Amazon plans to start soon a public listing of the names and addresses of US-based third-party sellers on its Marketplace platform as a measure to fight counterfeiters, as per reports from Business Insider.

The change was announced in a note sent to sellers on Wednesday, and the change goes into effect from  September 1st.

“These features help customers learn more about the businesses of a seller and the products that they are selling,” the note says, as per a copy of the note obtained by Business Insider.

It further went on to state “We are making this change to ensure there is a consistent baseline of seller information to help customers make informed shopping decisions.” This change in policy will make it tougher to stay an anonymous seller on Marketplace, and will further create transparency as customers will know exactly which person or entity they’re buying from and where they are located.

“Over the years, we have developed many ways for sellers to share more about their business, including through features like the seller profile pages, ‘Store’ pages for brand owners, and Handmade ‘Maker Profile’ pages,” a company spokesperson says. “These features help customers learn more about sellers’ businesses and their products. Beginning September 1, we will also display sellers’ business name and address on their Amazon.com seller profile page to ensure there is a consistent baseline of seller information to help customers make informed shopping decisions.” was a statement given to The Verge,  as Amazon confirmed the change in policy.

Business Insider commented that the impetus for providing more transparency around e-commerce transactions was influenced from a January based counterfeiting report from the Department of Homeland Security

“To increase transparency on this issue, platforms should significantly improve their pre-sale identification of third-party sellers so that buyers can make informed decisions, potentially factoring in the likelihood of being sold a counterfeit or IPR infringing merchandise,” the report read.

Amazon has in the past encountered counterfeiting in the  Marketplace, which is now responsible for more than half of all of the company’s e-commerce sales. The company has tried a number of tactics over the years, including monitoring suspicious listings and sellers using various automated software and taking action against sellers of items that are prone to price gouging  and other forms of fraud, which include  face masks and hand sanitizer, during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic

The company has also had a strategic understanding with big  sellers, like Apple and Nike (which ended its deal last year), to create dedicated storefronts for brands on its platform, although deals like those have had the adverse effect of  delisting of some genuine third party sellers,

Last month, Amazon went to the extent to launch a Counterfeit Crimes Unit made up of “former federal prosecutors, experienced investigators, and data analysts” to “go on the offensive” against counterfeiters.

Amazon said it spent $500 million last year to fight fraud, abuse, and counterfeit products, and that it took down 2.5 million potential bad actor accounts shut down 6 billion suspicious listings.

Amazon’s aggressive enforcement in this matter also adheres to the fact that it has had a  rocky relationship with the Trump administration, which stems in part from the ongoing feud between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and President Trump over the Bezos’ ownership of The Washington Post.

In April, the Office of the US Trade Representative placed five of Amazon’s international websites on the annual ” Notorious Markets” list, in effect labeling Amazon’s international businesses as hot spots for sales of counterfeits. Amazon responded by stating that it was a victim of Trump’s vendetta.

Nonetheless, Amazon has taken active steps in recent months to show that it is seriously taking the issue of counterfeiting.

India’s latest e-commerce policy draft includes stringent steps that could help domestic startups and impose government hawk eye on how companies handle data.

The  Indian Government has been working on the policy draft for at least two years with its focus on reducing the dominance of global tech giants like Amazon.com Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google, and Facebook.

Under rules laid out in a 15-page draft accessed by Bloomberg, the government would appoint an e-commerce regulator to ensure the industry is competitive with broad access to all data and other information resources. The policy draft has been prepared by the Ministry of Commerce’s Department for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade.

The proposed rules would also authorize the government access to online companies’ source codes and algorithms, which the ministry said would help ensure against “digitally induced biases” by competitors. The draft also addresses issues pertaining to ascertaining whether e-commerce businesses have “explainable AI”, referring to the use of artificial intelligence.

The ministry will offer the draft policy for stakeholder comments on a government website. There’s a tendency among some of the leading companies to exercise control over most of the information repository, the draft said.

“It is in the interest of the Indian consumer and the local ecosystem that there are more service providers” and that “the network effects do not lead to the creation of digital monopolies misusing their dominant market position. The government, in consultation with relevant stakeholders, will define the categories of e-commerce that would require mirroring or localization,” the draft said.

For issues on data storage,  the draft leaves open the question of which e-commerce platforms would have to keep information local..Hosting data overseas has been a pricky point in previous drafts, which drew criticism for favoring local startups at the expense of others.

