Are you caught up on all-things Amazon? Do you know what’s in the pipeline and about to affect your online business? If not, you’re in the right place. Stay tuned for today’s top headlines.
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Stay Private
By the time you’re reading this, Amazon has already listed your business address on Amazon.com. However, this article points out that anyone could find your address beforehand by changing the URL on a seller’s profile to the Mexico or UK site. Moral of the story, if you currently use a home address as your mailing address, consider changing that to a UPS mailbox to keep your personal life private.
Amazon Inventory
It’s no secret that Amazon’s working hard to clear its warehouse of extra products. Starting September 15th, Amazon is charging $6.90 per cubic foot or 15 cents (whichever is higher) for products that have sat for 365 days or longer. If you’ve got large products sitting in storage, now’s the time to clean house.
And regardless of size, you’ll need to move products fast. If you’re not shipping products directly from a supplier, order smaller amounts of product and frequently stream products through Amazon to manage inventory without adding endless fees.
Improve Your Listings
Amazon has introduced a new tool that helps you improve listings. Find the listing quality dashboard on seller central. Here, Amazon recommends improvements for all of your existing listings. Speaking of, check out Todd’s recent episode all about improving listings on slow-selling products. His mining method helps you snag exclusivity agreements, higher ROIs, and bigger bottom lines. Click here for more information on Todd’s upcoming webinar that will break it all down from top to bottom.
Prime Day
When is Prime Day 2020? That is the question. Recent reports speculate an early October date. October is really the last month Amazon can host Prime Day without dipping into the holiday selling season. No matter the case, the fourth quarter is quickly approaching and that always means one thing: stock up on products! COVID has boosted online sales and this holiday season shows no signs of slowing.
Amazon Accountability
A recent court order holds Amazon responsible for faulty products. Amazon supports this so long as it applies to all competitors, including rivals who don’t warehouse and ship to third-party sellers. Ultimately, Amazon will push this back on us sellers, likely requiring that we have expensive liability insurance with Amazon listed as the payer.
In short, with more regulations, Amazon will make it harder for new sellers to thrive on its platform. That’s why now is a great time to get started on Amazon and establish yourself as a top seller while you still can.
Overall
In a sea of negative news, we’ve also got stories on Amazon delivery drivers saving kids and dogs. And if you haven’t heard, Amazon is closer than ever to drone deliveries.
Hopefully this helped you weed through the headlines, good and bad. Be sure to check out information on Todd’s upcoming webinar so you too can find golden products among those collecting Amazon dust.
As always, happy selling everybody.
Resources From This Episode
- Amazon driver finds girl on the side of the road: ‘I’m not going to leave’
- Amazon Buyers Can Find Your Home Address In 30 Seconds? How to Keep Your Personal Information Safe
- Long-Term storage fees
- Amazon Accelerate
- Listing quality dashboard
- Todd’s upcoming webinar
- Wholesale Mine & Refine Method, Finding Gold on Amazon
- When Is Amazon Prime Day 2020?
- Burning laptops and flooded homes: Courts hold Amazon liable for faulty products
- Amazon Prime Air drones secure FAA exemption
- Amazon Delivery Driver Saves Senior Dog from Drowning in Backyard Pool
Outline of This Episode
[00:19] Todd’s introduction to this episode
[00:55] Amazon driver saves girl
[02:26] Protect your privacy
[05:05] Storage wars
[08:12] Amazon Accelerate
[10:53] Let Amazon help your listings
[13:24] When is Amazon Prime Day?
[16:37] Amazon’s accountability
[25:25] Updates on Prime Air
[28:06] Amazon driver saves dog
[29:50] Todd’s closing thoughts on this episode
Transcript
Todd (00:00):
Amazon drivers save a little girl and to save a dog. When the heck is prime day, Amazon’s liable for your products. It’s a bird, it’s a plane. No wait. It’s Amazon prime air drones, and much more. Stay tuned for Amazon news.
Announcer (00:19):
Welcome fellow entrepreneurs to the Amazon Seller School podcast, where we talk about Amazon wholesale and how you can use it to build an eCommerce empire, a side hustle or anything in between. And now your host, Todd Welch.
