News and Trends in the Amazon and Marketplace Ecosystem- EPISODE 179
DESCRIPTION
We’re back with the most recent news and trends in the Amazon and Marketplace ecosystem! If you've been tuning in for the last few weeks, you might have heard that our conversations were all about Instacart. After a series of Instacart episodes, we are back with some Amazon-related topics. There have been some significant changes on Amazon and we can’t wait to break them down and help you understand how they relate to your brand.
Make sure you tune in to find out more!
“It’s an incredibly important dimension in someone’s buying experiences to go and look at product reviews.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Amazon ERP (Early Reviewer Program) has come to an end officially. The Early Reviewer Program encourages customers who have already purchased a product to share their authentic experience about that product, regardless of whether it is a 1-star or 5-star review. This program is for registered brands only, and as a seller, you have to pay a nominal fee of about $50 to get Amazon to incentivize reviews for your product. Customers who participate in ERP will receive $1 or $2 if they write a review. It was a good tool in your product launch toolkit and something we recommended to our clients at Bobsled. Brands and sellers need to find a way now to fill that gap. Actually, what is happening here is that Amazon is distancing brands from reviews.
The second big change Amazon did was that brands, sellers, and vendors can't respond to product reviews. Previously, it was possible to respond and provide some customer service to that customer, offer a resolution to them or offer to get a replacement product, or even to correct some incorrect information that sometimes gets shared in these product reviews. So they took that ability away from brands.
Last year Amazon released a single click review system or rating system rather. So instead of having to write a review, along with providing a one to five-star rating, you could just write that product, one to five stars without any commentary. That has taken a step backward in creating a review ecosystem that is trustworthy, and not prone to abuse.
It's a very toxic ecosystem that can be created through these kinds of actions. In Boblsed we're digging into this a little bit more, to see what is the action plan here and how to fill all gaps caused by the changes mentioned above.
There's going to be an earlier Prime Day or summer Prime Day rather than a later Prime Day that we saw in 2020. That's because Amazon's inviting brands to submit their Prime Day deals between March 15 and May 9. Just because they've invited deal submissions from brands doesn't mean that it's a sure thing.
Amazon is seeing incredible success with early t-commerce efforts, combining TV with product placement and in entertainment shopping experiences. Their advertising ecosystem, fulfillment and shopping ecosystem has created this perfect synergy of capabilities to actually move ahead with t-commerce or television commerce. They've changed the game because people can do everything from their TV now. It also ties into some previous news that we saw a couple of months ago, around new targeting options in Amazon's DSP, which enable advertisers to target an audience based on their viewing habits. So in DSP, now, you can target shoppers based on directors of the film, like which film directors have they watched recently, what genre of TV do they watch, etc. There's really the perfect combination that Amazon's created here to really go deep into this new type of e-commerce experience.
Walmart has made some interesting moves in the advertising space recently. Some data shows that Walmart paid search has doubled. The amount of sponsored search placements that have been purchased by brands over a year basis has grown two times. And they looked across 40 high-frequency keywords. It's grown from 1.7 to 4.1 per month. In January, Walmart announced a shift in its digital media strategy rebranding Walmart media group to Walmart Connect and revealing plans to grow digital activations on-site in their stores and off-site while introducing new in-store activations. Walmart is getting creative with partnering with their stores offering more compelling placements.
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