3 Key Takeaways from Amazon's Accelerate Conference 2021

Amazon recently hosted their Amazon Accelerate annual virtual conference in which its effort is to assist third-party sellers in developing their businesses and enhancing their brands through partnering with Amazon. We had a variety of takeaways throughout the two-day event.

We know positive reviews can be incredibly valuable to sellers, so we wanted to outline the most effective ways we found to receive valid product reviews on Amazon without violating Amazon’s terms of service.

New Features: Search Analysis Dashboard Tools

One of the key elements of Amazon Accelerate was the debut of a variety of new features becoming available for sellers. Amazon announced two new dashboard tools as part of Amazon’s Search Analytics Dashboard launching in Q1 of 2022.

• Query Performance Dashboard: This tool shows search queries relevant to specific brands and will allow sellers to better understand their top search terms associated with their products. With this information, Sellers can target keywords in their marketing campaigns and identify opportunities to grow their product portfolio based on customer interest. With this dashboard, Sellers are able to receive insight into 4 funnels:
• Impressions – you can see query volume, impressions, brand count, brand share
• Clicks – clicks, click rate, brand count, share count
• Cart Adds – cart adds, brand count, brand share
• Purchase – purchases, purchase rate, brand count, brand share
• Catalog Performance Dashboard: This tool helps to identify how customers interact with product detail pages and better recognize conversion issues in their sales funnel at a product level. Beyond funnel reports, sellers will also have access to understand their price competitiveness of their products to optimize their marketing investments. With this dashboard, Sellers are able to receive insight into 3 funnels:
• Impressions – price, deal badge, best seller badge
• Clicks - click rate, deal badge, best seller badge
• Purchases - conversion rate, price, deal badge, best seller badge

Innovations Focusing on Growth of Brand over Resellers

In 2021 alone, 100,000 new brands joined Amazon’s US marketplace. In an effort to assist brands in building and maintaining customer relationships, Ian Simpson, VP of Selling Partner Tools and Services at Amazon stated:

“We are constantly innovating for brands and excited to share some of our latest tools, services, and other benefits including the Amazon Brand Referral Bonus, Amazon Customer Engagement tool, A+ Story Cards, and Customer Review Resolution tool.”

Some of these new tools Amazon announced as benefits to brands include:

• Brand Referral Bonus: together with Amazon Attribution this recently launched initiative allows sellers to earn a bonus up to 10% of sales from external traffic driven to Amazon up to 14 days after clicking on the advertisement.
• Customer Engagement Tool: this brand-exclusive solution allows you to use email marketing to engage and connect with your customers when they follow your Amazon Store to build brand loyalty and ultimately increase customer lifetime value. *Note: brand must be registered in brand registry, have a brand store page and have followers of your brand in the Amazon Store.
• A+ Story Cards: enables brands to tell their brand story through visuals and better connect shoppers with their other brand products.
• Customer Reviews Solution: this tools allows brands to see all review feedback in one place and track customer sentiment. Additionally, brands can respond to customers to increase satisfaction and offer a courtesy refund if chosen.

In addition to the tools listed above, and other benefits we’ve already seen such as stores, A+ content, Posts, virtual bundles, and brand follow, the Manage Your Experiments feature could help brands better understand what content drives their customer to conversions.

Manage Your Experiments

Amazon has rolled the Manage Your Experiments tool, which allows sellers to run A/B testing on A+ content, titles, and main images so sellers can learn what content resonates with customers versus what doesn’t.

This feature is recommended to run 8-10 weeks (although can run as little as 4 weeks), and uses the notes feature to document your hypothesis. These experiments do not affect search ranking and shares potential 1 year impact on sales. Amazon provided some tips when using this tool:

• Experiment on high traffic ASINs
• Make one big change at a time
• Don’t test minor differences in content
• Don’t end your test too early

In addition to the Manage Your Experiments feature, Amazon announced the Opportunity Explorer.

Opportunity Explorer

Becoming available to business sellers in 2022, the Opportunity Explorer tool helps brands discover customer demand for new product ideas. To access this tool, go to Opportunity Explorer or navigate in the Menu to Growth > Product Opportunity Explorer.

With this, brands can better understand Amazon customer search and purchasing behaviors to determine the opportunities available if consumer demand is unmet, and allows brands to meet that demand through offering new products. It is explained in more detail below:

“You can explore up-to-date and accurate data on customer needs and the current selection on Amazon. Customer needs and selection are bundled together into niches. Each niche has a unique set of characteristics, which determine the economic potential for new products in the niche.”

Emphasis on Global Growth & International Marketplace Success

Amazon announced that they will be introducing several new product features that enable brands to explore more opportunities internationally. With additional functionalities for global selling, Amazon is launching new tools to help in expanding beyond the US with a seamless experience when looking to manage business globally.

• Customer Service by Amazon: specifically for merchant-fulfilled and 3P sellers, this service gives brands the option to have Amazon manage their customer inquiries, refunds, and returns on self-fulfilled orders. Currently Amazon announced they will offer this service for free or at a discounted rate depending on the seller’s customer contact volume.
• Marketplace Product Guidance: this tool assists in scaling business globally by determining what products should be offered internationally and gives suggestions in particular catalogs (Cross Listing, New Products, and Niche Market).
• Global Inventory Viewer: allows a “one-shop experience” to monitor inventory supply and demand across all stores and integrates with Send to Amazon, limiting out of stock issues.
• Global Listing: enables sellers to list once on Amazon and sell that product in multiple countries, this feature saves brands labor costs and would significantly speed up launch time in marketplaces.

With nearly 75% of US shoppers using the marketplace to discover new products and brands, Amazon is constantly testing and launching new features, betas, and platforms to help their businesses best deliver the right products to the right customers.

As the opportunity in Amazon expands, it’ll become increasingly crucial to stay up to date with these innovations as the marketplace world grows more competitive.

Feel free to reach out to us today!