Amazon Accelerate 2021 – Day 2 – Key Highlights For Sellers

Following on from our Day 1 highlights post from the Amazon Accelerate 2021 event, we can now bring you the key highlights from Day 2 and highlight what the main takeaways are for your business. Whilst Day 1 was heavily focused on brands and marketing those brands, the main topics from Amazon Accelerate Day 2 were split between helping grow your local customers, and helping your export opportunities. Both aim to help grow your sales on the Amazon platform.

Let’s get started by looking at how Amazon is going to help you sell to your local customers.

Amazon Accelerate: Amazon Launches New Local Selling Capabilities 

Today at the Amazon Accelerate 2021 conference, Amazon announced Amazon Local Selling, a new set of services that enables local, regional, and national retailers to start or expand their Amazon businesses by offering both in-store pickup and fast delivery to local customers.

More than half of all products purchased in Amazon’s store are sold by third-party sellers, most of whom are small and medium-sized businesses. With Amazon Local Selling, sellers can quickly and easily expand their multichannel offerings by listing products in Amazon’s store and offering them to local customers in designated areas for in-store pickup on the same day that they place an order. When making an order, customers can select in-store pickup and receive a notification when it is ready that day. Or, they can choose fast local delivery by the seller.

Amazon Local Selling is now available from both national and local retailers, including Mavis Discount Tire, Sears Hometown Store, 4 Wheel Parts, Electronic Express, Best Buy, Appliance Connection, Mattress Warehouse, Beach Camera, Adorama, DataVision, Exclusive Furniture, World Wide Stereo, MODIA, Focus Camera, and others. Sellers who are interested in joining Local Selling can apply at sell.amazon.com/local as the program expands this year and during 2022. Customers can learn more about Local Selling at www.amazon.com/localpickup.

With Amazon Local Selling, sellers can give nearby customers the opportunity to support local businesses with regional offers across all product categories, and they can offer products they couldn’t before, such as large or fragile items. Additionally, sellers can offer customers add-on services, such as product assembly or installation, for the products they deliver.

Walt’s Television, a longtime Amazon seller with a store in Tempe, Arizona, and distribution centers in Louisville, Kentucky, and Dallas, Texas, participated in a trial of Amazon Local Selling.

“Amazon has been the foundation of our national online selling for years. Now we are bridging our online business with our in-person experience, which means more customers are getting to know our brand and full range of services,”

“New local customers are finding us and giving us very positive feedback on the convenience of buying online and picking up at one of our locations. We’ve seen a significant increase in local sales, and we’re excited about the ability to offer installation and repair services to Amazon customers.”

Bear Hendley, Manager, Walt’s Television.

“Local Selling presents enormous opportunities to a large number of sellers who want to bring more product selection to their Amazon business, enabling many to expand their multichannel offerings by integrating their physical stores and delivery capabilities with their digital operations,”

“Our research shows that many customers will opt for local pickup when given the choice. This new capability is an exciting way to help sellers reach and delight more customers with great products and convenience.”

Jim Adkins, Vice President of Recreational and Vocational Categories, Amazon.

Amazon Launches New Tools to Empower Small Businesses to Grow Their Export Sales

At the Amazon Accelerate 2021 conference, Amazon also announced a set of new tools that will make it easier for American third-party sellers to offer their products in Amazon’s 21 stores worldwide. Amazon estimates that more than 6 million products currently offered by U.S. sellers have a high potential for success in its international stores.

“Selling internationally has been terrific for us. International sales account for 20-30% of our business depending on the season, and we’re seeing sales in some geographies grow as much as 50% year over year,”

“Expanding to international locations without Amazon would have been more difficult because we’d have had to get a distributor in every country to manage our products. Amazon has made this process much easier and taken a lot of the guesswork out of which products will be successful.”

Ben Clark, CEO, Vermont-based Ann Clark Cookie Cutters.

Amazon offers a range of tools and services to help U.S. sellers offer their products to hundreds of millions of customers from 185 countries that are shopping in its 21 stores worldwide. Last month, these 21 stores brought in more than 900 million customer visits, and more than half of the visits came through Amazon’s international stores. Small businesses and emerging brands are able to easily gain traction across the globe by leveraging Amazon’s internationally recognized brand and the company’s state-of-the-art global logistics network.

“Global Selling helps small businesses leverage Amazon’s scale and reach to easily expand into countries around the world, while maintaining control of their brand and not having to worry about global logistics,”

“These capabilities, such as the use of Amazon’s renowned worldwide customer support for all of their products at low or no cost, will help our U.S. sellers capture billions of dollars in international opportunity.”

Eric Broussard, Vice President of International Selling Partner Services, Amazon.

Amazon announced the following new tools at Accelerate 2021:

• Customer Service by Amazon gives sellers who fulfill their own orders the option to have Amazon manage their customer inquiries, refunds, and returns on self-fulfilled orders—and at Accelerate, the company announced they will offer this service for free or at a discounted rate depending on the seller’s customer contact volume. Customer Service by Amazon reduces the burden of providing quality customer service across geographies and in multiple languages. Customers can contact the more than 130 customer support sites via phone, chat, or email, day or night, and receive help in 15 languages. It is available now and open to all U.S. sellers.
  
• Marketplace Product Guidance takes the guesswork out of which products should and can be sold internationally. It helps sellers determine which of their products they should offer internationally and identify other high-potential products they can add to their catalog in international stores. These recommendations are personalized and ranked based on their opportunity score, and calculated by machine learning models that take into account hundreds of parameters at the seller, product, and store level. It is available now and open to all U.S. sellers.
  
• Global Inventory Viewer provides a one-stop experience for sellers to monitor inventory supply and demand across all stores in a consolidated manner. Global Inventory Viewer seamlessly integrates with Send to Amazon, making it simple and easy for sellers to send more inventory to Amazon fulfillment centers before running out of stock. It is available now and open to all U.S. sellers.
  
• Global Listing enables sellers to list products on Amazon once and sell globally. Instead of managing products separately across Amazon’s stores, sellers can now replicate their product listings in multiple international stores with just a few clicks. Sellers will be able to view their listing from a set of globalized pages and views. Amazon is currently testing the feature in beta and will open it to all U.S. sellers in early 2022.

All in all the two-day Amazon Accelerate 2021 event has been a great event for sellers with Amazon really showcasing some new initiatives and tools focused on helping them make the most on the Amazon marketplace and really grow their businesses online.

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