Amazon announced that it wants to help its employees quit — so they can start their own delivery businesses. Tthe e-commerce giant said that it’s expanding its Delivery Service Partner program to include an incentive for current Amazon workers

The program promises up to $10,000 in startup costs for employees who partake in the program. Amazon is also throwing in the equivalent of three months of an employee’s most recent salary to help soon-to-be entrepreneurs get their fleet of delivery cars off the ground. 

The program is Amazon’s solution to its last-mile delivery problem where the company is trying to compete with legacy players like UPS and FedEx.

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In the era of online reviews and SEO, the impact of unauthorized ecommerce sellers ranges from lost revenue to damaged relationships with authorized sellers to questionable brand integrity. If you want to protect the integrity of your brand, unauthorized third-party sellers should be a big deal.

In order to protect themselves, the first step for online retailers is collecting the basic facts about these ecommerce sellers: Who they are, what they’re doing and where they are operating. In short, brand manufacturers first need to figure out who the seller is and how to reach them. 

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USPS has floated a new proposal to Congress that would see it reducing mail delivery from six to five days a week while expanding packaging deliveries to seven days.

The shipping world has changed dramatically over the past decade. Since 2007, total U.S. mail volume has declined 31% to 146 million pieces, including a 41% drop in first-class mail, its most profitable product. At the same time, ecommerce has exploded, offering a way to plug the lost revenue while also adding burden to USPS operations as it handles more packages. USPS has already started to dip its toes into 7-day a week delivery to manage the 20 million packages it averages daily. It now delivers some Amazon.com packages on Sundays and also other ecommerce retail fulfillment during the busy Christmas holiday season.

The agency lost $3.9 billion in 2018, its 12th straight year of losses. According to the agency, this move better reflects the market conditions and would save it billions of dollars per year. Republican and Democratic members of Congress, however are opposed to making a change to mail deliveries.

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American consumers are prepared to reward manufacturers, retailers, and others offering products that benefit the environment as long as any additional costs associated with providing those benefits are not transferred to them in the form of higher prices.

Earth Day 2019, an A.T. Kearney study of 1,000 US consumers’ sentiments on environmental benefit claims found that more than 70% of consumers consider their impact on the environment when shopping. But, even as topics like climate change continue to make headlines, only 52% have shifted their purchase decisions—although this is improving, with 66% intending to shift within the year. Why haven’t they changed? The answer is they want the businesses that serve them to change first.

While nearly 80% of respondents would consider delayed shipping if the environmental benefit was clearly articulated, they are unlikely to settle for higher costs in exchange for environmental benefits.

“What we see in these findings is that the consumer market may be more receptive to buying green products than they were in years past,” said Greg Portell, an A.T. Kearney partner involved in the study. “But, they don’t want to sacrifice quality or pay higher prices to benefit the environment.”

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A national unemployment rate hovering around 4% is a good thing for the economy but makes life difficult for managers of distribution and fulfillment centers. Finding sufficient staff is a problem that’s not likely to go away soon, so companies are looking to maximize productivity and reduce inefficiency.

This special report from Multichannel Merchant explores ways ecommerce and direct-to-customer merchants are creating optimized warehouses to address labor shortages. This includes tactics like incentives, space optimization and investment in a modern warehouse management system (WMS).

In the MCM Special Report you will learn:

• About the shift from centralized DCs to smaller regional fulfillment centers
• About leveraging existing WMS capabilities like labor management and order flow
• About the advantages of a modern WMS, including granular KPIs and volumetric data
• How more efficient space utilization can fuel opportunistic buys that capture more sales

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Amazon.com has launched Project Zero, a program that enables brands to designate counterfeit product listings on the e-tailer’s site for removal. Amazon is providing each product with a unique code that can be scanned to determine whether a product is authentic or counterfeit. The online retail giant launched a new anticounterfeiting program, called Project Zero, that it says would better protect brands from scammers by letting them designate listings for removal, rather than going through a cumbersome reporting process with Amazon.

The company has been testing it with roughly 15 brands for a few months, and will now start inviting selected additional companies to participate. Amazon said it wants all brand owners to join the program eventually but declined to specify a timeline.

As part of Project Zero, Amazon also is including a tool that generates a unique code for each product unit that the brand can print onto existing packaging or attach onto items using a sticker. The codes can then be scanned to ensure a product’s authenticity when it enters an Amazon warehouse.

In shifting some monitoring duties and authority to brands themselves, Amazon is taking an unusual step. Other tech companies use outside contractors to help monitor their platforms but don’t generally let users remove content. Amazon, for example, has required brand owners to report suspected counterfeits to an internal team that would investigate and decide whether or not to remove them.

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Whether it’s a deadly cold snap or a hole under an Antarctic glacier or a terrifying new report, there seem to be constant reminders now of the dangers that climate change poses to humanity.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., think they have a start to a solution.

What is the Green New Deal?

The Green New Deal is an ambitious proposal in the US to combat climate change. Named after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to combat the Great Depression, the Green New Deal is a massive stimulus package aimed to address climate change, as well as the rising social, economic, and political inequality in the US that comes with it. It calls for economic mobilization not seen since World War II and the New Deal and aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in half by 2030, shift 100 percent of national power generation to renewable sources, upgrade all infrastructure and transportation for energy efficiency, decarbonize the largest polluting industries (manufacturing and agriculture), fund the capture of GHGs, and virtually eliminate poverty in the US by including everyone in the prosperity that this transition would provide.

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This is the million dollar question. Actually, it is a multi-million dollar question, as thousands of people have staked a claim in the success of Amazon’s seller marketplace, and many more are eyeing the potential of selling on Amazon and ready to make a move.

The goal was simply to get a better understanding of what an Amazon seller looked like: simple demographics like age, gender, location, but also at a deeper level, what factors helped the top sellers succeed?

Getting Started is Key!

The hardest part is getting started: finding a product idea, maintaining momentum, and ultimately getting it live on Amazon. If you can do that well, you have set yourself up for success. That is the exact path that every one of these successful sellers we surveyed took.

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As Amazon gets stronger and companies become more competitive, e-commerce companies need to continually find ways to improve operations, reduce expenses, and at the same time improve customer service.

As we perform operational assessments for multi-channel retailers – while companies have similar functions and processes – they often end up with very different outcomes and costs per order. From the hundreds of practical blogs on our website, here are 13 major ways to make your fulfillment operation more efficient and links to detailed blogs for improvement.

1. Understand your cost per order
2. Compare your service level metrics
3. Reduce outbound shipping cost
4. Increase productivity
5. Effective picking and slotting

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Some days you might feel like you’re caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Like clockwork, carriers increase their charges. The competition is absorbing more of their shipping costs and offering “free” shipping. The customer’s “point, click and deliver” mentality is here to stay.

The cost of shipping and the time to get the package to the customer affects many customers’ decisions to buy from your business. As these trends continue, multiple distribution centers may be the best bet to reduce shipping costs and deliver faster to the customer. As an alternative to internally managing additional facilities, we recommend companies evaluate the use of 3PL as a major way to reduce start up investment and shorten the schedule. You may be able to reach 80% of your customers in 1-2 days via ground from two strategically placed centers.

However, multi-DC strategies are not the right strategy for every company because of the added expenses, inventory required and managing a second remote center. 

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