Weekly News Roundup (November 6 – November 12)
This is your dose of weekly eCommerce news for the week of November 6th to November 12th.
Discount Provided by Amazon
We reported this last week, but Amazon discounting third party seller items is still causing a lot of stir that it's worthy of another mention.
While sellers still get the full price as Amazon shoulders the brunt of the discounts, many of them feel that this move cheapens their brands. It’s a big issue for sellers who market other manufacturer's products and are subject to MAP pricing. This also makes sales tax collection even more confusing. If Amazon can discount prices on items they don't own but fulfill, shouldn't they collect sales tax?
Even though sellers can opt out of the program, it still gives Amazon a troubling level of control.
Alibaba's Huge Singles' Day Event
Alibaba launched its annual Singles' Day shopping event, generating a whopping $1 billion within the first two minutes and $8.6 billion dollars in sales within 1 hour.
While the Chinese company was hosting a gala to kick off the event that featured Maria Sharapova and Pharrell Williams, people from at least 192 countries were flocking the ecommerce giant and snagging deals in the background, with 93% of transactions done via mobile.
Mobile Will Outpace Desktops
Alibaba's Singles' Day success is proof that shopping on mobile devices is gaining a lot more ground, with Adobe saying that traffic to ecommerce sites on mobile will outpace desktops for the first time in history, starting with this year's holiday season.
Shoppers in the US alone are expected to spend more than $107 billion online this holiday season. Adobe predicts that the 5-day stretch from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday will account for $19.7 billion.
Sellics New PPC Automation Feature
Advertising plays an important role in bagging a chunk of those billions this holiday season. Sellics has announced its new PPC bid management automation feature, helping sellers who run Amazon ads save time in monitoring their keywords.
The PPC automation feature allows sellers to create custom rules that automatically change keyword bids based on performance. Rules can also be set to pause unprofitable keywords in Manual Campaign and set unprofitable search terms to Negative in Automatic Campaign. Definitely a time saver!
State of the Merchant Survey
Needless to say, time is a very precious commodity for entrepreneurs. That's why EcommerceFuel is offering something very exciting in return for your time answering their annual State of the Merchant Survey.
One lucky participant will receive a round-trip plane ticket to anywhere in the world, up to $1,500 in value!
This survey aims to better understand and help independent store owners like you. It takes about 10 minutes and is 100% confidential and anonymous.
Go to www.ecomcrew.com/stateoftheunion to take the survey.
EcomCrew Updates
We have officially increased our podcast to twice weekly until the end of the year, with new episodes coming out every Monday and Thursday.
For our Monday episode, Dave and Mike interviewed David Couillard, an entrepreneur who has been running an ecommerce store while traveling with his wife and son for the last 4 years. Go to ecomcrew.com/94 to find out how he is able to pull it off.
We also had Andrew Youderian of EcommerceFuel as our guest for our Thursday episode. We talked about the behind-the-scenes of how he grew and sold his successful dropshipping businesses. Go to ecomcrew.com/95 to learn more.
In a new blog post, Dave discusses how more and more Chinese sellers are selling directly to consumers, and how Amazon is helping them do so.
This means a significant increase in competition in an already competitive market.
Check out Dave's blog post to learn how to protect your sales and maintain your market share.
That has been your update for November 6th to November 12th. Stay tuned for more updates next week. Until then, happy selling!
