Amazon advertising: Here’s how you can refine your strategy

Unless you have been living under a rock or are one of 10 people who still consider e-commerce is a fad, you know about the explosive growth Amazon has seen in the last decade. But very few people have fully comprehended Amazon’s maniacal focus on chasing profitability in the last few quarters. To boost profitability, Amazon is steadily shifting its model from a retailer to a marketplace. For the first time in its history, over 50 percent of all sales on Amazon were driven by more profitable third-party sales, where Amazon takes a healthy cut. Also, to boost its bottom line, Amazon aggressively CRAPs out SKUs (CRAP is an endearing Amazon acronym for Cannot Realize Any Profit, where Amazon’s algorithms suppress and kick out unprofitable SKUs from its platform.) But Amazon’s advertising division has so far flown under the radar. For the first time in its history, Facebook publicly acknowledged Amazon as a direct competitor in the advertising world in its last earnings call, and it has good reasons to be scared — very very scared.