E569: How to Access the New Amazon Dashboard, Get 1-on-1 Seller Support & More (Accelerate Recap)

In this episode, Dave recaps Amazon Accelerate 2024, highlighting some announcements that sellers should know about, and some developments that impact e-commerce sellers. 

Amazon Accelerate 2024 has just wrapped up this year, and there's been a few announcements that Amazon revealed that may or may not pass the smell test.  

In the online event, Amazon announced a range of new programs and services to help brands build relationships with third party sellers and increase their sales and profitability.

Apart from the announcements, Amazon is also making a big push to being a part of the entire supply chain process – from logistics to delivery. 

The Big Takeaways of Today's Episode

• Amazon Accelerate is the biggest event of the year for Amazon with over 4,000 live attendees and 450,000 virtual views.
• Amazon receives over 125 million product reviews annually.
• Same-day or next-day delivery 2x conversion rates.
• A new seller dashboard is available and offers better analytics for sellers.
• Live chat support is now available for all cases.
• One-on-one assistance is also now available for sellers.
• Amazon is starting to focus on owning the entire supply chain process – from logistics to delivery. 
• Buy with Prime aims to capture off-Amazon sales.

Amazon Accelerate Episode Timestamps

• 00:00 – Overview of Amazon Accelerate
• 01:17 – Key Statistics and Announcements
• 04:40 – Positive Developments for Sellers
• 11:44 – Skepticism Towards Amazon's Announcements
• 16:27 – Amazon's Supply Chain Strategy

As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com if you're interested. 

Don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. If you have any questions, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com. We'd love to help you in any way we can. 

Thanks for listening!

Until next time, happy selling!

Transcript

Ecomcrew (00:00.098)
Hey guys, it's Dave Bryant here and in today's episode, I'm going to give you a solo recap of Amazon Accelerate. So last week, Amazon Accelerate took place in Seattle and Amazon Accelerate is Amazon's biggest event of the year where they reveal a bunch of different things that Amazon's working on and also reveal some numbers. So in today's episode, I'm going to give you a recap of some of these important numbers, some of the important things that Amazon has rolled out or is working on rolling out.

And I'll also give you a bit of background on some of the announcements that Amazon made that I'm a little bit skeptical of. So if you didn't get a chance to attend last week's Accelerate, or you attended and you were just sleeping during most of the presentations, this will be a quick recap of what you missed. Ready to start and grow your own profitable e -commerce brand? This is the EcomCrew Podcast, the web's most transparent podcast.

where we don't hide our brands, our products, or our failures. From creating stellar products to selling both on Amazon and off Amazon. Keep listening for authentic stories, practical advice, and tactical tips for starting and running your own e -commerce business.

Ecomcrew (01:17.036)
Alright, so like I mentioned, I'm going to give you a recap of the major numbers and facts that Amazon revealed. I'm going to give you a rundown of some of the announcements that they made, and I'm going to divide it into two sections. Announcements that they made, which I think are going to be good for sellers and which are overall positive, and announcements they made, which I'm just skeptical of across the board. Let's start off though with some big numbers that Amazon revealed. First off, attendance for Accelerate.

So they announced that there are over 4 ,000 live attendees and 450 ,000 virtual views. So they say it made it the biggest Amazon Accelerate ever. Okay, big deal. Let's move on to the more interesting things. So an interesting little tidbit that I picked up, which I thought was kind of cool, is that they announced that every year they receive this many million product reviews and ratings. What do you think it is? Well, I knew it was a lot and you probably knew it was a lot, but I was shocked at

how big it actually was. So every year they receive over 125 million different product reviews and ratings. That's across all marketplaces. Over 100 million ratings and reviews. And this is part of Amazon's competitive mode is having all these reviews and ratings. I know our website gets nowhere close to that and probably yours doesn't either. So Amazon announced that there's five billion items which are eligible for same day or next day delivery. And this is pretty staggering.

when you think back about how far e -commerce has come. So when I started, geez, 15 years ago, getting an item within a week was absolutely amazing. And typically it was more like 10 to 14 days. So Amazon really has revolutionized logistics for e -com companies and it's staggering the fact that there's that many items available for same day or next day delivery. What's also interesting is Amazon said that when an item is available for a same day or next day delivery, conversion rates double and I believe this.

