Amazon Japan under increased scrutiny, Timu and Sheehan revolutionizing Black Friday marketing

with aggressive keyword bidding, and the first ever live selling analytics platform in the

TikTok shop app store. This and more on this week's episode of the weekly buzz.

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the serious sellers podcast by helium 10 i'm your host bradley sutton and this is the show that is our helium 10 weekly buzz

where you give you a rundown of all the new stories that are going on in the amazon walmart

and e-commerce world we highlight the latest new feature alerts from Helium 10,

and we review a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious

sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Today, our host is going to be Shavali Patel, and so Shavali, take it away and let us know

what's buzzing.

The first article we're covering today is a spicy news piece from Bruters.

On November 26th,

Japan's Fair Trade Commission conducted an on-site inspection of Amazon Japan on suspicion of anti-monopoly law violations. The investigation stems from allegations that Amazon Japan

pressured sellers to lower their prices in exchange for favorable placement on its platform.

A government source disclosed that these practices might constitute irrational demands on sellers.

But this isn't the first time that Amazon Japan has faced scrutiny.

In 2018, in fact, it was investigated for allegedly forcing suppliers to absorb costs related to discount promotions.

While Amazon Japan has not addressed these current concerns, they did address those concerns back

then. So hopefully in a bit of time, that's going to change as well for this concern.

Now, Routers has also reported last week that Amazon is likely to face a EU investigation next year

on allegedly prioritizing its private label products over third party sellers.

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