Amazon Sellers Go All In on Logistics and GenAI
If you were looking for a pulse check on the state of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) post-interest rate cuts, you could do worse than Seattle this week.
Amazon gathered its independent sellers from all four corners of the globe for its annual Accelerate conference. While the mood was enthusiastic, the crowd that gathered was concerned about two things: GenAI and logistics. One thing that didn’t show up: Relief over interest rate cuts.
Most of the sellers interviewed on site by PYMNTS were relieved that the Fed finally took action. But they were looking for more immediate relief than a gradual drawdown of interest rates would provide, and for the most part, they weren’t rushing to access any new funding anytime soon.
“One of the lessons I learned here is that funding is something you have to track in different ways,” said Richard Brown, proprietor of Cleveland-based sneaker accessory retailer Proof Culture. “Funding for my company is more about finding better payment terms than it’s about access to capital.”
“We just took our first loan this year (before the rate cut),” said Tulsa-based fishing accessory retailer Chill-N-Reel CMO Chris Diede. “Usually we put back everything we make into new products and content creation. But we realized that if we want to be the great American redneck brand, we need to make sure we have products in stock.”
Brown, Diede and other Amazon sellers were far more excited about AI in the context of their business than they were about interest rate cuts. And they weren’t disappointed. Amazon used the event to introduce a slew of AI applications, from the personal AI assistant Project Amelia to upgrades to AI-powered tools like Rufus to help customers make better shopping choices and analytics tools to help sellers understand why items get returned.
A big change is that all sellers using Amazon’s warehouses can now easily resell returned items, which the company says will increase their profits and offer more discounted products to customers. Amazon also introduced a new tool to help sellers avoid returns by offering free product support, which prevented 11 million returns last year. For cheaper items, sellers can now refund without requesting the product back.
While AI got much-deserved attention at the conference, it did so in the spirit of extending big business capabilities to SMBs. Sellers discussed using AI to create product images, tell their brand story and to access datasets that would help bring customer acquisition and retention costs down.
“Your brand story is how you differentiate yourself,” said candle manufacturer Hemlock Park Founder Mikey Kim. “It’s how you communicate quality. It’s how you get good reviews.”
Kim and other sellers also discussed their use of data, which one roundtable survey put at the top of the Amazon services list. Several of them described using sales and competitive data to pivot anything from product development to social media usage to entire business models.
“I’ve been telling all the other sellers here to shoot as much video as possible because you can slice it up and feed social platforms like TikTok — which has had its moment — and that expands your audience,” Diede said. “There’s more than 50 million fishing licenses in the U.S. and we’ve only old 300,000 products. That’s a lot of runway.”
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