Amazon Retiring Product Ads

Effective from of advertising for many sunsets

[minnapple]

After October and just before 2015 holiday sales season. Amazon product ads will no longer be available.

It seems like and obvious push to get product ad buyers to open Amazon stores.

Amazon Store pricing structure will boast their bottom line when advertisers convert from ads to selling on Amazon

We all of seen this type of thing before, free hosting and blogs converted to paid hosting and blogs, free Google shopping listings converted to paid listings. The old bait and switch.

So . . . now in the process of creating a master plan to create converting Amazon stores for my clients using Amazon product ads before the holidays.

[Tonearm]

Amazon will eat your lunch. If they like your Amazon Store performance, they will sell your stuff and put you out of business. It's a well-known business practice of their's.

[engine]

I've been using those product ads!

Bait and switch, yes, i'm sure.

We did have a discussion about Amazon using sales stats to show which merchants products it should sell. No surprise there.

Take it while you can get it, but after October, you're going to have to switch to Amazon stores, or do something else. Just do it, and build a great reputation while the opportunity still exists, imho.

[mrengine]

Amazon also has text link ads. They may want to bolster that service so they have a larger inventory to offer publishers on external/non-Amazon sites.

I thought Amazon stores was closed for new signups?

[ecommerceprofit]

Funny - I refused to use product ads because they could just steal data from me (my opinion). Regarding the stores...I used them for 2 years - the most stressful of my life. If you run a store there / ebay - you must answer customer questions on the weekend to keep from getting bad feedback - that meant constantly checking my e-mail from my phone even when out with my family - talk about a mood kill when you get an angry customer - that's why you must respond on the weekend - if you don't many will leave bad feedback if you don't answer a complaint right away - very bad for my family...btw, amazon does not have a "percentage" feedback score - only merchants.

Our business took off big time after we left amazon/ebay (more time to devote to my brand) - I hate those companies - especially amazon who can kick you off their system with only one appeal chance (from what I understand) - we never had this happen to us but it could have...can you imagine having a large value of inventory ready and then they kick you out - would be stuck...plus they see all your top sellers. We could double our business if we sold through them again but no way - now how...not worth the risk / stress.

All of the above is my opinion and how I feel - if you want facts do your own research.

[IanKelley]

Selling on Amazon is definitely double edged. At the moment it gives you access to insane volume, but you're also giving them data that they can use to put you out of business.

I think I mentioned this in another thread but one interesting (or scary depending on your perspective) thing I've seen is evidence that the process by which they order and test sell new products is at least partially automated already. Meaning that they are conceivably approaching the point where they can use all that sales data coming through their platform to automatically choose new products, order those products, and start test selling them to see if they're worth continuing to stock, with very limited human oversight.

Which solves the scale problem, really their only barrier outside of warehouse space, to taking over online retail.

[smilie]

>> minnapple: It seems like and obvious push to get product ad buyers to open Amazon stores.

Yes, and along with all emails Amazon send to expand inventory, to do Amazon Fulfilled, and to answer questions on your products that would later on Amazon make into content good enough for slot #1 in G.

>> IanKelley: Selling on Amazon is definitely double edged. At the moment it gives you access to insane volume, but you're also giving them data that they can use to put you out of business.

What poster above said.

Amazon is making a push to completely destroy small ecommerce. They will find your bestselling product and will go to your manufacturer. They will use your competition and basement based sellers who don't understand consequences of being Amazon's free tech support to answer questions about your products. Then you won't have a chance in hell to compete in G with your owns sites. And even if you do Amazon will still have lower price because of some shmuck making beer money will decide he wants to have lowest price that you won't be able to match.

Be very careful what and how you sell on Amazon, and be prepared to be pushed out of selling that particular product.

Amazon IMHO came up with a very clever way to beat Walmart and its "lowest prices" scheme - to use basement based sellers for free as Amazon's product content builders. Naturally, they don't want to send their humongous, converting traffic to external ecommerce sites anymore.

[smilie]

Amazon also will send out support questions on the products , and then disallow to put external links even if there's no product that's sold on Amazon that is an answer (such as a part). And even if a question requires a phone support.

They are making it more and more of a walled garden.

Build your own ecommerce site, that's your only defense. And keep all knowledge on it, don't give it to Amazon. Especially FREE, they have enough billions to acquire it if they have a need. Let them work for this knowledge, and even Amazon won't have enough resources to step into every possible niche.

[creeking]

will this be better for amazon affiliates?

[Hoople]

A good read on it here:

[marketingland.com ]
"...Amazon is simultaneously introducing a new ad option called Amazon Text Ads, and the email sent to advertisers suggests that as one of a couple of alternatives..."

Emphasis mine :-)

[isellstuff]

will this be better for amazon affiliates?

I suspect this will be good for Amazon affiliates. Amazon ran Adsense for years without too much of a negative impact on affiliates. Product ads, on the other hand, had a decidedly negative impact on affiliate commissions, in my opinion.

[mrengine]

I run both Amazon product ads and Amazon text ads. The placement on the text ads must be so miserably positioned because I am only seeing 10% of the text ads traffic as I do from their product ads. Needless to say I'm not impressed at all with Amazon's text ads.