All E-commerce companies will be required to make data available to the government within a notice of  72 hours, which could include information related to national security, taxation law & order it said.

The draft policy further specified that all e-commerce platforms would be required to provide to consumers the details of sellers, including phone numbers, customer complaint contacts, email, and addresses. For imported goods, the country of origin and value of work done in India should be clearly specified, the policy said.

Furthermore, foreign e-commerce companies providing live streaming services that use payment tokens should be regulated to ensure that users route such transactions through formal and regulated payment channels.

After learning the art of fine dining bar/restaurant trade at  Rosalie’s Cucina in Skaneateles, Joey Robinson went to work for Jimmy Buffet’s fun-loving  Margaritaville chain and now has ventured upon helping people enjoy the sip of rare, high-end spirits.

Joey Robinson, a Skaneateles native who is co-founder of the new rare online spirits retailer Curiada along with his two partners. last month.

This site specializes in rare and exquisite brands most people have never heard of, which includes likes of  All Points West whiskey, Opihr gin, and Chinaco tequila. It also showcases some less common types of spirits, like Brazilian cachaça, Peruvian pisco, and Italian amaro.

Curiada is a Portuguese word that means “curated,” and which also rhymes with the  English word “curious.”Both ideas fit the concept, Curiada is a craft spirits marketplace,” he said. “And yes there are a lot of marketplaces, but we’re focused on unique bottles, hot new craft distillers, and hard-to-find spirits.”

Soon after the Curiada site launched, it got a positive review in Swagger Magzine. an online “men’s luxury lifestyle” publication. The headline was upbeat and said: “The best new way to discover unique craft spirits.”

Robinson, 28, grew up in Skaneateles, where his father, Gary, operated Rosalie’s. “I worked there almost every day,” he said. He went to college in Philadelphia to study food marketing.

Upon returning home, he came in touch with the CEO of the Margaritaville restaurants, who spent the summers on Skaneateles Lake. That further lead to a job in brand marketing for the chain’s restaurants, hotels, and its affiliated beers and spirits.

“That’s where I learned and picked up the tools for digital marketing with an inside view of the drinks industry,” Robinson said. and in June, Robinson, and partners Adam Caplan and Joanna Franchini started up Curiada.

He is the chief marketing officer. Curiada’s current inventory is small, and that’s partly by design.

“A lot of our spirits are things you just can’t find unless you know the supplier,” Robinson said. “And many of them are small and out-of-the-way.”

Among the featured producers, this summer is  All Points West, a distillery in Newark, New Jersey. One of its products is a type of whiskey called pot still, which is common in Ireland but not so much in the United States. Until joining with Curiada, it was available only in the Newark/New York City area

An add on feature of Curiada is its curated collections, meant to fit certain drinking occasions. For the launch, they include Rooftop Aperitifs, Summer Getaways, and Lawn Concert Pitchers.

There are no Upstate New York producers in the lineup yet, but Robinson hopes to add new names to the kitty. He suggested that the Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards’ 1911 Established spirits line, made in LaFayette as a possibility for the future.

As an online-only retail site, Curiada ties up with the producers of the spirits with a network of brick-and-mortar retail outlets. One can buy the liquor from Curiada, but it is delivered via a retailer in your state.

Curiada is now available in 28 states, including New York. It’s working through the intricate maze of state alcohol laws to reach others.

We curate the selections and recommendations for what you’re doing, what you’re mood is,” Robinson said.

The coronavirus pandemic has opened new gates for online stores and platforms as they aim to capitalize on the online spending boom and at the same time give shoppers a great online shopping experience. Here comes into the picture Nacelle, which aims to increase conversion rates, increase average order value, and handle spikes in traffic to delight its customers with a faster and unique shopping experience.

Nacelle, which is an LA-based startup in the burgeoning “headless” e-commerce space, bills itself as a JAMstack for e-commerce, offering a developer platform that delivers greater penetration and visual experience with scalability to online store platforms.

Led by Index Ventures and Accomplic, it has raised about $48 million to date in funding. The other angel investors list include Shopify’s Jamie Sutton, Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki, and Attentive CEO Brian Long.

