Important Update: Updated Amazon Supply Chain Standards
- Effective on January 19, Amazon has increased its standards in order to improve its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) around human rights, the environment, and workers’ rights. These updates are focused on supply chain accountability. Upon request, Suppliers are required to disclose indirect hiring practices and any of their own suppliers, contractors, subcontractors, recruitment agents, or labor agents connected to the provision of goods or services to Amazon. This likely won’t be an issue for most sellers unless you are having quality issues or the manufacturer is flagged by Amazon.
- Potential Sales lift was just launched on the Listing Quality Dashboard. If your product listing is missing key attributes, such as brand or material, on the Listing Quality dashboard, the Potential Sales Lift metric estimates the impact on your sales of adding the missing attribute. The estimate is based on how much adding the missing attribute impacted sales for sellers similar to you in the past. With Potential Sales Lift, you can prioritize making the listing improvements that offer the most value to you. Great way to measure indirectly the benefit of good SEO and categorization.
60-minute Amazon Drone Deliver is Now a Reality in California & Texas
- Amazon drone delivery is available in California and Texas. Amazon hopes to speed up their last-mile deliveries from 1-2 days to less than an hour. In August, Amazon got the green light from the FAA to fly drones with a maximum payload of 5 lbs. That weight represents about 85% of Amazon’s last-mile deliveries. With these improved features, customers may feel even more encouraged to select drone delivery over traditional modes of shipping.
Walmart Made Over 6,000 Drone Deliveries in 2022
- Walmart completed more than 6,000 drone deliveries in 2022, according to a company announcement Thursday. Walmart now has 36 U.S. stores with drone delivery hubs, which are operated by DroneUp, Flytrex, and Zipline. The stores are located in seven states — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Walmart’s goal is to deliver 1M packages via drone per year. Walmart said in previous announcements on rollouts in Arizona, Florida, and Texas that customers within one mile of participating stores are eligible to use the service.
Amazon Finally Authorized Pakistani Sellers
- Pakistan ranks third among countries that have registered the newest sellers on Amazon. In May 2022, Amazon shut down roughly 13,000 Pakistani seller accounts that it suspected of fraud. The article includes some examples of scams that started as a result of opening up the marketplaces to new sellers. Amazon continues to crack down and make improvements to the platform. Like anything else, it takes some time for some of the kinks to be worked out so it can be more transparent and give more sellers the opportunity to enter the space.
More-efficient Annotation for Semantic Segmentation in Video
- To summarize; Amazon has improved its Artificial intelligence to better segment objects on images and videos. While right now the segmentation of the images is a manual process where a person is reviewing and segments the data. What this may mean for sellers is that as this technology improves approval of storefronts, advertising assets and other visual properties that will live on Amazon will have a shorter approval period. More info on AI learning to segment images.
Final Reminder Update to US Referral and FBA Fees Starting January 17, 2023
- Important Call Outs effective Jan 17
- Referral fees will remain unchanged
- Fuel & Inflation Surcharge being removed altogether, and a temporary charge that is being baked into FBA fees
Additional granularity in our FBA fees which will drive improved inventory health, more efficient use of Amazon’s storage, and create more capacity for sellers who are using space efficiently (Healthy Sell-through). A summary of fees is available here
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