Last week Amazon announced that the United States and Europe will stop accepting non-essential FBA deposits. Many sellers are asking how we should respond to possible out-of-stock and delivery issues. Today Xiaomei will give you a few practical solutions.

How to treat the notice of “Stop storage of non-essential products”

We first interpret related policies from several latitudes:

1. Demand trends

We think that the sudden announcement by Amazon should be based on its big data in the background. What Amazon really thinks about should not be the rigid demand that the epidemic has for necessities (this is of course there), but it is very likely that Amazon has already seen from big data that under the global outbreak of the epidemic, demand for goods will change dramatically.

2. Lack of staff

Amazon headquarters has reported employee infections one after another, so Amazon is already letting more employees work from home. However, the warehouse has to be manually involved. According to the situation observed by Hui.com, Amazon has already convened more temporary employees to participate in the FBA delivery work, but the shortage of manpower should be a very realistic problem.

3. Uncertain recovery time

Although Amazon gives the affected time period from March 17 to April 5. But the actual recovery time depends on the control of the epidemic. At present, the United States has basically completely closed its borders, the stock market has plummeted, business operations have collapsed, and a large number of people are facing unemployment. Therefore, we believe that Amazon gave nearly half a month to worry about causing sellers to panic, but how long it actually takes to restore the warehouse should be determined by the epidemic and economic conditions;

4.The sellers are greatly affected

Amazon explicitly limits the acceptance of “non-necessities”, which almost covers the products that most sellers are selling on Amazon. At the same time, although products such as “masks” and “cleaning fluids” are in the category of “can be put into the warehouse,” from the recent review policy of Amazon, ordinary sellers have been rejected, and the rest should be Goods from world-renowned companies. At the same time, under the drastic changes in customer demand, most sellers are likely to have to face new choices, and some sellers are likely to need to clear inventory in the near future.

5.Amazon may usher in strong growth again

Schools, shops, and public facilities are now closed in almost all countries to encourage everyone to work from home. Amazon, as the world ’s largest online retail platform, and Western consumers and the government are the only online platforms that can guarantee “timeliness of delivery” Probably strong growth.

In short, this restriction should have a greater impact on the vast majority of sellers.

6 things Amazon can do to prevent stockouts

Everyone should be aware that every crisis will have more opportunities and opportunities. Now Xiaomei enumerates several solutions that you can deal with:

1. Open more seller accounts

The reasons for opening more seller accounts are mainly:
Just-in-demand products such as masks need to be sold with a Sub seller account to reduce risks;
In order to prevent stock outs, you need to sell with your own Sub seller account;
At the beginning of each year, Amazon encourages sellers to open accounts. At the same time, during the epidemic, many competitors change their hands. They only know to clear the backlog of inventory and do not know the layout in the future. Therefore, opening as many accounts as possible at this time should be able to restore sales after the epidemic Get ready.

2. Try to use SFP whenever possible

SFP (Seller Fulfilled Prime) means that the seller delivers the goods themselves, but can still get the Prime mark. This method should be the best method at this stage. Whoever can obtain the SFP qualification should be able to usher in a very good sales level, but the project is now in a scheduled state.

Join the SFP project: https://services.amazon.com/services/seller-fulfilled-prime.html

SFP project contact information: sfp-enrollment@amazon.com

3. Ready to enter overseas warehouses

First of all, I would like to suggest that you should never consider shipping large quantities of goods overseas at this time, because of the uncertainty of market demand on the one hand, and the uncertainty of customs clearance policies of other countries on the other. At the same time, do not consider “Small Packet Delivery” as the first choice, because Western customers need timeliness at home every day! Therefore, there are three reasons for entering overseas warehouses:

Strive to obtain the SFP qualifications mentioned above;

Strive to shorten the time of self-delivery and ensure background performance;

Amazon can enter the warehouse as soon as possible when entering the warehouse;

Develop more platform sales, such as: Shopify

4. Use at least 2 sub seller accounts to sell products with high sales volume (Listing)

This should be a relatively simple and straightforward measure, with two purposes:

Prevent stock out;

Prevent performance degradation and audits caused by self-delivery;

5. Reduce Amazon advertising fees

The purpose of reducing advertising costs is also two:

Properly extend sales time to prevent stock outs;

Reduce costs and increase revenue;

6. Increase product prices

You need to pay attention to this point. Amazon is currently reviewing the list of price increases. Therefore, everyone’s price adjustment needs to be controlled within 20%. When the sales are satisfactory, the price is adjusted once a week, but the overall increase should not exceed 40%.

Changes in the selection of products on Amazon

Selection criteria during the epidemic

As long as all categories related to indoor, garden, fitness, DIY, and wine related products sales rose.

Take the Amazon Sports & Outdoor category as an example. Almost indoor fitness equipment is currently sold the most. Outdoor tents, picnic supplies, and beach supplies are basically not on the list:

Taking Amazon Clothing, Shoes, and Bags (apparel) categories as examples, the biggest sales now are indoor slippers, yoga clothes, masks, and personalized light and thin collars to cover the face. No one on the list

Prepare for sales with both hands

As we mentioned above, there are still some uncertainties about the validity period of Amazon’s control of warehouse entry, so I am afraid that you still need to prepare for both hands. They are:

1. Shopify: the only option

In the entire e-commerce, Amazon is still the king of sales. However, after Amazon and major platforms restrict the listing and sales of various products, especially Amazon FBA cannot return to normal after April 5th, maybe the independent station has almost become the only way out for merchants in 2020 under the epidemic.

Indeed, due to the shortage of goods on major e-commerce platforms, consumers will be forced to purchase more on independent stations. You can combine the above tools to analyze Amazon’s most sold products, and at the same time use Shopify’s unique DropShipping (through Amazon, AliExpress and other platforms to inventory and sell other people’s inventory and make profits), if your own goods are sufficient, also Orders can be shipped completely via Shopify.

2. Amazon: Once the warehouse is restored, immediately grab the homepage

Amazon’s restrictions on listing will inevitably catch many businesses by surprise. Whether it is to deliberately reduce sales in order to prevent stock outs, or if there is a stock out situation, everyone will see a sharp drop in BSR. The hard-earned list weight Maybe it disappeared overnight. After Amazon returned to the warehouse, I believe it is another period of desperately trying to regain traffic between sellers.