It makes sense. So I know me as a customer, if I can get an item same day, I'm much more likely to buy it. And this is kind of the reason why Amazon, for better or worse, rolled out lot of these placement fees and is basically forcing us sellers to divide our shipments to a bunch of different FCs. Amazon knows that shipping our items all throughout North America and distributing it makes these items available more sooner for customers and it helps conversion rates. Yes, it probably decreases costs for Amazon too. The fact that

Ecomcrew (03:40.974)
Now we're paying to have that inventory distributed instead of Amazon. Yeah, that helps, but overall it does definitely help conversion rates. And I believe them when they say it doubles conversion rates. The other interesting thing that Amazon revealed is that pretty soon you're going to be able to link your PayPal account to your Amazon Prime account. Now that would have been a lot bigger news 15 years ago. I'm not sure how many people still use PayPal. It's a bit of a dying payment processor.

And so the fact that PayPal is now getting into bed with Amazon is a sign of the times. And I know PayPal is now a separate company from eBay, but 15 years ago, imagining PayPal and Amazon sleeping together, it was unfathomable. So I'm not sure if this really makes a difference for sellers or customers one way the other, but it was kind of an interesting little tidbit that you can link your PayPal account to your Amazon Prime account now. Okay, now let's talk about the good about what was revealed at Amazon.

Probably the most interesting thing and good thing that Amazon revealed, kind of came at the end of one of the keynotes and they announced that you get access to a new seller dashboard if you go to nextgenselling .amazon .com. So this is pretty cool. When you get back to a computer, visit nextgenselling .amazon .com. It will automatically already be integrated in your Sellafcentral account and it's basically a way better analytical dashboard.

than Seller Central is right now. And the closest thing I can compare it to is either your Shopify dashboard or a Google Analytics dashboard. So it's actually a very useful dashboard. And most of the information that's in there, you can already get through different selling reports, but it's just a lot cleaner way of looking at all these analytical reports. So highly suggest you go to nextgenselling .amazon .com. It's already in your account and it is a nice dashboard for seeing a bunch of different metrics, whether it's sales, overall, seeing,

comparative sales, seeing important metrics, things like your IPI score, your average inventory age, just all those different metrics which are important to sellers, it's a nice dashboard, so check it out. The other thing they announced, which you've probably seen as a seller, is that live chat is now available in 100 % of cases. And I know I've noticed this as a seller, that hey, I always seem to have a live chat option. And last year, this was not always there. In fact, it was more often than not, not there.

Ecomcrew (06:07.63)
So the fact that we now have it as an option for 100 % of our cases, that's a good thing. It's not quite as good as phone, but live chat is definitely better than opening a case log. The other thing Amazon announced is that you now have the option for one -on -one assistance. Now what does that mean? It means that you can opt in for certain cases to have a single person handle your case from start to finish. So we've all been in one of these situations before where we have.

Jane looking at her case on day one and John looking at her case on day three and then Paul Geet looking at it on day three and what happens is one person doesn't know what the other person is saying and basically you get a new response every single time and it's frustrating. So Amazon now is allowing you to speak with one person, start to finish. To Amazon's credit, this is actually pretty innovative and I don't recall really seeing this as an option in almost any big company. The opportunity to have one single person

work with you on a problem. Now this is where I'll splice some skepticism in. So the first bit of skepticism I'll add to this is that right now, one -on -one assistance is only available for listing problems. And that's really not the major problem which sellers run into where we wish we just had one person helping us. No, we normally wish we had one person helping us for an account suspension or funds being held, that type of thing.

not really listing related issues. So yeah, it's great that we have one -on -one assistance, but it would be nice if it carried over to other issues rather than simply just listings issues. However, they did announce that it will roll out to different areas of seller support in the future. How quickly that happens, how many areas it applies to, we will see. Overall, it's a really nice change that they've made, having that one -on -one person the entire way through.

The other thing is that Amazon also announced that you now have the opportunity to escalate a case on pretty much any case. And we've all kind of known that this is the old hack that you need to do. So when you open a Seller Central support case, generally you get referred to the lowest tier of customer support. It's generally overseas based and they don't have a lot of authority to correct problems. And you would have to ask for that case to be escalated. And if you were…

Ecomcrew (08:26.038)
a smart seller and you knew about that, then you can get your case to solve a lot quicker. Now they're rolling out basically a one click option to have your case escalated. Now I suspect Amazon may kind of regret doing that because I think everybody is going to click that button on pretty much every single case because the lower level of support often can just be really frustrating. I think people will give up on it pretty quickly and opt to have a case escalated more often than not.

