Product selection has always been the most discussed and core issue in cross-border e-commerce. For product selection on different platforms, the most important thing is to understand the characteristics of each platform, but in any case, the core of product selection thinking is refinement. The following will introduce the characteristics of Amazon, AliExpress, eBay, and Wish platforms, so as to better prepare for product selection.
8.3.1 Amazon: Standardized products and recognized brands
The Amazon platform has five more prominent characteristics, which interpret the uniqueness of Amazon from the three aspects of “people, goods, and venues”.
The first is the “people” aspect. Usually, “people” refers to users, but for an e-commerce platform, Amazon faces not only consumers, but also stores.
Unlike other e-commerce platforms, Amazon is a platform that relies entirely on transaction commissions. After entering Amazon, stores do not need to pay deposits, service fees, and purchase store operation technology fees, but in order to ensure the quality of consumers’ purchases on the platform, Amazon’s assessment standards for store entry are relatively high.
Amazon attaches great importance to consumer feedback. Product reviews are completely open, and consumers can view all the comments of consumers who have purchased the product on the product details page. After purchasing the product, consumers can rate the store’s service, and this rating will determine whether a certain product of the store can be recommended.
In order to avoid the possible “score brushing” phenomenon, Amazon’s rating has a certain algorithm. For example, the registration time of the comment account, the adoption rate of the comment information, and the confirmed purchase (Verified Purchase, VP) level.
In the comments, the longer the account registration time, the greater the weight, which effectively avoids the behavior of registering many accounts to make malicious and false comments on the product, thereby affecting the product rating. Similarly, the higher the adoption rate of the comment information, the greater the weight, which effectively avoids the problem of affecting the sales conversion rate due to extremely rare cases.
VP means that the purchase can be confirmed and the consumer pays in full. All consumers with the VP mark pay in full, but not all consumers who pay in full have the VP mark. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the comment, the higher the VP level, the greater the weight of the comment, and it usually appears in the front position of the comment when displayed.
Why does Amazon attach so much importance to consumers’ evaluation of products? This leads to Amazon’s understanding of “goods”.
“Goods” refers to goods. Amazon advocates self-service shopping, so its focus is not on stores, but on goods. It is precisely because of this “light store” concept that Amazon’s promotion of customer service consultation is relatively weak, and it does not even set up functions such as “online consultation”.
In order to enable consumers to complete the purchase, the store needs to describe the product information as detailed as possible. In addition, if consumers want to know other information about the product, they need to go to the comment area to check other consumers’ comments.
Perhaps many people think that Amazon’s behavior is too cumbersome, but they don’t know that Amazon’s behavior has successfully increased the value of consumer comments, and consumers can make purchase choices based on their own subjective judgment.
In the early days, Amazon’s sales products were books. When consumers bought books on Amazon, they could see various comments on books in the comment area. Such comments were not superficial “good” or “not bad”, but “XXX annotations are wrong” or long comments of more than 100 words. Such comments can help other consumers make decisions on whether to buy.
Finally, there is the “field”. The “field” refers to the Amazon platform, which is a shopping mall. Amazon only has product recommendations, and no hard advertising channels. Product recommendations are based on the evaluation of consumers after purchasing the products, and are integrated and recommended by the backend. In this way, it can be ensured that the quality of all recommended products is sufficiently guaranteed.
Through such a chain-linked design, Amazon has fundamentally maintained the quality of platform products, and then used this to form brand reputation, and then used brand reputation to attract more consumers to choose to enter the platform to buy.