Amazon Seller Wallet Continues Slow Refactoring of 3P/Seller Central

Last week Amazon posted that it was introducing an easier way for sellers to manage their money on Amazon - something it called Amazon Seller Wallet.

* Will introduce in a few months

* Offers the ability to view, hold, and transfer Amazon proceeds to bank accounts.

My take?

Amazon Seller Central is old, like really old in "computer years" -- Amazon Marketplace launched November 2000. It was originally designed for small businesses who didn't need much payments flexibility.

Like any business who has been around for 10+ years, Amazon needs to refactor and improve its old infrastructure to better support the needs of more sophisticated brands than independent mom and pop sellers which were the original target when the marketplace launched.

Amazon payments infrastructure is also getting significantly more complex over the last few years. Amazon did not release a ton of details about these changes, but I expect Amazon will have to keep doing things like this.

There's a reason that the Amazon website and seller tools don't change very often. It's extremely difficult for Amazon to do so - these are massive projects which support billions in revenue. In some ways, this creates a huge drag on the business because it slows innovation.

Like an old ERP system (not a terrible way to think about Amazon eCommerce infrastructure), even Amazon takes an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mindset, and needs to be very careful when it makes these kinds of changes.

Retiring old technical debt (I imagine this may replace a lot of old payments infrastructure at Amazon) is important to keep on track for the company -- just over time :-)