As one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world, with services that include video streaming and even drone delivery, it is no surprise that any news from Amazon immediately sets the tech and digital industries alight. Having risen from extremely humble beginnings, Amazon.com has taken the internet by storm in the past few years and is widely known as a user-friendly,comprehensive marketplace which enjoys thousands of transactions every day.
The Origins Of Amazon.com
Amazon.com, and its many international guises including Amazon.co.uk,is the largest internet-based retailer. Amazon began as an online book retailer, named Cadabra, but it was changed to the now familiar Amazon less than a year after it was misheard as “cadaver".Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, chose to deal in books due to their low price point and the massive global demand for literature.
Amazon has largely been credited with popularising online shopping,particularly following the bursting of the dot.com bubble in the early 2000s. Without Amazon, the internet would not look like it does today, and the company's consistent focus to provide the best possible experience for the user has had lasting effects across the entirety of the eCommerce landscape.
Amazon Integrations – A Staple Of Modern eCommerce Design
The Amazon marketplace is one of the most powerful online retail solutions in the world, and the benefits associated with trading through it are numerous. From the outside, it can look extremely difficult for a business to offer their products to Amazon's diverse audience as well as providing their own dedicated online retail solution.
In fact, it can be difficult if a business isn't making use of the very best Amazon Integration services, which can align your Amazon account with your existing software and allow dynamic, automatic updates with regards to orders, delivery dates and stock counter.
Using our high-performing Amazon integration services, you have the ability to list, edit and remove products on your Amazon page at the touch of a button. There's no need to log into your marketplace account separately if you want to upload pictures, enter prices or set delivery rules – this information can be fed directly into your account via your business' personal CMS and eCommerce software.
What Are The Benefits Of Amazon Integration For Modern Businesses?
The advantages that your business can enjoy when trading through Amazon as well as your own eCommerce solution are almost numberless, but here are afew of the most beneficial:
- Managing Inventory – You can quickly and easily add any items that you offer to the Amazon marketplace, without having to individually enter them more than once. This remains true for a range of other integration services that we offer, including one of the other major online marketplaces,eBay.
Once you have all your items on your store, you can maintain current inventory levels across all systems to avoid running out of stock and irritating your customers by extended delivery dates and reneged orders. The only real way to ensure that this does not develop is through constant and dynamic communication between your various systems.
- Process Transactions – Once the orders start to roll in, you need to be able to process them with as little effort as possible. If all your time is spent dealing with the orders that you do receive, then you will never have the opportunity to develop your online retail business by attracting new orders.
There are many companies, usually smaller businesses, which have been forced to hire an extra member of staff just to transfer orders from the various web platforms to the warehouse or stock management systems. Not only is this a huge waste of resources, it is also a waste of a person's talent.
Just as importantly, any poorly-transferred orders could result in costly mistakes, which could then cost you repeat customers and future sales. Don't forget, either, that this is only one part of the process as well. Orders are only the beginning of the transaction process, and you need to ensure that you are fulfilling the various steps as effectively as possible. This includes acknowledgements, payments, invoicing and shipping information just to start!
- Increased Audience – By offering your products through Amazon,you are opening your business up to a brand new revenue stream, that thousands of businesses take advantage of every single day. Your products will be presented to a potential audience of thousands of people interested in the products that you can offer.
It can also be a great way to introduce your brand to a new audience. If Amazon customers discover a single product, similar to what they are looking for, then they are more likely to follow the product back to your eCommerce solution in the hope that you offer the ideal product to meet their requirements.
The Latest News From The Online Retail Giant;
Amazon To Drastically Grow UK Presence In 2016
Everyone in the country is already aware of the international retailer,but with the recent news that the company is planning to create more than 2,500 jobs in the UK shows that Amazon is definitely here to stay. This will increase the retailer's workforce in Britain to more than 14,500 by the end of the year,making it one of the biggest international employers on British soil.
The company will be hiring at its head office in London and at three research and development centres across the country. However, perhaps most exciting for eCommerce businesses, is that the organisation intends to drastically grow its warehouse staff across the UK.
With Amazon drastically increasing its presence across all of Europe,it is likely that this will result in increased functionality and reliability of service for the many businesses that choose to integrate with the marketplace's eCommerce solution.
Amazon Prime Now
Amazon's super-fast delivery service is the latest in a long line of steps that the business has made to provide unbeatable user-friendliness to its customers. With the ability to deliver packages in less than an hour in many areas, including Merseyside,Manchester and Greater London.
Amazon's delivery infrastructure is one of the quickest and most effective in the world, and provides another reason for businesses to offer their products through Amazon fulfilment.
