What happens when customers revolt against a customer-obsessed company?
That’s what happened to Amazon earlier this year, when a community of Amazon sellers, dubbed Million Dollar Sellers, boycotted Amazon over a series of changes that left them feeling like they were in a weakened position.
Last week, AdExchanger Senior Editor James Hercher found himself in a room full of Million Dollar Sellers. While the boycott resulted in Amazon pushing back the date when it will stop accepting credit card transactions, MDS’ other discontents continue to fester.
The sellers have a long list of complaints against Amazon and how it’s running its seller platform, from fuel surcharges to delayed payment for products (the DD+7 change) to ads running in places they can’t expect. They’re frustrated and fed up.
For anyone who’s been around the block in ad tech or worked with Google and Meta, many of the advertising-specific complaints aren’t new. For example, many sellers don’t like that Amazon doesn’t allow sellers to fully exclude (only “limit”) ads on off-network sites, which is familiar to anyone who lived through agencies’ dislike of Facebook Audience Network. Sellers also dislike AI-assembled creative. The platform also doesn’t allow them to control what kind of ads they run (like Amazon’s new AI chatbot ads), which was a former gripe about Google Performance Max.
What’s perhaps most unusual is that the Amazon sellers fought back with a boycott technique that the industry hasn’t really seen since YouTube brand safety boycotts in 2017 or the Meta boycotts over its policy on hate speech and misinformation in July 2020.
With so many platform changes upending how Amazon sellers run their business, jobs people once loved have now become displaced by unending uphill battles.
“It felt like everyone’s problems boiled down to, ‘We’re not having fun anymore,’” Hercher says.
