The Surprising Reason Your Amazon Searches Are Returning More Confusing Results than Ever
Between 2016 and the end of 2020, the proportion of the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon based in China went from one in five to nearly one in two, according to data from research firm Marketplace Pulse. (Sellers were ranked by seller feedback, a proxy for their revenue on Amazon.)
That was actually a subset of the total. Amazon bans sellers all the time, for infractions including poor-quality items and using disallowed “black hat” tactics to boost the rankings of items, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse. This could explain why the Shenzhen Cross-border E-commerce Association has said that the total number of accounts banned by Amazon in the spring and summer of 2021 exceeded 50,000, he adds.
“This whole system has created a massive issue for Amazon because the consumer can’t pick the best product for any search anymore, because they’re all essentially the same,” says Mr. Kaziukėnas.
