Amazon is keeping itself business in the pre-holiday season, announcing more tools to support sellers on its third-party marketplace platform and launching a delivery initiative and a robotic warehouse that points up its increasingly broad and intense, at times incidental competition with Walmart as the two companies ramp up capabilities to more effectively expand their businesses.
The robotic warehouse also suggests that greater competition with Kroger at least on the operational level but eventually on the sales level as Amazon continues to expand its food business.
At Accelerate 2021, a conference for third-party sellers in the United States, Amazon announced the launch of Search Analytics Dashboard, a new tool that will help those operators on the platform that have signed on to Brand Registry derive insights from the search performance of their products.
Amazon designed the new dashboard to enhance the existing Amazon Brand Analytics suite of aggregated data reports, the company stated. It will include two functions, Amazon pointed out: The Catalog dashboard helps brands understand their sales funnel at the product level and quickly identify conversion issues or drop-off points where they lose customer attention. The Query Performance dashboard supports better targeting of keywords sellers use in their marketing campaigns and aids in identifying opportunities to expand their product portfolio based on customer interest.
Also, as part of Accelerate, the company announced the debut of Amazon Local Selling, a new set of services that enables local, regional and national retailers to start or expand their businesses by offering both in-store pickup and fast delivery to local customers. With Amazon Local Selling, businesses can quickly and easily expand their multichannel offerings by listing products in Amazon’s store and offering them to local customers in designated areas not only for delivery but also for in-store pickup on the same day that they place an order.
Amazon Local Selling already is available from national and local retailers including Mavis Discount Tire, Sears Hometown Store, 4 Wheel Parts, Electronic Express, Best Buy, Appliance Connection, Mattress Warehouse, Beach Camera, Adorama, DataVision, Exclusive Furniture, World Wide Stereo, MODIA, Focus Camera, Amazon noted.
Walmart recently rolled out a service developed to help sellers reach out to consumers in the local market operations, GoLocal. Although it designed the service as providing a service to smaller companies operating in community settings GoLocal scales up, like the Amazon initiative, and Walmart has announced that Home Depot has become a GoLocal client.
Outside the Accelerate setting, Amazon announced the opening of a new first-of-its-kind robotics manufacturing facility in Westborough, MA. It will expand the company’s robotics manufacturing capability in the U.S. The facility will focus on manufacturing the mobile drive units that work in Amazon facilities.
Robotics has been a focus of retail attention lately. Of course, Kroger is opening its robotic fulfillment centers, developed with Ocado, across the United States and has used them to penetrate the Central Florida market with delivery services, a move it will repeat in the Northeast.
In the meantime, Walmart has announced plans to build a new, high-tech distribution center for fresh and frozen groceries in Spartanburg County, SC. Set to open in 2024, the new 720,000 square-foot facility will rely on the combination of Walmart associates, automation technology, robotics and machine learning to process grocery perishables including produce, eggs, dairy, flowers and frozen goods, and deliver them to nearby stores.
