Amazon Perfect Partner, Associates and UK Platform
When I checked my Associates sales for Amazon UK and Amazon US this morning, it turned out they sold the identical books yesterday. That's the first time I can remember it happening, though I don't check the Amazon UK Associates account every day, and it triggered me to take a look at how they compare. The top line number is that I sell 11% as many books through Amazon UK as Amazon US. The overall revenue difference is even greater since Amazon UK discontinued ebooks last year. I never did understand if they did this because of some overlap with Mobipocket, the French ebook company that Amazon bought, some glitch in international tax laws, customer support issues, or simple lack of interest.
I don't have any inside information on how Amazon runs their business or maintains their software, you can visit Werner Vogel's All Things Distributed blog for that, but it seems to me that Amazon UK runs different software than Amazon US. Their rank systems didn't operate the same way for years and years, Amazon UK only updated most ranks once a day long after Amazon went to sorting all ranks every hour, but the really critical difference for small publishers was that Amazon UK's Perfect Partner program seemed to go off the deep end around a year ago. I don't know if they lost all their sales data or confused it with views data or what, but long term Perfect Partner relationships not only broke, the partners disappeared from the Also Bought list as well. "Perfect Partner" is the UK equivalent of "Better Together" in the US.
This morning, Amazon UK is showing an Also Viewed list instead of an Also Bought list, but the matches look a lot more like what the Also Bought list used to look like. I know I'm expressing this pretty poorly, but it looks to me like Amazon UK may have simply swapped the database fields for these two items last year and just figured it out now. I suppose it's also possible that today's look is the mistake, but I've already spotted one instance where the Perfect Partner isn't the top book on the Also Viewed list AND it's not the Perfect Partner due to Co-op advertising, so I'm assuming that the Perfect Partner is coming from the top title on the Also Bought (as in the US) list which simply isn't displayed.
Overall, it's the biggest change to the Amazon UK platform I can remember since they stripped out the ebooks. They've also started showing the shipping weights in grams, something that accidentally rolled out in the US a couple weeks ago, with the wrong weights. The same thing has happened in the UK, as in the weights shown are wrong. In the US, they simply stuck "grams" in for "ounces", in the UK, the gram weights look right except the decimal point is in the ounces place, so the weights are 100 times too light! For books that weigh over a pound, they slid the decimal point the wrong was again, so a 2.2 pound book lists at 10 Kg. If it plays into the shipping costs they charge, it could cost them a few bucks or a few sales. The bottom line is that it looks to me like the Amazon UK software platform is being upgraded after a long period of neglect, and this is good news for publishers.
I don't have any inside information on how Amazon runs their business or maintains their software, you can visit Werner Vogel's All Things Distributed blog for that, but it seems to me that Amazon UK runs different software than Amazon US. Their rank systems didn't operate the same way for years and years, Amazon UK only updated most ranks once a day long after Amazon went to sorting all ranks every hour, but the really critical difference for small publishers was that Amazon UK's Perfect Partner program seemed to go off the deep end around a year ago. I don't know if they lost all their sales data or confused it with views data or what, but long term Perfect Partner relationships not only broke, the partners disappeared from the Also Bought list as well. "Perfect Partner" is the UK equivalent of "Better Together" in the US.
This morning, Amazon UK is showing an Also Viewed list instead of an Also Bought list, but the matches look a lot more like what the Also Bought list used to look like. I know I'm expressing this pretty poorly, but it looks to me like Amazon UK may have simply swapped the database fields for these two items last year and just figured it out now. I suppose it's also possible that today's look is the mistake, but I've already spotted one instance where the Perfect Partner isn't the top book on the Also Viewed list AND it's not the Perfect Partner due to Co-op advertising, so I'm assuming that the Perfect Partner is coming from the top title on the Also Bought (as in the US) list which simply isn't displayed.
Overall, it's the biggest change to the Amazon UK platform I can remember since they stripped out the ebooks. They've also started showing the shipping weights in grams, something that accidentally rolled out in the US a couple weeks ago, with the wrong weights. The same thing has happened in the UK, as in the weights shown are wrong. In the US, they simply stuck "grams" in for "ounces", in the UK, the gram weights look right except the decimal point is in the ounces place, so the weights are 100 times too light! For books that weigh over a pound, they slid the decimal point the wrong was again, so a 2.2 pound book lists at 10 Kg. If it plays into the shipping costs they charge, it could cost them a few bucks or a few sales. The bottom line is that it looks to me like the Amazon UK software platform is being upgraded after a long period of neglect, and this is good news for publishers.
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