Amazon News: Veteran Amazon Sellers Increasingly Dominate
Over 60% of today’s top 10,000 Amazon sellers registered before 2019, with nearly 30% having joined prior to 2016, indicating that marketplace success increasingly correlates with seller longevity. While the platform remains accessible to strategic newcomers (nearly 10% of top sellers registered within the last two years), most sellers face significant challenges including rising fulfillment fees, increasing advertising costs, and external factors like tariff volatility—resulting in high attrition rates with less than 8% of pre-2019 registrants still active today.
Exclusive: Amazon Is No Longer Penalizing Some Top Sellers For Raising Prices Aggressively Amid U.S.-China Tariff War
Amazon appears to have reversed its policy of suppressing the Buy Box for sellers who raised prices significantly to offset Trump’s China tariffs, with several top sellers reporting their Buy Box functionality has been restored despite price increases of up to 25%. This shift comes shortly after CEO Andy Jassy publicly acknowledged that Amazon sellers would likely need to pass increased tariff costs on to customers.
Amazon And Walmart Keep Chasing Faster Deliveries To Woo Shoppers
Amazon and Walmart are expanding their same-day delivery capabilities to more rural areas, with Walmart reaching 93% of U.S. households while testing 30-minute deliveries, and Amazon increasing same-day delivery facilities by 60% in 2024. Both retailers are investing in faster shipping options after seeing data that faster deliveries lead to higher purchase completion rates and more frequent shopping.
India Under Tariff Pressure To Give Amazon And Walmart’s Flipkart Full Market Access
The Trump administration is pressing India to provide Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart complete access to its $125 billion ecommerce market as part of trade negotiations, with India facing potential 26% tariffs on its US exports without an agreement. Currently, US ecommerce companies can only operate as online marketplaces in India, while their Indian competitors can produce, own, and sell goods through their platforms—a restriction the US considers a “non-tariff barrier.”
Post From Todd M. Piechowski, MPA:
Shopping directly in ChatGPT? Rumors are swirling that Shopify & ChatGPT are working on an integration where users can buy directly in-chat. Once shoppers can ask “best running shoes under $150?” and buy without leaving the conversation, the discovery funnel tilts toward the chat window. It’s an immediate closed loop moment. Remember how Uber wedged itself between riders and taxi companies? ChatGPT is about to slide between shoppers and every search bar or marketplace you know. Why this hits hard –
- Gatekeeper shift: ChatGPT ranks SKUs; rich Shopify data wins, thin listings vanish.
- Traffic drain: One chat checkout = one less Google click, one less Amazon session, CPCs climb.
- Platform tax 2.0: First‑question demand won’t stay free; expect OpenAI tolls.
- Data asymmetry: Conversation intent lives with OpenAI; your pixels get crumbs. Act before you’re yellow‑cabbed.
Some ideas:
- Supercharge Shopify feeds – tight titles, complete attributes, real‑time inventory.
- Get ready to budget for paid placements inside ChatGPT; attention always attracts tolls.
- Own post‑purchase touch-points – email, packaging, loyalty – to pull customers back from the AI middle‑layer.
Get chat‑ready now or watch your discovery moat crack.
Post From Mansour Norouzi:
Amazon has unlocked access to Amazon Insights for audience creation—free to use. And coming June 2nd, they’re doing the same for Amazon Your Garage and Brand Store Insights. This doesn’t mean full access to those features for reporting—just for building audiences. If you still want to pull insights or performance data from those sources, that’s still behind the paywall.
But here’s why this matters: Let’s say you want to build a custom audience of Subscribe & Save customers who’ve ordered more than 3 times. Before, you couldn’t touch that data unless you paid. Now? You can use those repeat buyers to build audiences—for free. I’ve been using this to create lookalike audiences from my most loyal Subscribe & Save customers—people who’ve ordered at least 3 times. These are high-LTV shoppers. If I can find more people like them, the chances they’ll also become repeat customers go way up. If you are a CPG brand, definitely dig into this.
Post From Blair Forrest:
poppi just sold to PepsiCo for $1.65B with a DTC strategy that breaks every eCommerce rule: they don’t let you buy from their website.
1. The anti-DTC model is winning Looking at Poppi’s site: – No checkout functionality whatsoever – Direct links to Amazon and Target only – Zero investment in fulfillment infrastructure – Complete focus on brand building For a brand that just sold for $1.65 billion, this is fascinating.
2. They’ve eliminated the most expensive parts of eCommerce: – No warehouse leases – No shipping infrastructure – No returns management – No customer service headaches – No tech stack maintenance
3. What they’re doing instead: – Building a powerful, distinctive brand – Focusing 100% on demand generation – Driving traffic to established marketplaces – Letting the giants handle fulfillment complexity – Shifting resources to retail relationships
4. The marketplace hybrid model is the future: – Vendor Central relationship in Canada – Seller Central in US (maintaining control) – Target.com for mainstream audience – No resources wasted on site checkout – All spend directed toward awareness
This is what I’m predicting we’ll see more of in 2025-2026: Brands realizing they don’t need to build fulfillment empires. They need to build brands that convert on marketplaces. The new playbook: – Own your brand – Own your content – Own your media – Outsource everything else
I DO think there is a play to have their eCommerce store setup and create its own catalog/packs to own the customer, not pay the 15% referral fee and create a unique brand experience instead of an Amazon box arriving… BUT it depends.
Contact FoxServices today to grow your eCommerce brand through expert social media advertising and social commerce solutions!
