Amazon’s stock price has been growing steadily since 2017. During the 2020 epidemic, Amazon experienced a sharp rise, and its stock price has exceeded $3,000. From the perspective of the flywheel, Amazon’s rising stock price represents the growth of the platform, which will also lead to lower product costs, improved buyer experience, and increased traffic.
Understanding Amazon’s development history can help us understand Amazon’s product-first and branding ideas more deeply. Because products like books that strictly comply with the various indicators of standard products are few after all, once relatively strict standard product rules are formulated in the early stage, inertia will form when expanding to other categories.
When Amazon introduced third-party sellers, it directly applied its original rules. The ownership of the link still belongs to Amazon, and the seller only has the right to sell under the link. When Amazon classifies sellers, it also takes whether they have a brand as an important sign. A typical representative is that brand stores can add A+ pictures and texts on the front desk, while non-brand stores can only add text product descriptions.
Another application of branding ideas lies in the Amazon platform’s attitude towards malicious follow-up sales. In the early days, some sellers would choose to purchase a small amount of goods when online or offline products are discounted, and then sell them by following sales to earn the difference. Following sales itself does not impact the normal market order, but the abuse of following sales is what Amazon and sellers hate.
When a large number of third-party sellers settled in, although more goods were brought in, the original customer shopping experience was also affected. A very small number of sellers often use low-price following sales to grab the link shopping cart, send inferior products, and then cause the link evaluation to drop rapidly, and ultimately lose the reputation of the platform and the interests of other sellers.
For such a following sales model that has long caused dissatisfaction among sellers, Amazon did not directly cancel or restrict following sales, but introduced brands to restrict it and strengthen the punishment for infringement. Amazon has successively introduced functions such as the 0 plan, the transparent plan and the brand 2.0 to help sellers make more timely following sales complaints. At the same time, Amazon restricts the following sales behavior of sellers with brand records. Once following sales are found, complaints can be made directly. The platform will directly ban the following sales store within 1 hour, and it will not be unblocked without the withdrawal of the original store.