E-commerce giant Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) recently made quite a few changes to its operations, likely in hopes of improving the company. However, investors weren’t exactly pleased with the changes, as Amazon was down fractionally in Friday afternoon’s trading.
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One of the new changes features a shift in how Amazon treats third-party sellers. A newly-minted email invitation went out, and now, third-party sellers will be able to use Amazon’s own in-house delivery services. Previously, this was only available for Amazon’s marketplace and a few other sites. With Amazon now handling 23% of the United States’ entire parcel volume—FedEx (NYSE:FDX) handles 19%, UPS (NYSE:UPS) takes 24%, and the US Postal Service handles 32%—that’s a pretty wide and reliable network.
However, a less reliable change also kicked in. Amazon is testing a new rating system for products, which is making an already shaky system in terms of value even more so. The new system, based on reports from Engadget, shows a weighted average next to a single star, along with the percentage of five-star ratings received. This will apparently force users to pay closer attention to star ratings because, visually, they all look the same: one star with a number to follow.
Stars and shipping, though, don’t mean much to analysts here. With 40 Buy ratings and one Hold, Amazon stock is considered a Strong Buy by analyst consensus. Further, Amazon stock comes with a 30.84% upside potential thanks to its average price target of $174.13.