What's Going On With PayPal And Amazon?
Recently, PayPal split from eBay in the hopes that the service would become much more appealing to other businesses. The biggest coup would certainly have been if Amazon embraced the PayPal service in order to appeal to the small customer base that will only complete transactions through PayPal.
However, the Amazon Payments VP, Patrick Gauthier (a former employee of PayPal) questioned why Amazon would want to make their payment process more complicated, when they are constantly trying to make it a quicker, less strenuous part of the transaction. With many products, the customer can make the most of Amazon's one-click checkout technology, which can make a transaction almost instantaneous.
Pay With Amazon And 3rd Party Websites
Amazon launched their own payment service, Pay With Amazon, as far back as 2013, and the retail giant are clearly hoping that the service will take offand see more and more business integrate it into their own eCommerce systems.
Gauthier went on to say that more than 23 million customers, in more than 170 countries, have used the Pay With Amazon button on 3rd party sites. Somewhere in the region of 300 million people have used Pay with Amazon in the past, primarily on the various Amazon sites themselves, so that means nearly 10% of all uses came from external sites.
That's great news for Amazon, which is looking to improve its presence around the world. If you're already signed in to the service, then it can be as simple as a one-click checkout option, and it is a great way to add customer-confidence into a smaller store which the customer might not have used before. Similar to the way that PayPal works, PwA could drastically help smaller and independent stores all over the world to increase their own online retail success, whilst cementing the company's reputation as a trustworthy business.
Who Are The Shoppers Using Pay With Amazon?
Most interestingly, these shoppers are what Gauthier refers to as the“crème de la crème". More than 50% of them are Amazon Prime customers, with a high average basket value and unshakeable faith in Amazon as a reliable service.
PwA And Amazon Integration
Introducing Amazon's payment solution to your online retail solution can be a great way to give your customers a little extra confidence in your business, which can be really useful when you're just starting out in the world of eCommerce. Integrating you online business with Amazon can provide a great range of advantages, so there really isn't a reason not to. Despite this, some business still prefer to try and go it completely alone; an idea which is,frankly, pointless.
With no downsides, every online business needs to follow the very best in multichannel eCommerce strategies and ensure that it is presenting its products in the most efficient way, to as many people as possible.
Amazon Exclusives; Initial Data From The eCommerce Giant
For the first time, Amazon.com has released information on the success of its Exclusives store which, as you might be able to guess from the title,offers products which aren't available anywhere else. This website managed totop more than $50 million in the last year, with as many as 120 difference brands making their home on the site.
Of course, this sales figure represents only a tiny fraction of those who sell on Amazon's 3rd party marketplace, but it is a great indicator as to the potential successes that businesses can enjoy through intelligent Amazon integration and partnerships.
Exclusives is part of Amazon's major effort to target niche shoppers,through unique stores like Handmade, which offers completely hand-crafted items, and the crowd-funded site LaunchPad. The online company appears to be more dedicated than ever to providing a one-stop shop for everything, and it has announced plans to expand the site following its initial success. Already as many as 10,000 products are listed on the site, but it is certain to explode in 2016, as more and more people are looking for niche, unique products that can't be found anywhere else.
Every day, more and more independent retailers are offering their products through Amazon's Exclusives service, with active merchants utilising the platform having grown by more than 50% over the last year. More than 1 billion items were delivered, all across the world, and the massive infrastructure of Amazon is making it possible for smaller businesses to take advantage of the global nature of modern eCommerce.
So; Why Should Your Business Choose To Integrate With Amazon?
One of the best ways to ensure that your business is trusted across the internet is to offer your products through Amazon's fulfilment process. Customers know that they can trust the world's leading online retail site, and if you hand some of your products over to them for fulfilment, they can really help to increase your sales.
How Does Amazon Fulfilment Work?
Essentially, once your system has been effectively integrated with the Amazon marketplace, you can send your stock over to Amazon's warehouse. This can help to reduce on your own storage space, as your products will be readily at hand for packaging and dispatching.
Using the Store Express EMS, you can keep track of inventory across multiple storage locations, print labels, inventory documents and relevant paperwork for the shipment. This information can then be quickly and easily sent on to Amazon to allow their warehouse team to fulfil the order.
Thanks to the highest levels of marketplace integration that our expert team can provide, you can drastically reduce the difficulty of fulfilling any orders that you receive, and ensure that your customers can really trust your business when purchasing through Amazon's 3rd party marketplace.
Choose Store Express, For Essential Amazon Integration And Fulfilment
By integrating with Amazon, you can drastically increase your customer's sense of brand awareness and encourage a greatly increased number of transactions through the global leader in terms of 3rd party online retail.