Nacelle is building a smoother path for e-commerce brands to conveniently adapt a headless structure. Headless web apps essentially focus on the premise that a site’s frontend is decoupled from the backend infrastructure, so it’s leaning fully on dedicated frameworks for each to deliver the final content to its end users. There intrinsic benefits for sites going headless include greater performance, better scalability, leaner hosting costs, and a more systematic and dedicated developer experience. For e-commerce sites, there are also some notable complexities due to how storefronts operate and how headless CMSs need to take care of its dynamic inventories and user shopping needs.

CEO Brian Anderson  informs TechCrunch “We asked how do you pair a very dynamic requirement with the generally static system that JAMstack offers, and that’s where Nacelle comes in.” Anderson previously operated a technical agency for Shopify Plus customers building custom storefronts, a venture that has led to a major traffic increase of its customers. Kelsey Burnes has been hired as this startup’s first VP of marketing from the e-commerce plug-in platform Nosto.

Although  Anderson described a host of benefits pertaining to Nacelle’s platform,  yet many are the result of reduced reaction time that he said converts more users and pushes them towards spending more.

The company has a particular eye on mobile storefronts, with Anderson noting that most desktop storefronts end up dramatically outperforming mobile counterparts and that the speedier load times, Nacelle enables on mobile can do a lot to overcome this.

In the coming times, more brands are embracing headless structures, Nacelle is aiming to manage the experience. Nacelle is optimized for Shopify users to get up and running fast and efficiently. Users can also easily integrate the system with popular CMSs like Contentful and Sanity. In totality, Nacelle sports integrations for more than 30 services which include  SMS marketing platforms, analytics platforms, payment platforms, and more. The ultimate objective is to minimize the need for users to alleviate data or learn new workflows.

The company is aiming its guns at direct-to-consumer brands pretty with full thrust. Some of the company’s early customers include D2C bedding startup Boll & Branch, cozy things marketplace Barefoot Dreams, and Something Navy, a popular fashion brand. The majority of Nacelle’s rollouts launch later this summer. Last month, Nacelle went live with men’s toiletries startup Ballsy and claims that the conversions at storefront have seen a whopping jump of  28%

Nacelle is not the only new entrant on the block, as just last month Commerce Layer announced that it had given further ignition to market by raising $6 million in funding from Benchmark.

FedEx, which was founded in 1971, and globally known for its overnight shipping service and pioneering a system that could track packages and provide real-time updates on package location, is seeing a thrust in its e-commerce packages and needs to hire more than 1,000 team members in Rialto to keep up with the demand,  the company officials announced.

On Monday FedEx said  in a news release that it will hire 1,600 package handlers at its Rialto location.“As much of the country begins to reopen, e-commerce is showing no signs of slowing down,” commented  Allie Addoms, its spokesperson .for FedEx, said in a statement.

FedEx also went on a hiring spree in March when more than 520 package handlers were also offered jobs at the Rialto location.

The accrued benefits of this package handler position include competitive wages depending on shift,  extra wages for weekends with other benefits including medical, vision and dental coverage, paid time off, holiday pay, tuition reimbursement, paid parental leave, and employee discounts on cell phone service, groceries, car purchases and more,  as per a  company news release.

Applicants interested in this  FedEx Ground positions based job must be at least 18 years of age.  Both Day and night shifts are available.

Further details are available here.

While we are seeing a pandemic unfold in front of our eyes which is the Coronavirus pandemic, we are also seeing trends in the market evolving due to this reason. One of the biggest trends that has been observed in the shopping department is that retail is almost dead right now and that most people prefer to buy online due to the risk of virus. While it must be noted that wholesale retail like Walmart and other malls are still doing well, the single retail shops have almost shut down completely.

This is to say that the important of e-commerce is more than ever and most of the people are told to move from single retail to e-commerce as soon as possible. However, the problem is that we are also facing an economic crisis meaning that spending on ads and other stuff is unlikely to happen. For that reason, Google announced they will be offering free product listings on their platform’s shopping tab. But now, Google has made an even better announcement which is that these free product listings will not be limited to the shopping tab but also come to the main Google Search results.

The company also says that if you now search for a product on Google then you will see the free product listings instead of the ads for that product while the ads will be present but in a different section of the page. Google has said that their shift to free product listings instead of showing ads is “a way to aid businesses struggling to connect with shoppers due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic”. But some reports say that Google was under threat from Amazon and free listings is Google’s answer to that threat. Now, we will see how this affects Google’s ad revenue but it definitely good for e-commerce sellers.