Todd (00:36):
What’s up everybody welcome to this week in Amazon news, a lot of really good articles that we’re going to dive into. Make sure if you want the links to any of the news in here, you can get that at amazonseller.school/39. Since this is episode 39, but let’s go ahead and just dive right into the news.
Todd (00:55):
All right. First article from journal news, Amazon driver finds girl on the side of the road. So this is an interesting one. The Amazon driver was delivering packages and she saw a car in the bushes, went to investigate and found a little girl on the side of the road called 911 and stayed there with the little girl until the police arrived and made sure the little girl was safe. Apparently what happened is the father’s vehicle had been stolen and reported stolen about 30 minutes prior the person stealing the vehicle, probably didn’t even know the little girl was in there when they found the little girl was in there.
Todd (01:41):
They just abandoned the vehicle, which makes that person a really horrible person. I mean, it’s one thing to steal a vehicle. Another thing to like hide the vehicle in the bushes. When you find out there’s a little girl, just kind of crazy, but really cool that the Amazon driver found this little girl called nine one one and helped reunite her with her parents. So just a nice feel, good story there to start things off. Always nice to hear people doing good things like this, and this just happens to be an Amazon driver. So pretty cool news. So I wanted to bring that up here to you. Always good to start things out on a positive note.
Todd (02:26):
This next news article comes from helium 10 and it says Amazon buyers can find your home address in 30 seconds. How to keep your personal information safe.
Todd (02:37):
Now I bring this one up because the day that this episode is going to be going live is the day that Amazon is going to start showing our address on amazon.com or your business address, whatever address you have registered on amazon.com. And I’ve mentioned this already in the past, and that if you have your home address on there, you probably want to get a mailbox like from ups or boxes, mailboxes, et cetera, or something else to use as your business address. Now we have to keep in mind, right? That whatever address you use, you need to be making sure that you’re using that as your business mailing address. It doesn’t have to be your business shipping address so you can have multiple addresses. So you can have your business mailing address. So I have my mailing address as a scanning service. And then my shipping address is my warehouse.
Todd (03:38):
So they can be separate. And as long as that mailing address is on the invoices that you’re getting from your suppliers, Amazon will still accept that invoice. So make sure it’s the same, but what this article points out is that people could actually get your address prior to September 1st. And it was really easy to do. So if you go to a product page, you can click on the seller’s name. And when you click on the seller’s name that brings you to the seller profile, which is where now they’re going to say, or where they’re going to show your address. And that is for the.com. But in the past, they had already shown this for like Mexico and the UK and other places. So the trick that they pointed out here was you could go to the.com seller profile, change the.com to like.com.mx, which I think is the Mexican marketplace, the Mexico marketplace, or change it to.co.uk, which is a UK marketplace.
Todd (04:41):
And it would have shown your address already. So not really something new, it’s going to be easier for people to find your address, but they could actually find it before. So just keep it in mind. Your address is going to be public information on here already. So get a mailbox or something. If you don’t want people seeing your personal email address.
Todd (05:05):
Next up here are some news articles from Amazon themselves. So in seller central dashboard, these popped up. Coming soon, longterm storage fee inventory cleanup. So September 15th is the next hit of the longterm storage fees. And these fees are going to be high. They’re going to be $6 and 90 cents per cubic foot or 15 cents. Whichever is higher. So if you have smaller products, it’s not too bad. If you have a bigger products, it’s really going to hit you. And so this is where any inventory that’s been in there for 365 days or longer.
Todd (05:45):
Now we all know that Amazon is working hard to clean up their warehouses because they are overstock in their warehouses. They literally do not have any more storage space in a lot of their, so they are hitting people hard, trying to get product out that’s not selling. They only want you to store product that’s in there. And it’s selling really quickly. You know, we’ve seen with the IPI score where you can’t be below 500, or you get severe restrictions and individual restrictions on products where you can’t send the products in. Now I’ve heard reports that the number of products you can send in for a product is going up as the sales history sees higher sales velocity. So hopefully they continue to do that. I’ve already run into it with my products, not being able to send the number of products in that I want.
