Final Amazon Marketplace Executive Loses Many Of His Duties

Amazon’s Peter Faricy, the vice president of Amazon Marketplace, the remaining executive in the unit, has seen his role in the company reduced.

CNBC, citing an internal document, reported that Faricy, who has worked at Amazon for twelve years, has no one reporting to him except for his assistant — many of the functions overseen by him and his former boss Sebastian Gunningham, who left the company for WeWork, have been shifted to the head of Amazon’s retail group Doug Herrington. CNBC noted its the latest change for Amazon Marketplace, which represents more than half of the eCommerce volume.

Amazon’s move to give merchants access to its fulfillment centers, logistics and shipping has resulted in a boom to that business. Still, as the service has grown, it has also suffered from fake products and fraudsters who have been able to put fake reviews up and engage in other tactics that hurt the real sellers. The problems are hard for Amazon to stop, even though it has rolled out initiatives including Brand Registry and Transparency, a software product that tries to pinpoint scammers.

With Faricy losing his duties and Herrington, who is senior vice president of the North American consumer business, taking on most of the roles, the unit is more closely tied to its retail business.  Amazon didn’t address the Faricy demotion in a statement but told CNBC that it is consolidating the groups so that customers have the same experience via both services.  “We’ve been working for some time on standardizing the products, tools and services we offer to the brands and resellers that sell on Amazon, and have made some organizational changes as a result,” the company said in the statement to CNBC.

In May Amazon announced the launch of a new Marketplace Appstore created for professional sellers. According to CNET, the new app store will be rolled out slowly in North America through Amazon’s Seller Central. The store will include tools to handle pricing, inventory, advertising and other needs for sellers. “Many developers have innovated and created applications that complement our tools and integrate with our service,” Amazon said in a statement. “We created the Marketplace Appstore to help businesses more easily discover these applications, streamline their business operations and ultimately create a better experience for our customers.”