As a sign of Amazon’s unwavering support to sellers, it organizes events for third-party merchants, small business owners, and newbie sellers to help them improve their Amazon business. One of these recurring events for sellers is Amazon Accelerate.
What is Amazon Accelerate?
Amazon Seller University YouTube Channel: Screenshot of Opening Keynote – Welcome to Amazon Accelerate 2021!; Retrieved Nov. 02, 2021, From https://youtu.be/5Qq7tEYw6-g
Amazon Accelerate is an annual Amazon event that brings together Amazon experts, executives, small business owners, and Amazon entrepreneurs.
The conference is hosted by Amazon and is open to those currently selling on Amazon and those who are interested in participating in the Amazon marketplace as future Amazon FBA or FBM sellers.
Amazon organized the conference to help sellers maximize the available opportunities and help them accelerate their Amazon businesses to the next level. This event aims to empower sellers and fuel their success in the marketplace.
Amazon Accelerate is the tech giant’s way of expressing gratitude and care to third-party sellers whose sales comprise more than 50% of the marketplace sales.
To help sellers improve their industry knowledge and marketplace know-how, more than 70 speakers were present for this year’s Amazon Accelerate conference. Participants were able to hear from Amazon experts and connect with peers during the event.
Discussion of proven Amazon approaches, selling practices, and the latest Amazon features were among the event highlights. Several Amazon tools and Amazon services were introduced to help sellers grow their business and adapt to the unpredictability of the consumer trend and economic climate.
Amazon Accelerate – Latest Amazon Tools and Amazon Services
If you were not able to attend Amazon Accelerate 2021, held last October 20–21, Amazon introduced several Amazon tools and services for current and aspiring sellers.
To help you raise your Amazon partnership to the next level, you can take advantage of these latest Amazon tools and services focused on helping you start, build, and grow your Amazon brand. Here are some important tools and services to know about.
1. Amazon Features for Starting Your Brand
Starting your Amazon business or brand is a daunting task, especially if you have no prior knowledge of how eCommerce works. To further assist you with your budding Amazon business, Amazon introduced these new features.
- Product Opportunity Explorer
Opportunity Explorer is a new tool that helps sellers explore customers’ demand for new product ideas. This is a powerful tool for Amazon sellers since it gives sellers insight into Amazon customer search and purchasing behaviors.
Your selling opportunities are expanded by addressing unmet customer demands. You can introduce new products that customers are already searching for in the marketplace with the help of Amazon Opportunity Explorer.
You can access Opportunity Explorer via the Amazon Seller Dashboard. Simply Navigate to the Growth tab on your menu and look for Product Opportunity Explorer on its sub-section.
This tool provides access to summary data for a niche where you can see top search terms and statistics concerning a new product’s launch potential. The available information includes but is not limited to what customers are clicking, buying, pricing trends, and product sales history.
Note that Opportunity Explorer is in limited release in the United States and Germany as of the current writing. Further updates are to be expected through 2021 and 2022.
- Search Analytics Dashboard
Another tool that was announced during the Amazon Accelerate 2021 conference was the Search Analytics Dashboard. This tool can be very useful for sellers who are still starting their Amazon business as it provides information that can improve sellers’ product development, inventory planning, and product listing.
Amazon’s Vice President of Search at Srikanth Thirumalai stated that “the Search Analytics Dashboard will provide sellers with a wealth of anonymized data to better understand customers’ interests and shopping choices for their products.”
This analytics tool will include features such as the Query and Catalog Performance dashboards.
The Catalog Dashboard can help you:
- identify conversion issues or customer drop-off points
- analyze products’ price competitiveness
- comprehend sales funnel your brand, at the product level
- optimize your inventory planning
- enhance your marketing investments
The Query Dashboard can help you:
- understand product’s top search terms
- identify target keywords for marketing campaigns
- determine opportunities to expand your product portfolio
2. Amazon Features for Building Your Brand
A 12-month period data shows that brands have been successful in Amazon with almost 60% sales growth. To bolster this success of brands and help newbie sellers improve their branding, Amazon formally introduced new features for brand innovation during the recently concluded Amazon Accelerate conference.
Some of the tools and services intended to foster brand innovation include Amazon Customer Engagement, A+ Story Cards, and the Customer Review Resolution.
- Amazon Customer Engagement
The Amazon Customer Engagement or otherwise known as Manage Your Customer Engagement (MYCE) tool, allows sellers to directly market their products to Amazon customers who follow their brand. If you can maximize this feature, it will greatly contribute to brand visibility.
This new Amazon feature is only available to registered brands with followers on their Amazon stores. And as for available templates, the MYCE currently supports new product announcements and more templates to be added in the future.
- A+ Story Cards
Providing a unique background story for your brand can help improve consumers’ familiarity with your products. To increase brand awareness, Amazon encourages you to use A+ Story Cards.
This new feature on Amazon lets you showcase your brand story through visual imagery. The imagery and additional text placements are a great way of increasing value proposition and sales.
- Customer Review Resolution
To help you build a stronger brand for your business, you can use the Customer Review Resolution tool. This new Amazon tool is intended to enhance customer service and interaction. Once you have identified the customer who left a negative review, you can offer additional support or a courtesy refund.
Resolving customer issues is of paramount importance for Amazon. Hence, this new Amazon feature has been introduced to create a strong connection with Amazon shoppers.
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Amazon Features Scaling Your Brand
Establishing your brand is not enough to keep your Amazon business profitable. You should be able to expand your customer reach to scale your business. To help you grow your business, Amazon introduced the following Amazon tools and services.
- Local Selling
This Amazon service will allow you to manage Amazon shoppers within your local area. Customers will receive notification of the delivery option or pick-up location, time, and process. You can reach more Amazon shoppers within your local delivery area using this new Amazon feature.
- Global Selling
Apart from local selling solutions, Amazon also introduced Global Selling to help American small business owners expand their businesses globally. This will allow sellers to extend their market reach and export sales while leveraging Amazon’s branding and state-of-the-art global logistics network.
Some of the services for Global Selling include the following:
Customer Service by Amazon: This service gives international sellers an option to let Amazon handle customer inquiries, returns on self-fulfilled orders, or even refunds. The Customer Service by Amazon is intended to reduce the burden on Amazon sellers, especially those dealing with multiple geographies and languages.
Marketplace Product Guidelines: This global selling solution from Amazon provides ideas to sellers which products should and can be sold internationally. This will lessen conjectures since sellers can determine which product has high potential and adhere to international market standards.
Global Inventory Viewer: The Global Inventory Viewer can help Amazon international sellers monitor and evaluate inventory across all Amazon marketplaces in a consolidated manner. This allows a quick check of inventory levels of multiple stores. Hence, avoiding stock shortage for a particular marketplace.
Global Listing: This feature is expected to be available for sellers in early 2022. Global Listing will allow sellers to replicate their product listings in multiple international stores instead of managing inventory items separately.
If you want to check out the Amazon Accelerate 2021 virtual conference, here is the full video playlist of the event. CLICK HERE.