Founded in 1995, Amazon is the largest e-commerce platform in the United States and one of the earliest companies to start e-commerce. In the early days, Amazon only had its own book category, but now it has become an online retailer and Internet company with the most product varieties. In 2019, Amazon’s online sales ranked first. According to Amazon’s 2019 financial report, Amazon’s net profit in the fourth quarter was US$3.268 billion, an increase of 8% year-on-year; net sales were US$87.437 billion, an increase of 21% year-on-year. At present, Amazon has opened sites in many countries and regions, covering more than 100 countries and regions, with more than 541,900 employees and more than 100,000 robots to serve. For every dollar spent by American consumers on e-commerce, Amazon’s revenue is as high as 49 cents.
Amazon is not only a cross-border e-commerce platform, but also a technology company. In 2017, Amazon’s R&D investment ranked first in the United States in the ranking of R&D investment of American companies. The huge difference in platform R&D intensity and technical strength has created a great difference in operation mode and effect. There are many sellers’ Amazon operation models, and few understand operations from a technical and data perspective. Some e-commerce operators are good at “brushing orders” and private domain traffic operations, which are difficult to achieve on Amazon. The former is because once Amazon’s A9 algorithm finds “brushing orders”, it will cause the store to be closed, and the latter is because once Amazon finds that the store has signs of diverting traffic from the site to the outside, it will punish the seller and even directly close the store. Amazon’s A9 algorithm has strong enough technical strength to find high-quality products and promote them, so it is very difficult to succeed on Amazon by relying solely on marketing methods.
According to Amazon’s flywheel theory, the platform needs to continuously optimize the buyer’s shopping experience to drive overall development. General operations can only do titles, keywords, A+ graphic pages and video promotions. Many operators have not refined these links, but only optimized them through their own feelings and experience, which ultimately leads to low operating efficiency. Some operators will even give up optimization directly and try to increase sales through gray means. Once violations of platform rules are discovered, the store or link will be subject to sales restrictions, so this is not a long-term solution. In addition to price factors, the operating space of Amazon product pages is actually not large, but how to obtain excellent operating results within limited means is the embodiment of operational capabilities and technology.
For example, when listing products on the Amazon platform, you need to enter titles and keywords, which almost determines whether the product can obtain effective exposure and traffic in the early stage. Therefore, whether effective keywords and titles can be filled in is one of the indicators for judging whether the operational capabilities are excellent or not. This will test the operator’s understanding of technology, or understanding of search engine optimization (SEO). Operators may not understand how the A9 algorithm is calculated specifically, but operators must be clear about the search logic behind it, the weight of each factor, the impact of review scores on exposure, the impact of keyword length on search rankings, the impact of title length on traffic, etc. These issues are what every seller needs to think about and learn in their daily work.