🍭 Treacle Thursdays from Seller Candy (25/11/21 issue) 🍬

Dear Buddy,

Avid readers may have noticed my brief hiatus from putting together these weekly installments. I've been ✈️ back to the UK to visit my family for, you guessed it, Christmas. Which, shockingly, is next week. 

Christmas will bring a near end to another year of tiresome rules and restrictions that we're hopefully closer to seeing the back of.

Enough of that for now - there's plenty of news to get caught up on!

Let's get in to it.

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

- Marie Curie

Amazon services down for thousands of users. Outages over the holidays?

Christmas time is coming and that has Amazon's huge server management arm, AWS, taking some big blows from the vast amounts of traffic they see around this time of the year. This has led to not one but multiple outages of parts of their service.

This sounds bad for us as Amazon sellers. It sort of is. But it hasn't so far affected the entire world and it seems that the hardest hit have been streaming services, games, and various other things like Zoom. The worst part, though, is that there was another outage earlier today.

Be prepared for unexpected crashes and the inherent problems that come with them. And if you're planning to keep your kids entertained with Frozen streamed on Netflix over Christmas then make sure you've downloaded it. You never know when AWS will let it go (AHA).

Better fulfilment - no more money

Earlier this month, Amazon started a new Partner Carrier program which gives products which fit the bill preferential shipping without you spending a penny more than you currently do. This is a pretty dry story but it's good to know, so I'm just going to share the info. Amazon say:

"Box-level placement improves the distribution of your products across Amazon’s fulfillment network at no additional cost to you. For eligible inventory, we’ll separate your shipment into multiple box groups, allowing your products to reach our fulfillment centers faster.

Other benefits

• Faster fulfillment, since your products will be moved closer to your customers
• No changes to your shipment fees or current logistics
• Full visibility into the shipment status for each of your box groups

Next steps

• No action is required from you. Once you select a partnered carrier as part of your shipping plan, we’ll let you know if your shipment qualifies for box-level placement.
• We’ll contact your partnered carrier directly to process the shipment."

There's some more info below. If your products qualify then you're in luck!

Taking the stress out of account issues

We always love feedback from our clients. We especially like it when the feedback is good. I recently had the pleasure of setting up the Seller Candy YouTube channel, which will be tasked with keeping track of all of those lovely things people say about us as well as holding some pretty snazzy additional content.

This video, in particular, is some feedback from David about how rather than going through receipts, putting together a case on Amazon Seller Central to send over them, following up with Seller Support for days then having your plan of action rejected, and having to do it all over again, people who work with Seller Candy just open a ticket and have their problem solved with no extra work. No hassle. No stress. No dealing with seller support.

Check it out if you get a moment. Maybe pop alike on there. You could even subscribe. Please subscribe.

Get your holiday snaps with Packshots

At this competitive time of year, have you been wondering if your photos and videos are due a spritz up? They can make a pretty huge difference to conversion rates.

Our pals over at Packshots Direct can help you out with that. They're experts at getting your listings to pop and give you that little extra leg up against your competition. Whether you need standard images, models, or videos they've got you covered.

To make the season even more jolly, our readers get an additional 10% off of their already reasonable prices. Just quote the code "SellerCandy-10" to claim any time before the end of this year. 

Click the button below to get some more info and see what they can do!

That's it for this week. I hope your pre-holiday sales are smashing your goals and continue to do so. We've got one more issue coming before Christmas, so expect to see some jolly party snaps with hideous holiday-themed jumpers included.

May your sales be high and your returns low!

Rich

Partnership Manager and chilly newsletter writer at Seller Candy