Amazon releases global e-commerce tools for third-party sellers

Amazon is offering third-party sellers on its platform new solutions designed to ease international processes such as customer service and inventory management.

At its Amazon Accelerate virtual selling conference, the e-tail giant announced a set of new tools aimed at making it easier for U.S.-based third-party sellers to offer their products in its 21 stores worldwide.

[Read more: CSA Exclusive: Amazon offers third-party sellers enterprise support]

Amazon announced the following new tools for U.S. third-party sellers at Accelerate 2021:

• Customer Service by Amazon gives third-party sellers who fulfill their own orders the option to have Amazon manage their customer inquiries, refunds, and returns on self-fulfilled orders. Global shoppers can contact more than 130 customer support sites via phone, chat, or email, day or night, and receive help in 15 languages. At Accelerate, the company announced it will offer this service free or at a discounted rate, depending on the seller’s customer contact volume. It is available now and open to all U.S. sellers.
• Marketplace Product Guidance helps third-party sellers determine which of their products they should offer internationally, and identify other high-potential products they can add to their catalog in international stores. These recommendations are personalized and ranked based on their opportunity score, and calculated by machine learning models that take into account hundreds of parameters at the seller, product, and store level. Amazon estimates that more than 6 million products currently offered by U.S. sellers have a high potential for success in its international stores. This tool is available now and open to all U.S. sellers.
• Global Inventory Viewer provides a one-stop solution for third-party sellers to monitor inventory supply and demand across all stores in a consolidated manner. It is available now and open to all U.S. sellers.
• Global Listing enables third-party sellers to list products on Amazon once and sell globally. Instead of managing products separately across Amazon’s stores, sellers can now replicate their product listings in multiple international stores with a few clicks. Sellers will be able to view their listing from a set of globalized pages and views. Amazon is currently testing the feature in beta, and will open it to all U.S. sellers in early 2022.

“Global selling helps small businesses leverage Amazon’s scale and reach to easily expand into countries around the world, while maintaining control of their brand and not having to worry about global logistics,” said Eric Broussard, VP of international selling partner services at Amazon. “These capabilities, such as the use of Amazon’s renowned worldwide customer support for all of their products at low or no cost, will help our U.S. sellers capture billions of dollars in international opportunity.”

In 2020, Amazon says it invested more than $18 billion in logistics, tools, services, programs, and teams to help third-party sellers. According to the company, its third-party sellers have created an estimated 1.8 million U.S. jobs managing, operating, and supporting their Amazon-related businesses.