But it's a great option now that you can basically have a case escalated with one click of the button. Again, the last kind of good news that Amazon announced is an inventory defect portal. Now there's good and bad to this, and I'll get about the bad and the part I'm skeptical about in a second, but from the good, this inventory defect portal looks really good. So you can see all your cases that are open, you can see cases where Amazon has lost inventory, where you are eligible to open a case for it, you can see.

Just an overall good overview of the different reimbursements that are available to you, what reimbursements you have received, and basically everything to do with reimbursements. This is in line with what Amazon has been doing overall for the last few months, and they've really clearly been turning a lot of attention to how they deal with reimbursements. So the big one that they announced a couple months ago is basically that we have less time to file for these cases once inventory is lost, which

is overall really bad news for sellers because it's way too short of a time period that they're giving sellers to open these cases. And I think the writing is on the wall that basically Amazon is trying to phase out these reimbursement services as much as possible. And part of the reason is that Amazon just wants to penny pinch and they don't want us getting reimbursements for as many issues as possible. The other thing is, is that definitely these reimbursement services have been tiptoeing into –

gray hat areas and very black hat in some scenarios. So basically they, I shouldn't say they, some of them have been guilty of applying for lost inventory that maybe was not necessarily lost. So these services might proactively apply for a refund for a lost shipment, which was never actually sent in in the first place. And so where a lot of this gimmickery was happening was these services would allow you to generate packing slips, even if those items were not actually shipped.

Ecomcrew (10:47.15)
So the fact that you can generate a packing slip kind of after the fact is already kind of a bit of a suspicious thing that's going on. know, packing slips should be generated as that item is packed and sent out. And yes, there are cases when you would want to generate a packing slip after the fact, but overall these services were sometimes doing it in a way that wasn't very genuine. So I think Amazon is looking at easing out of these reimbursement services and trying to…

chip away at their business simply from a P &L standpoint and also a standpoint where, you know, there were some bad actors in the space. And to be fair, most reimbursement services are acting in a genuine and good way, but there are some which are tiptoeing into some questionable tactics for claiming reimbursements. So on that note, let me now tiptoe into parts that I'm skeptical of Amazon's Accelerate conference and announcements they made, which I think

Either you have to read through the tea leaves and see what Amazon's really saying or things which are probably just bad news for sellers overall. The first one is regarding reimbursements, what we're just talking about. So Amazon announced that they will proactively reimburse us for lost inventory. So my first question was, why weren't they doing that before? And my second question is, are they actually going to reimburse us for all lost inventory? The cynic in me believes that Amazon is not going to reimburse us for

as much inventory as they lose and they will only proactively reimburse inventory in very, very binary cases where it's clear that they lost that inventory. A case I can imagine where Amazon would not proactively reimburse inventory, we ship in 10 units of product, the receiving team never scans in 10 items, they scan in nine items, they say, you didn't send us 10 items, it's impossible that we didn't scan all of our items correctly. And in a case like that,

I don't think Amazon's going to proactively reimburse lost inventory. Now, in a case where that inventory's physically been scanned into their inventory, they've tracked it the whole way, and all of a sudden it's just gone missing, yeah, I think they'll probably reimburse it. But I think there's a lot of edge cases where they're not going to reimburse lost inventory. And I think the writing on the wall is that they're going to make it harder to file for reimbursement for these edge cases. The next thing I'm a little skeptical of is Amazon had a lot of AI -related announcements, which you would expect.

Ecomcrew (13:10.178)
And the big one that they announced was a seller assistant called Amelia. So Amelia is basically an AI help bot. And I guess I should actually say there's some good and bad to this help bot. So the bad, which I can immediately kind of imagine is that these AI help bots will be even more useless than seller support is right now, and especially the overseas seller support. And so that's a scary thing is if Amazon's trying to push everybody into AI support.

is that going to slowly decrease the resources that they have for seller support overall and actually speaking to somebody live? And I mentioned just a few minutes ago how Amazon's now offering you the ability to chat live with somebody and to have a one -on -one person. So it seems that they are still putting a lot of resources and attention to having that live support, but who knows down the road, will it be harder and harder to actually speak to a live rep? We'll see.

Now, with that being said, there were a couple of interesting things when it came to Emilia and having these AI support tools. The first one, which immediately made my ears perk up, was they announced that with some of these AI support tools, they'll be automatically able to generate your listings for you. And I've always been skeptical of this, like, hey, Amazon, I don't want AI writing my bullet points and my descriptions and that type of thing. That's our company's competitive advantage, that we can make better listings than the other guy. However, there's some interesting

parts about the AI listing generation, which I never even thought about. So the first one is just generating listings in mass. So for us, it's not really a thing because we have dozens of products and it's easy enough to create these listings one by one. If you're a reseller though, and you have thousands of products, you can basically now give Amazon a list of the URLs on your website or even a competitor's website where you're buying those products from if you're a reseller, and Amazon will fill in as many details as possible for those listings.

