The Amazon platform is an e-commerce platform transformed from an online bookstore, continuing the model of different sellers selling the same product at the same time in book sales (the same version of a book may be sold by multiple sellers).
In order to avoid the same product being repeatedly released by multiple different sellers, which will cause a decline in consumer shopping experience, the Amazon platform allows one’s own products to be directly attached to other people’s product details pages under the premise of complying with platform rules. This is what we usually call “follow selling”. The basic rule of follow selling is that the ownership of product information belongs to Amazon, and all sellers who follow sell the information of the common product details page, including pictures, titles, descriptions, five-element characteristics, EAN/UPC codes, etc. The same products from different sellers are aggregated into the same product, and all sellers share the exposure and traffic of the product details page. Follow sellers can only set their own prices, item new and old conditions, and inventory quantities.
In general, for products that are followed by multiple sellers, the seller who occupies the Buy Box (shopping cart) has a higher probability of transaction. Therefore, it is important to have a shopping cart, which means sales. For follow-selling products, all sellers will compete for the shopping cart. According to the logic of Amazon’s A9 algorithm, the shopping cart is allocated by the platform based on the performance of the seller, and its reference basis includes product price, delivery method, sales volume and account performance.
Following others’ products can share others’ exposure and traffic, and it is easy to quickly generate orders based on the previous accumulation of other sellers. It is precisely because of the above reasons that many sellers use following others’ products as a means of their own operation.
For the sellers who are followed (the original sellers), if the products they have worked hard to create are followed by others, it will lead to a decline in sales and reduced profits. It may even cause the products to receive bad reviews due to the poor quality of the follower’s products, which will in turn affect the weight and ranking of the products.