The Ecomcrew Ecommerce Podcast E185: Amazon News, Minimum Wage Hike, Increase in Storage Fees, etc.
It’s been a hot minute since Dave and I sat down and did a podcast focused solely on discussing news and updates from Amazon. And so that’s what we did for this particular episode.
Here’s what we covered.
Amazon Raises Employee’s Min Wage to $15 (for US and UK)
The company’s move to raise the minimum wage was lauded by critics but there’s a fear that the cost will trickle down to third-party sellers by the beginning of next year.
Increase in long-term and Q4 storage fees
Amazon storage fees appear deceptively cheap but if you do the math, they could potentially cost 10 times the amount of what a 3PL would normally charge. You’ll find a table comparing the old and new storage fees here.
If possible, we recommend using a 3PL and Amazon fulfillment.
Update to reviews policy
The latest announcement basically clarifies on the sanctions a seller can receive for violating the updated review policy. Log in to your Seller Central account and read the verbiage.
States collecting Sales Tax
A couple more states have joined South Dakota in pursuing sales tax collection for online sellers. We are actively fighting this via the Online Merchants Guild and have plans to take the fight for this “undue burden” to federal court.
A hope in the horizon comes in the form of a Congress bill specifying that compliance should be restricted to $10 million dollar sellers and more.
Image non-compliance
We have recently been receiving emails from Amazon about this and have taken steps to clean up our listings and improve our images. Otherwise, they’ll suppress ASINs that don’t meet their guidelines.
This is a new FBA feature that essentially gives manufacturers some level of access to a seller’s account on Amazon. With this, there’s a real danger that Chinese suppliers themselves will start selling on the marketplace.
European Union takes legal action Amazon over antitrust issues
Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's competition commissioner, said concerns had been raised over how Amazon was using data from third-party sellers and whether it was helping the company predict the 'new big thing.'
That’s our roundup for the month. We’ll hopefully do another one in November or December. You can check out our previous podcast about Amazon updates on the link below.
New Amazon Developments - June 2018
Registration to EcomCrew Premium is closed indefinitely. But, you can still learn from us through our suite of free courses. There’s a total of 20 videos covering ecommerce topics like Importing from China and Building a 7-Figure Business. More information here.
As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!