews for.And the last1.3033 million sellersThe number of comments contributed only accounts for10%about.
That is to say, 2.3% of the sellers contributed 50% of the comments.If 2.3% of the sellers leave Amazon, how much will the ecological impact on the platform be? Although Amazon's comments are seriously flooded at present, once this happens, it will be devastating to Amazon.For these sellers, although Amazon does not need to "provide" like "Uncle", it is not willing to offend them unless it is absolutely necessary.This is why Amazon needs to make a good statement.If we really cut it all down, we will be happy. But what can we do to make up for the subsequent decline in sales and stock prices? (Article/cross-border e-commerce blue ocean Yiguan website domain news)