Todd (06:40):
Literally I’ve ordered like 500 and I could only send in a hundred and some. So I’ve got a bunch of sitting back here in the warehouse and I can’t send them in. So I’m just streaming them in. So you’re going to have to decide how you want to do that. Either selling fulfilled by merchant, perhaps the product that you have sitting on hand or have it in stock like I’m doing. And every time I make a shipment, I see how many more of that product I can send in and send it in. So I’m constantly streaming that product into Amazon. A lot of people are going to be doing FBM. I’m not a really favorable on the FBM. I don’t like it. I like doing the FBA. So I’m streaming my inventory in. I may start doing some FBM if it gets really bad and I’m running out of stock on Amazon, we’ll see what happens, but it’s going to be a struggle.
Todd (07:27):
Amazon is trying to free up space and make sure people are not sending in a ton of products. So you’re probably regardless going to have to have stock ready to go. If you’re not shipping directly from your supplier, you’re going to have to have it in your warehouse, ready to send in. And you’re probably going to have to order small amounts if you’re ordering from your supplier and just having that constant stream of product going into Amazon. If these are products that are selling a lot of stock very quickly. So definitely keep that in mind, September 15th, getting stock out of there, that’s been in there 365 days or more. S0 do not get hit with that.
Todd (08:12):
Next news on Amazon do not miss out on Amazon accelerate. So Amazon is going to be having a free conference here. There’s a, it doesn’t show a lot of information, exactly what they’re going to be talking about.
Todd (08:26):
It’s going to be skewed towards brands. It says here day one, keynote, we’ll kick off with a fireside chat with Jeff Wilkie CEO, worldwide consumer. So that might be a little bit more information about selling internationally is going to be my guest. So if you’re interested in that, you can definitely check that out. Now it says we will cover three main topics during the event, building your business toolkit, discovering what’s new, getting ready for peak. So probably good information for wholesale. But day two though is going to be Christine Buecamp president of Amazon fashion. We’ll share how to build a standout brand on Amazon. So that one is going to be more interesting for brands, but us wholesale sellers might want to check it out as well. Because as I’ve talked about cleaning up brands and helping brands grow, knowing this information will be very beneficial to you.
Todd (09:25):
If you’re going down that path of trying to get exclusives and help brands grow their business and offer that additional service on top of just selling their product to try to get those accounts open. So that could be very good information there for us as well. Day three Devesh Mishra, the VP worldwide supply chain will discuss the state of our operations and roadmap for FBA. So that is probably going to be really good information as far as managing your stock and supply and how Amazon is doing, storing all this product and shipping it out and how they are trying to upgrade their facilities. So definitely something probably to check out if you’re able to it’s free. So, you know, a lot of times you get what you pay for. This is probably going to be a lot of information and how to, or how Amazon is trying to make things better for us and for brands and things like that.
Todd (10:26):
So just keep that in mind, but just wanted to point it out for you so you can check it out. If you are available September 1st to third, to check out this virtual event that they’re going to be doing for us. And I’ll put links to the virtual event in the show notes. So you can click over there and definitely check out Amazon accelerate. If you want to just go right there, it’s register.amazonaccelerate.com to find out more information.
Todd (10:53):
The next news coming out of Amazon is that they have this nice new tool for improving the quality of our listings. So they’re calling it the listing quality dashboard. And if you head on over to it, you will see all of your listings that they recommend improvements for. And they actually show the information that they’re recommending you fill out. In the previous episode, I talked about how we can go about finding gold on Amazon, right?
Todd (11:24):
These listings that are collecting dust, buy the products, bring them into Amazon, maybe be the first FBA seller, clean up the listing, taking nice pictures, the bullets, the title, the description, and all that great stuff. So this kind of goes right into that as well. If you’re looking at improving listings, you can come on over to the listing quality dashboard and find additional things that Amazon is recommending that you fix to help get your product in front of people, more information to get better, search results, more information for the customer. So this goes right in hand with that. And if you did not check that episode out, I highly recommend going back and checking out episode 38, where I talked about finding gold on Amazon and gifting these listings all to yourself. And in fact, I’m going to be doing a webinar on this.
