Judging from the chatter on Amazon's discussion boards, Amazon really screwed up this morning.

We heard early this morning from our toy sellers that they had received notification from Amazon that they do not meet Amazon's Holiday Guidelines and thus would be shut out of the toys category for the holiday buying season.

This despite the sellers' not just meeting the guidelines but actually having stellar performance!

Even if you don't sell in this category, we're sure you can understand the alarm this would set off for affected sellers -- your revenue for toys depends almost entirely on holiday sales...and here's one of your best performing channels just evaporating.  

We realize it's Halloween, but do you really need to scare the you-know-what out of your toy sellers?

​We anticipate this to be corrected soon -- we'll keep you updated once we learn more.

UPDATE: As expected, Amazon recognized their mistake and retracted the erroneous notifications.  Reports from affected sellers show they are both relieved and in need of new shorts.  

We take pride in enabling sellers to meet marketplace best practices and guidelines that help drive their sales.  If you are new to us, please contact us to learn more or schedule a demo!

It's ecommerce's worst kept secret: despite mobile devices being the tool-of-choice for online shopping, that experience is restricted to just browsing.  The number of buyers actually using checkout on their mobile devices lags compared to those who checkout on their desktop.  

In fact, some studies show that mobile transactions' lag behind desktop is significant: desktop converts at almost 3x when compared to mobile.  

That's not just a problem, it's missed revenue -- you spent all that money getting buyers to your site, you know your buyers are browsing on their mobile device (and you have optimized your listings for the mobile experience)...why lose them when you are most likely to transact the sale?

So what can a merchant do?  One of our favorite industry intelligence firms, L2, has proffered up the following best practices and considerations to optimize your mobile checkout process and increase mobile transactions:

1. Use single-page checkout.  With the average checkout process being 3 pages long, a mobile user will abandon their cart rather than having to complete yet another page of checkout information!
2. Utilize auto-complete for relevant fields.  Even if you go to just one page checkout, there will be on average 12 fields to fill out -- a big deterrent for a mobile user.  Depending on the field type, the first few characters typed can expose auto-complete responses such as an address.
3. Use expedited checkout options in a non-intrusive way.  This means options like Apple Pay or Google Pay on your product detail page, or anchored to the footer of each page in the checkout process.

We take pride in enabling sellers to meet industry best practices and guidelines that help drive their sales.  If you are new to us, please contact us to learn more or schedule a demo!