In March 2023, Google will stop tracking personal cookies in its Chrome Browser. If you are selling products online, this data deficiency should concern you. However, there is a solution from an unexpected quarter: Amazon.

Read on to discover the challenges that are facing retailers with the end of third-party cookies. Find out what Amazon can offer retailers who are looking to diversify their ecommerce strategy.

The Challenges

With the end of third-party cookies, tracking will become more challenging – if not impossible – and so too will reporting on ROI. Losing solid data will make it difficult to introduce optimisation choices to your PPC strategy based on facts.

Now that Covid restrictions have lifted, people will start to head back to physical stores for their larger-priced goods . This will reduce their online spending. This poses a concern for multichannel sellers as offline sales are harder to track. It is an even bigger problem for sellers who are exclusively selling online. This, in combination with shortages of products due to supply chain issues caused by Covid and Brexit, will give online retailers further headaches.

The reality is that in a cookieless world, the online acquisition market is going to change dramatically and irreversibly. The question is when and how you adjust your paid media strategy in order to keep up.

And here is where Amazon as an online acquisition channel comes into its own.

The Amazon Solution

A 2021 report from SEO company Jungle Scout, found that nearly three-quarters (74%) of consumers begin their online shopping searches on Amazon. This shows us that Amazon is a huge shopping channel, presenting a big opportunity for sellers to generate sales. This should steady the nerves of merchants who have never sold on the marketplace before and are feeling apprehensive about dipping their toes in for the first time.

In addition, the Amazon platform has evolved tremendously over the past couple of years, building on the foundations laid by maturer channels such as Google and Facebook.

Amazon sellers can now take advantage of:

• Third party tools such as Channel Advisor and Linnworks. These allow the marketplace to integrate seamlessly with your existing ecommerce website and sales processes, solving issues with inventory planning
• A+ Content and Brand Stores that allow you to control your brand voice and messaging
• The B2B dashboard, which enables you to cater your offering specifically for business customers
• New reporting analytics that help you breakdown who your customers are and how they interact with your products, which helps you build a customer persona

The Risk Factor

Despite this, Amazon scepticism among businesses is rife. After all, why should you risk taking traffic from your owned media channels?

It’s true that Amazon sellers do not own the customer relationship in the same way that retail websites do. Depending on your shipment service, you may not know their contact details or demographics, you can’t retarget or add them to your mailing list. But to brush Amazon aside based on this alone is vacuous.

As Nate Materson from Maple Holistics puts it, “while it’s important for every small business to build and maintain their own retail website, you simply can’t compete with the number of eyes that can find your product on Amazon.[…]

“Amazon only continues to grow and the propensity of global consumers to look to Amazon to make purchases only continues to grow. Amazon is the future (if not the present), and businesses will either adapt to it or get left behind.”

Prepare for All Eventualities

I’m not saying that you need to completely jump out of bed with Google, it is a great piece of kit and we have work-arounds in place to support the changes coming in 2023. What I’m saying is you need to look at your sector’s results in 2021 commercially and strategically, add in the changes coming, and be prepared with an omni-channel performance marketing approach.

For more details on our Amazon Advertising Services, and for advice on how to navigate the challenges of creating sustainable ROI through PPC and organic methods, please get in touch here.