Todd (12:22):
So you can definitely check that out as well. amazonseller.school/mine, M I N E. And you can get all the information on that. That’s going to be a paid webinar, but I am going to go in depth on how I am getting these products with 75 to a hundred percent ROI, and really boosting my bottom line on these products. That definitely check that out and definitely check out this listing quality dashboard as well. Now, if you’re just looking for that listing quality dashboard in your seller central, you just have to hover over inventory, go to manage inventory. And then in the list of links that they provide at the top of managing inventory, one of them is listing quality dashboard. Right now it’s the very last one for me, but you never know they move that stuff around. So that is where it is currently.
Todd (13:15):
I’ll put links to the listing quality dashboard in the show notes aswell entrepreneurventure.com/39. So you can check that out also.
Todd (13:24):
Alright, this next, the news is from PC gamer.com. When is prime day 2020, when the heck indeed right. Previously on Amazon news, I reported that Amazon prime day was supposed to be sometime in September. It’s looking more and more like that is not going to happen. According to this news article, it’s looking like it’s going to be in October. As of the recording of this, the Amazon 2020 prime day landing page is, does not have any dates on it really at all. So no information there, but according to elite email supposedly that PC gamer.com is referencing here. They are looking at October we’re fifth as a possible date, but nothing is solid on this, but really October is the last month as they point out in this news article that they could really do it after October.
Todd (14:26):
Then you have black Friday, and you’re really in the thick of the holiday selling season and prime day is supposed to be a summer selling day. So October is really yet my guests. They would do this in the beginning of October, unless something really crazy happens with COVID and coronavirus and all that craziness. So with riots and else that’s going on in the United States right now, let’s hope they do it in October 5th. As I’ve mentioned, prime day is a day where you can see your sales, literally quadruple or more by for doing nothing really. That whole week becomes like a high sales week that you can really move a lot of product. Again, it looks like they’re pushing it back from September to October, we’re still going to want to be prepared for this regardless, right now, you want to be expanding the inventory that you’re carrying.
Todd (15:20):
I mean, I’ve expanded a lot of my inventory out to 90 days, sometimes even longer. I’m trying to get a business line of credit right now from my bank of up to a hundred thousand dollars so that I can really stock up for this holiday because the sales are just going to be insane. They’re already insane. Since coronavirus hit, it’s been like holiday season the entire summer, which normally the summer, you see sales dip a little bit, depending on what category you’re in this summer has just been exploding. The last I looked at my seller central account. My sales have increased by 230% from last year, this time. So it’s just crazy time on Amazon prime day looks to be even more crazy. And this holiday season is going to be just exploding on Amazon, as everybody looks to buy gifts and everything else online as much as possible.
Todd (16:22):
So they don’t have to physically go to the store to get the stuff. So make sure you’re preparing for that. Stocking up extending the days that you’re staying in stock and just getting prepared for this holiday season. That’s coming.
Todd (16:37):
All right. So this next article is from the Washington post headline reads burning laptops and flooded homes courts, whole Amazon liable for faulty products. Multiple court rulings have found that e-commerce giant responsible for defects in product sold by third party merchants on its marketplace. So this is a huge news article with major repercussions. If these court rulings hold up essentially what they are saying is that Amazon should be liable for the products that you and I sell if they hurt someone. So if you and I sell, and the example they use in this court hearing is a laptop battery that caught on fire and burned down someone’s apartment and burned them.
Todd (17:30):
They’re saying that Amazon should be held liable for that rather than the sellers of the product or the manufacturers of the product and their reasoning is because the sellers of these products often will disappear. They might be Chinese sellers, so they just leave the U S or whatever. And there’s no one to hold accountable. So they’re saying that Amazon should be held accountable because they’re selling the products, which isn’t really true, right? Amazon is providing the platform for us to sell the products. So this is going to have major repercussions so far. It said that there have been court hearings in Texas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and California, where this has been upheld or something similar California is actually trying to pass a bill that would hold Amazon accountable. So we’ll see where this goes. I definitely think Amazon would probably take this all the way to the Supreme court if necessary.