So if you're a reseller, that's massive. Like it will make listing generation way easier. The other thing which is applicable even to smaller sellers is you'll be able to upload a CSV file or an Excel file in pretty much any format and Amazon will automatically convert that to their requirements on the fly through AI. And if you've ever used Amazon's flat files, they are frustrating to deal with. Flat files overall, no matter the platform are just frustrating to deal with because you get one little field wrong and it

Ecomcrew (15:32.918)
rejects the whole thing and you gotta either figure out the error in the best case scenario or redo the whole thing in the worst case scenario. And so the idea of AI being able to just convert these spreadsheets and be kind of intelligent about how they convert them, that is music to my ears. And I can definitely see how that will work well. know OpenAI and ChetGPT, they do a great job of this already. So if Amazon's AI tools are leveraging.

open AI or they have a great AI backbone behind them, this could be really positive for sellers. So plot files, it's one small thing that a seller gets frustrated with, but there's a lot of different things like this where come to think of it, yeah, AI actually could be pretty useful for sellers beyond just generating bullet points and product descriptions. Yeah, so I think those are the main things which I looked at as positive developments for Amazon and some of the things which I viewed as skeptical.

I guess one final thing to wrap up on here, which I forgot to mention anywhere throughout this podcast, is that there was a huge emphasis on supply chain by Amazon. You've probably seen supply chain by Amazon mentioned, either in Seller Central or in various different blogs and podcasts. Supply chain by Amazon is basically Amazon trying to own the entire logistical experience from the point of your factory all the way into a customer's hands. So basically, Amazon is trying to cut out

every single logistical middleman in the entire process. So whether that's the freight forwarder, so if you're using Amazon Global Logistics, they're trying to cut out those freight forwarders and get you to use Amazon as your freight forwarder. 3PLs, so with AWD, they're trying to cut out 3PLs, and then of course the carriers, so they're trying to cut out UPS and FedEx and have their own logistics carriers making the deliveries to customers.

So Amazon emphasized this throughout the conference and you can see they are just trying to cut out every single logistical middleman and provider that's out there. And concurrently with supply chain by Amazon, Amazon was really emphasizing buy with Prime. So we've all had buy with Prime pushed on us as sellers and basically what Amazon's trying to do is get us to integrate buy with Prime onto our Shopify sites. And basically…

Ecomcrew (17:47.202)
What Amazon's trying to do is say, hey, we know about half of all e -commerce sales occur off of Amazon. Well, we want a bite of that cake too. Okay, either we want you shipping MCF, Multichannel Fulfillment, with Amazon, even if that order is occurring on your Shopify site, or even better, we want you using MCF and buy with Prime, and we want to own that transaction. We want to take a cut of that.

dollar value sale that the customer is making with you. So if they buy something for $100, we want them to process that $100 with us, Amazon, and we're gonna take our cut of that as well. So Amazon wants to take a share of those off Amazon sales, which is absolutely terrifying that they're going after that too. Ultimately though, if you do run an off Amazon site, you have an option of course to enroll in Buy With Prime and MCF. You don't have to, but.

Clearly that's what Amazon's trying to do. They're like, crap, know, we can't really dominate e -commerce anymore on our own platform. What can we do? We can go out and get all these sales which are occurring off of Amazon. Try to get a little bite of those sales as well. So yeah, Amazon was really pushing supply chain by Amazon and buy with Prime and just they're showing where some of their attention is going and it's trying to get these sales which are occurring off of Amazon. They're trying to dominate all of e -commerce.

So hopefully that gives you guys a good recap of what happened at Amazon Accelerate last week. As is typical with Amazon, it was a lot of Amazon PR and fluff, but there were some pretty big announcements that they made as well. So hopefully that was useful to you guys, and until the next one, happy selling. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the EECOM Crew Podcast. If you haven't done so already, please head over to iTunes and leave us a review. It helps more than you know.

Did you know that eCom Crew has a ton of free content, including eCommerce courses? Head over to eComCrew .com slash free to check it out today. That's going to do it for this episode of the eCom Crew Podcast. Until the next one, happy selling and we'll talk to you soon.