Amazon Small Business Academy program and how it works?

Amazon launched its Small Business Academy program in 2019 to offer in-person seminars, webinars, and community college courses to small businesses. The program aims at assisting startups, business owners, and entrepreneurs to succeed online.

The idea is to teach digital strategy and brand building skills to entrepreneurs so that they can turn their ambitions into reality.  

Let's find out more about this program and how it helps small business owners.

Amazon Small Business Academy

According to Amazon, the program "strengthens Amazon's commitment to empowering small businesses, which make up 99.9% of US businesses and employ almost 60 million people." Amazon claimed US-based small to medium-sized businesses sell more than 4,000 items per minute in Amazon's stores.

The Small Business Academy program wants to enable small businesses to exploit the Internet to reach more customers, brand building, and increase sales. Currently, small companies cover 99.9% of US businesses, with over 60 million people employed, making up the economy's backbone.

The program even includes a grant to the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) to enable curriculum development. The academy was designed after listening to small business owners' requests to accelerate their digital capabilities irrespective of whether they are a new company or old.

The curriculum

Amazon Small Business Academy offer curriculums on three levels: 

  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • Advanced

Each curriculum contains content of sixteen hours long and has been developed in collaboration with NACCE and the lead schools of the program:

  • Lorain County Community College, Elyria, Cleveland, Ohio
  • North Idaho College, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Amazon even said they are going to invest $15 billion in "the success of its selling partners" and promote over 150 tools and services to assist smaller businesses to increase their sales through Amazon. These tools include teaching them how to increase Amazon ranking, which translates to better sales. The curriculum will teach owners how to use Amazon listing optimization services effectively.

Amazon's product search algorithm (A9)

The company aims at arming small business owners with sufficient tools to manage their brand better and increase sales using Amazon's in-house AI. The product search algorithm, which provides accurate results to buyers for their search, works in two phases. First, it gathers relevant results from Amazon's catalog. It then ranks each product according to relevancy to the search.

Amazon product ranking includes 21 factors, which are essential for a small business to keep in mind for their product to feature in the top of the results.

  1. Sales rank
  2. Customer reviews
  3. Answered questions
  4. Image size and quality
  5. Price
  6. Parent-child products
  7. Bounce rate
  8. Product listing completion
  9. Title
  10. Features/bullet points
  11. Product description
  12. Brand and manufacturer part number
  13. Specifications
  14. Category and sub-category
  15. Search terms
  16. Negative seller feedback
  17. Order processing speed
  18. In-stock rate
  19. Perfect Order Percentage (POP)
  20. Rate of order defect
  21. Rate of exit

Summary

Today, Amazon is making small business owners the king of sales. It wants to enable them to harness the power of the Internet and its in-house tools. This will allow business owners, especially those in rural areas, to grow business at the international level.


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