Todd (18:38):
And they did say that if Amazon is to be held liable than Amazon supports a measure that would require the law to apply to all online marketplaces, including its competitors, who for example, do not warehouse and ship products sold by third party merchants that drew intense opposition from several Amazon rivals, including Etsy is chief executive. Josh Silverman wrote in a blog post. The measure will saddle small businesses with complex, hard to comply with legislation that only they can afford to absorb. And he’s absolutely correct there, regardless of if they only impose this on Amazon, it’s going to hurt us small sellers that are selling on Amazon. It’s not going to hurt Amazon. Amazon will take this in stride. And what will happen is that they’re going to push it back on us. Most likely they’re gonna number one require that we all have super strong liability insurance, that names Amazon as a primary payer of that insurance.
Todd (19:43):
And it’s going to be expensive. We all should have product liability insurance anyways. And the price has not been too bad on that in the past, but Amazon, it has not really pushed that requirement either. They will probably start requiring us all to have it and provide proof of that require a minimum for it as well. Well, and that they be named in that liability insurance, very similar to the liability insurance I signed. When I got this warehouse, they required a $2 million liability insurance policy. And I had the name, my landlord in that liability insurance. So if I burned down the place that my insurance will pay my landlord, so he can rebuild the warehouse here or whatever he decides to do with the money. So that is definitely one thing that amazon is going to require if this kind of stuff goes through and they are probably going to be even more strict on sellers who are trying to sell on Amazon.
Todd (20:43):
And they’re going to favor the big sellers and more established sellers with better seller feedback. So that is going to become even more important. I’ve talked about that in the past requesting seller feedback has been something I’ve done from the beginning because it came from my private label days. That’s something where you request feedback and reviews on every single sale because reviews are so important. And now even more important is going to become the seller feedback in terms of how Amazon treats you on Amazon. So I’ve said over and over, there has never been a better time to get in on Amazon. And I repeat that now it’s going to continue to get harder. So if you can get in now ahead of all this stuff before the government starts clamping down on Amazon, even more and makes it maybe nearly impossible for new sellers to get in.
Todd (21:39):
You want to do that now, start selling, get in, get grandfathered in, get learning all of this stuff, because as it gets harder, the barrier to entry, it gets harder. The profitability of those of us in there is going to go up and it’s going to get better for established companies. So become one of those established companies right away. In my opinion, I don’t think Amazon should be held liable for these products. Now, should Amazon require a sellers to have insurance and everything else? Yes, I can definitely see that being a good thing. But if you look at this, you could really make a case that if you’re going to say that Amazon, because they store the products and shipped it for us. What about every single website that is out there, the internet service provider or not the a service provider, but their website hosting company allows them to sell their products on the internet and USPS or ups or FedEx ship, those products to the end customer.
Todd (22:43):
So technically couldn’t you make a case that the hosting company is partially liable for a product that was hazardous and was bad and hurt someone. And that ups and FedEx and USPS were also liable because they ship that product, right? It’s a little bit different because they didn’t physically store the product in their warehouses, but Amazon is just taking that product. So this could really hurt any three PL that I’ve talked about in the past as well. Third party logistics, any company that stores a product for a company. If these lawsuits are upheld, technically could be held liable. So it’s going to become a lot harder for any kind of business and a lot more expensive for any business to store their products anywhere that isn’t their own warehouse, because that insurance is going to have to go. The cost of that is going to have to go up.
Todd (23:47):
The liability is going to have to go up. And those companies that are storing product are going to have to store or are going to have to charge a lot more to cover all that additional costs and any possible lawsuit that could come back on them. So this is going to have major repercussions throughout retail, throughout any kind of company that stores products, depending on where this goes. So it’s going to be a really interesting case to follow. Definitely. We’ll probably go to the Supreme court. And this is one thing that I’ve talked about in the past, right? About crony capitalism. So what I read there about Amazon saying they actually support this measure as long as it applies to all their rivals as well. Amazon’s the monster. And when big business gets in bed with big government and passes laws and regulations claiming to support and help the consumer, of course, it really ends up supporting the big business like Amazon, because then it’s almost impossible for a small business to start and compete with these big customers with these big companies, I should say, because of all of these regulations.
