Brands today have more options than ever for selling their products including Amazon’s store, other marketplace service providers, their own direct-to-consumer websites, social media apps, and traditional wholesale retailers. The addition of each sales channel gives brands greater flexibility in bringing their products to consumers but can also create a complex landscape for sellers to navigate with each sales channel sometimes having its own logistics, marketing, operational, and other requirements.
As part of its commitment to inventing on behalf of and delighting sellers, Amazon has expanded its strategy from providing powerful solutions for independent sellers selling in the Amazon store to delivering new capabilities that enable seller success wherever they choose to sell.
At Amazon Accelerate, Amazon unveiled five new features and capabilities that support seller growth and drive success across their sales channels.
New Multi-Channel Distribution capabilities for moving products in bulk
Sellers need low-cost warehousing to store products in bulk so they can quickly replenish them to fulfillment centers and physical stores that service individual customer orders. Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD) offers this solution at a great value and Multi-Channel Distribution (MCD) for AWD provides additional capability, allowing sellers to distribute products in bulk across channels. MCD recently launched the ability to do custom labeling and prep, enabling the distribution of products to multiple sales channels, including other marketplace service providers, wholesalers, distributors, and sellers’ own physical stores.
MCD significantly streamlines a seller’s supply chain by allowing them to hold one unified inventory pool in AWD that can serve all channels, rather than having to allocate inventory to each channel from the start – which can be costly if it turns out to be too much inventory or lead to missed sales if it’s too little. Sellers are finding that consolidating into a single inventory pool in AWD reduces total inventory stock needs by an average of 20%, providing a significant savings in working capital.
Multi-Channel Fulfillment delivers customer orders faster
Sellers who use Amazon’s logistics network can also use Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) to fulfill sellers’ orders in other sales channels including other marketplace service providers, their own direct-to-consumer website, or another sales location. With MCF, Amazon takes care of picking, packing, and shipping those orders.
MCF works with over 100 pre-built integrations including Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. By sharing one pool of inventory for all sales channels, sellers who use Multi-Channel Fulfillment not only simplify their inventory operations, but also see reduced out-of-stock rates and improved inventory turnover. As a result, Amazon MCF has grown to serve over 200,000 U.S. sellers and has seen a 70% year-over-year increase in the total number of orders that have been fulfilled by MCF so far this year.
Building on this success, MCF is speeding up its Standard Delivery option by 40%, at no additional cost to sellers. Sellers can now enjoy a reduced Standard Delivery option from 5 business days to 3 business days, with deliveries made 7 days a week.
Amazon also launched the ability for sellers to embed a dynamic, real-time delivery estimate on their products fulfilled by MCF and available for sale on their own direct-to-consumer or other website. This delivery estimate provides shoppers visibility into when they can expect to receive their product, increasing conversion and sales for sellers. For example, sports apparel company NXTRND saw an 8.9% increase in revenue when the specific delivery estimate was added to their site.
Amazon Shipping integrates with multi-channel order management apps
Sellers who have their own warehouse and manage their own packing of orders can still leverage Amazon Shipping for reliable, fast pickup from their warehouse and ground delivery across the United States. The new Amazon Shipping Mobile app, announced today, provides a convenient, on-the-go solution to manage key logistics and fulfillment needs. The app gives sellers the ability to schedule pickups directly from their own warehouse, oversee inventory across warehouses, receive real-time updates on delivery vehicles, and access support from the palm of their hand. Amazon Shipping also announced that they now integrate with over 50 shipping software partners commonly used by sellers – making it easier than ever to use Amazon Shipping.
Integration with popular services streamline advertising and payments
When building and managing their own direct-to-consumer business, sellers rely on many different service providers to drive traffic, increase conversion, and support payments. To provide sellers with more choice in integrating with the popular services they want to use, Amazon announced powerful new integrations with popular advertising services including Google and TikTok ads and popular payment provider, PayPal, who handles almost $25 billion in payment transactions each year.
With the new MCF Fast Badges for Google integration, sellers will be able to feature delivery speeds in their Google Shopping ads to help drive high-converting traffic to their direct-to-consumer sites. According to a recent Google study, merchants saw an increase of up to 7.6% in clicks on Google Shopping ads in the US when their offers showed “Free 3-Day” shipping or faster.*
And for sellers using Buy with Prime, they will soon be able to display the Prime brand and real time delivery estimates in their TikTok ads to help drive increased conversion and traffic to their direct-to-consumer site. This allows sellers an opportunity to tap into consumers looking to shop from within a social media context, and more efficiently get them to purchase their products.
For participating brands integrating the Buy with Prime API, Paypal is now available at checkout after shoppers log in to their Amazon account. And next year, sellers using both Buy with Prime and PayPal will be able to offer Prime shopping benefits directly in PayPal checkout. After a customer chooses to checkout with PayPal, they’ll have the opportunity to select Prime as a shipping option for Prime eligible items. If the customer chooses to link their Amazon and PayPal accounts, the next time they shop on any site that uses PayPal and Buy with Prime, they’ll automatically get their Prime shopping benefits for fast and reliable delivery without an additional login.
Simplifying multi-channel business management
In order to support sellers across their business, Amazon has provided sellers and app developers with access to programmatic APIs related to selling on Amazon. This enables developers to not only extend capabilities for selling on Amazon but also build tools to help sellers manage their business operations seamlessly across multiple sales channels. Today, the Selling Partner App Store offers more than 3,000 apps designed to support and simplify a seller’s business.
While the increased availability of third-party apps has provided new capabilities for sellers in many areas, it has also led to an increased need for sellers to manage multiple apps and notifications from these apps to stay on top of their entire business.
Last year at Accelerate, Amazon announced a new feature that provides access to notifications from popular apps in the Selling Partner App Store. The power of this new capability was that sellers got these notifications directly in Seller Central, helping sellers get more of their notifications about any of their sales channels, in one place. While it’s still early days, over 300 thousand sellers are now using these cross-channel notifications to better stay on top of their entire business.
Today, Amazon announced the next step with the new Embedded Apps feature, a capability that fully embeds third-party apps in Seller Central. Now, sellers not only get notifications across all their sales channels in one place, but they can also take action to manage their entire selling business. The launch includes an initial set of apps with more to come.
Whether it’s unifying inventory management with Multi-Channel Distribution, accelerating fulfillment speeds through Multi-Channel Fulfillment, integrating shipping operations through the Amazon Shipping Mobile app, or streamlining marketing and payments across channels, Amazon is providing a comprehensive suite of services designed to power sellers’ businesses regardless of where they want to sell their products.
“We believe we can delight sellers and provide them with great value by continuing to innovate on their behalf and support them in listing, advertising, and selling across the places they want to sell. When we do this well, it enables sellers to spend more time creating amazing products and delivering exceptional customer experiences – a win for sellers, customers, and Amazon.” said Dharmesh Mehta, Vice President, Amazon Worldwide Selling Partner Services.