Amazon News: Amazon’s Changes to Product Detail Pages, Fulfillment Center Miscounts, and More

Today we're covering Amazon's latest change to Product Detail pages, fulfillment center miscounts, and more. Welcome back to the Amazon Analytics Insider. Let's get you up to date. The Customer Questions and Answers feature on Product Detail Pages is still available. However, it is now much less accessible than it used to be. The series of Q&As are now hidden within the have a question search bar and are only revealed when a customer types a word into the search bar. The Q and A feature can be a good source of information because it can provide answers to questions, questions that may not be in product reviews. If sellers have any vital information stored here, we hope that they create a separate FAQ section or move it to other areas of their listing soon. Amazon had plans to launch marketplaces in Chile, Colombia, Nigeria and South Africa in early 2023, but they have since delayed those plans. The company has already started recruiting sellers for their South African marketplace, which is now expected to launch early in 2024. Expansion into the other countries seems to be on hold with no specific information about when or if they will launch. Amazon's decision to pause its expansion plans is most likely due to factors such as the cost of launching new markets and growing competition from local e commerce companies. After being investigated by the Competition and Markets Authority or the CMA in the uk, Amazon and Meta have made a series of commitments to help ensure fair competition on their retail platforms. Amazon's first commitment is to not use the data of competing sellers to gain an unfair advantage over other sellers. An example of this would be to ensure that Amazon doesn't look at Apple's phone charger sales to determine how many amazonbasics phone chargers to keep in stock. Their second commitment is to guarantee that all product offerings will be treated equally when deciding which to be featured in the buy box. The third commitment that they made is to allow 3P sellers to negotiate their own rates directly with prime delivery service providers. Meta's first commitment is to provide an opt out option for advertising to prevent customers from having their data used to improve Facebook Marketplace. This is because Meta took data from user interactions with third party Facebook ads to shape what products users were shown on their marketplace feeds. Their second commitment is to limit their use of ad data in product development, specifically when it comes to developing products that may compete with other companies that pay to advertise on their platform. Within the past week, Sellers reported an error with Amazon's Buy Shipping tool. This error has been forcing them to upgrade to ground in priority shipping for small and light items rather than a more affordable option such as Ground Advantage. This results in a price increase of $2$7 per shipment. Sellers can still buy shipping from external sites, however, this will make their orders ineligible for protection against INR or item not received claims this week sellers have been struggling with missing inbound units and unit miscounts at fulfillment centers. These situations are especially upsetting because it seems that when sellers try to reconcile these miscounts with the inventory ledger report, they're told by Seller Support that that's not recognized as a valid document and therefore they cannot help their case. Hopefully the Inventory Ledger Detail Report can provide a bit more guidance here as it contains information such as reason codes for inventory adjustments thanks again for joining me for the Amazon Analytics Insider. The link to the full written version is available in the description box below. And while you're there, pay a visit to our Help center for more information on how to become an Amazon Data Expert. And I can't wait to see you again every other Tuesday. Thank you.