Todd (25:02):
So we always have to find that balance between regulations and free markets. I always air on the side of free markets, as I’ve said in the past, there’s always unintended consequences of everything that government does. So we always have to keep that in mind, big news there though, for Amazon sellers, we’re going to have to keep an eye on that and see where that goes.
Todd (25:25):
Next up here from paxax.aero is this one of the business of passenger experience website news, the headline reads Amazon prime airdrone secures FAA exemption Amazon’s prime air drone delivery plans scored a boost on Thursday. The federal aviation administration approved an exemption, allowing the company to move forward with operations while working towards formal certification of the MK 27 UA aircraft and the airline operations, the approval comes with significant limits, but allows the company to continue development of the platform and supports progress towards the necessary certifications.
Todd (26:10):
So if you’re watching this on video, you can see the picture here of the drone. It’s pretty cool. Just think of like a drone that you’d normally see. It’s got prime air on the side. It’s a little bit bigger, of course, for carrying packages and things like that, but really cool to see Amazon moving forward with the Amazon prime air and air delivery. So I definitely think we’ll see this sooner, rather than later, they’re pushing forward with this. And as people want faster and faster delivery, and they proved to Amazon, they’re willing to pay extra for that delivery. It’s gonna keep moving forward and pushing technology like these, this drones are getting better and better at being able to self navigate and flying at levels high enough that you and I can’t hear them all the time and then delivering packages. So it’s going to be a very interesting, interesting future for delivery.
Todd (27:11):
We could potentially buy a product and have a drone deliver it within minutes or hours and going to be interesting because these drones keep in mind are going to be unmanned. They’re going to be programmed to just fly out, deliver these packages. They’re not going to need employees and things like that. So people like to talk about the automated future, where we may not need employees. And this is a step towards that. An inevitable step. You know, it’s going to be interesting finding the balance between automation and having things for people to do. That’s a whole nother discussion, but I’m a technology geek, a computer geek. So I love seeing this kind of stuff moving forward and look forward to maybe a package being delivered by drones at some point, for sure.
Todd (28:01):
And last but not least, we’ll finish this up with some happy news.
Todd (28:06):
Amazon delivery driver saves senior dog from drowning in backyard swimming pool. John Cassabria . Ray said I happened to be in the right moment at the right time. An Amazon delivery driver delivered the gift of life. When he saved a dog from drowning during one of his routes, John Cassabria was out delivering packages and Wilburn Massachusetts earlier this summer, when he noticed an animal struggling to stay afloat in the deep end of a backyard pool, I saw what looked like a snout. And at that moment, my heart sank, he told the local news outlet upon realizing that it was a pup in trouble. Cassabria said he immediately jumped into the pool with everything on and didn’t take anything off. The delivery driver had his phone wallet and watch on when you hit the water. Cassabria said, none of that matters. So you dove into the pool, saved the dog.
Todd (29:01):
It looks like a Husky here. And just a pretty cool story. Another one where Amazon delivery driver is making a difference out there. Always good to point out these positive news stories. I think because there’s so much negativity out there. If we reported on every positive thing that happens in life, you’d never hear the negative news stories. So we always got to keep that in mind, right? The news is full of constant negativity, especially right now in an election year. If we reported on every positive news story, there wouldn’t be time for the negative. So there’s so much positive out there, but all only always hear about the negative. So that’s why I wanted to bring these to your attention and a great way to end the news here. So with that, check out the show notes at entrepreneurventure.com/39, and a reminder on the webinar that I’m going to be doing here very soon, the live webinar on how you can find gold listing on Amazon, Polish them up a little bit and get all those sales. to yourself with 75 to a hundred percent ROI. Check that out. amazonseller.school/mine. That is going to be the wholesale mine and refine method that I’m going to be teaching you guys. So definitely check that out. So with that, Todd, well, to your host, signing off happy selling everybody.
Announcer (30:34):
This has been another episode of the Amazon Seller School podcast. Thanks for listening fellow entrepreneur and always remember success is yours. If you take it.
