AMAZON SELLERS NEWS
https://awesomers.com/140 show page
Steve talked about several news items.
1) Jeff Bezos claims Amazon is getting beat by 3rd party sellers, so stop saying Amazon needs broken up.
Steve shares his views on why that arguement is absoluteđź’©đź’©!
And he totally ignored this wildly unfair situation positioning their own brands above 3rd party sellers!: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/03/amazon-removes-special-promo-spots-for-private-label-products.html
Articles refercing Bezos' letter:
https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2019/bezos-shareholders-letter-third-party-sellers/
https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-amazon-shareholder-letter-bezos-says-aws-targeting-specialized-databases-for-specialized-workloads/
2) Steve talked about brand analytics and demographics which are a step in the right direction. Amazon did recently talk about the fact they removed the pricing parity requirement as a way to try and appease politicians calling for the company to break up.
https://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-caves-on-seller-pricing/550388/
Hopefully these improvements are only the beginning.
The article below the Amazon PR machine which touts 50 other ways it is helping sellers.
https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2019/04/09/amazon-sings-50-ways-to-help-your-seller/
3) Steve mentioned that Amazon is going to start adding retail taxes to FBA services which the great Paul Rafelson thinks is an illegal take on cost of goods sold, and we think he is right! Check out the Online Merchants Guild to support their legal efforts to fight the man! The Guild's efforts to get Amazon to collect taxes and stop the states illegal collection activities is bearing fruit. https://onlinemerchantsguild.org/treasurerletter/
Amazon gets pressure to do the right thing from sellers like us, the OMG, and Fiona Ma:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/new-treasurer-americas-populous-state-taking-amazon-114917764.html
Then this happened:
https://abc7news.com/business/california-online-sales-tax-increases-/5228284/
Now we just need to get them to stop their criminal like collection activities seeking back taxes from sellers instead of from Amazon.
Steve called out the BETA concept for cross border trade that the Empowery Co-op is testing:
What if you could be in business in Europe in less than 30 days** with no European entity, no VAT tax headaches, no forms, no employess, and almost no risk? GET ON THE LIST NOW
** Time to launch will vary based on lots of seller variables, but less than 30 days is possible from the time your application is approved.
https://awesomers.com/140 show page