While Alexa is a huge presence at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Amazon has been using the popular gathering for another purpose – an opportunity to meet with third-party sellers and promote a new seller support service called marketplace growth.
The new service, as reported by CNBC, costs between $30,000 and $60,000 a year, depending on the tier chosen. The Amazon marketplace makes up more than half of the site’s eCommerce volume, and also gives sellers access to Amazon’s logistics prowess and shipping relationships, not to mention the site’s legions of customers.
The company has more than five million third-party sellers, and Amazon sees face-to-face meetings at places like CES as a smart way to educate them about new programs, as opposed to reaching out one by one.
The marketplace growth program allows sellers to access an Amazon manager who will give them hands-on support, personal coaching and training. The manager will also provide guidance and advice on problems that come up when dealing with the marketplace. It has three tiers that cost between $2,500 and $5,000 per month.
Will Land, the CEO of Marketplace Valet, which acts as a consultant and seller for brands on Amazon, was invited by the company to meet and discuss the program. He met with Amazon reps at the Venetian in Las Vegas, in a room called One Amazon. He wanted to know how spending $5,000 per month would help his business.
“Anytime Amazon invites us for a meeting, we attend,” Land said. “Getting a direct, consistent contact at Amazon is gold for any seller, so we’re excited about the opportunity.”
Abe Chomali, the founder of XP Strategy, a marketplace consulting agency, said Amazon’s strategy of meeting sellers at trade shows or expos is smart because it lowers overhead and allows for a direct relationship with the company and the seller. This, he said, can help to build trust and grow confidence in sellers who might not be open to new programs. “It’s a great way to make face-to-face connections with many sellers at once,” Chomali noted.
Evolve Bank & Trust said Tuesday (March 4) that it is set to return some funds to end users impacted by the Synapse bankruptcy but does not yet have the information it needs to return additional funds.
The bank is working with Ankura to analyze data and confirm institution-to-institution cash management transactions involving end users’ funds held at Evolve, the bank said in a Tuesday update.
“As a result, Evolve will be disbursing more funds to a subset of End Users on or about March 6, 2025, via PayPal and checks sent via the U.S. Postal Service,” the bank said in the update.
To continue identifying and returning funds to the appropriate end users, Evolve needs to receive more transactional data from other Synapse ecosystem banks and to examine that data, according to the update.
“If and when we receive the necessary data from the Synapse ecosystem banks, we expect the comprehensive, ecosystem-wide reconciliation will determine which banks hold End Users’ funds, how much each bank holds, and what still needs to be disbursed to End Users,” Evolve said in the update.
Before Synapse’s bankruptcy, Synapse connected other FinTech firms with banks, helping those startups store their customers’ money, PYMNTS reported in February.
At its peak, Synapse was managing billions of dollars, and when it collapsed in April, thousands of people were locked out of their accounts.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) cited the Synapse situation in September when proposing a rule that would strengthen recordkeeping for bank deposits received from third party, non-bank companies that accept those deposits on behalf of consumers and businesses, PYMNTS reported at the time.
Currently, when non-bank companies deposit their customers’ funds in a bank, they do so in a single custodial account that may hold funds of thousands of consumers and businesses — and the bank may not know the individual owners of funds in the custodial account.
Evolve said in its Tuesday update that it is working with the other Synapse ecosystem banks to get the transaction data it needs to determine where end users’ funds are being held, because the Synapse ledger is unreliable.
“While the process for reconciling and recovering from the Synapse bankruptcy is taking longer than expected, we remain optimistic that with cooperation from the Synapse ecosystem banks, End Users funds can be located and returned to their rightful owners,” the bank said.