This week's headlines can be found at: https://www.sellerlabs.com/blog/icymi-amazon-seller-news-feb14/

Revox Podcast

#65 In the news

A customer on average needs to see your content 7 times before they feel comfortable enough to purchase something from you.By looking at cheaper ad platforms, you can bring your total CPA down. It doesn’t make sense to advertise on Amazon for “Brand Awareness” unless it’s cheaper than advertising on other platforms.There are ways to advertise that are way more affordable than Amazon (or Facebook or Google for that matter).Don’t get too caught up in the metrics and attributions. This is top- to mid-level advertising, so you probably won’t be able to track direct sales. Instead, look at CPC and CPM costs to know if you’re doing well.All of my clients who have focused on this kind of advertising have seen a lift in sales across all sales channels.

#73 How to SKYROCKET Amazon Sales OFF Amazon

April 5th isn’t a hard date on when other categories can ship in products. Coronavirus is unpredictable, so nailing down times for anything is going to be finicky.No new coupons or deals until April 5th (hopefully). Probably to slow things down as Amazon tries to cope with the possibility of a lot of their employees getting sick.Have an extra condition on all of your listings in case you run out of FBA inventory. This will allow you to keep your listing open (and ranking) by selling FBM inventory. Make no mistake. This will not slow Amazon down. Amazon, like a lot of business, will not only rebound, but will do better than ever after this. Amazon is still doing rather well, all things considered, and when everyone goes back to work, they won’t go back to shopping in brick and mortars. Amazon and online shopping in general will continue to grow. That being said. You can use this downtime to your advantage. If you have room, I would recommend spending even more in ads than you ever had before. Most companies are pulling back on everything. If you can go all in, when the economy rebounds, you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. While we’re on the subject of gaming the system. Amazon’s attention is on pretty important things right now. And while I’m not one to advocate breaking rules…you may be able to break some here. Things in your titles, descriptions, photos, that would help give you a leg up might be worth a shot. Usually you’re not allowed to put competitor names in your descriptions. But if you can use it as a keyword…it might just help you. Adding graphics to your main photo might improve your conversion rate. Again, Amazon might catch you—but if they don’t…well…

#72 Updates for COVID-19 and Gaming the System

#71 Amazon and COVID-19

Amazon is a marketplace with a lot of awesome opportunity. Some of the reasons you can be so successful on the platform have to do with a lot of user-testing Amazon has done. They’ve nailed what makes a page convert. No websites on the planet—no marketplaces—convert as well as Amazon does. Their customer experience is awesome. Not just how everything looks, but the buying and even returning process are awesome. And customer support is great for customers. This sets you up for running a really awesome business that’s almost done for you.The downside is that there are tons of other people on the platform with you. In the week you launch your product, there are thousands of other products also being launched. This means just on the basis of competition alone, you have a lot to deal with on day one! Coupons, promotions, giveaways, and external traffic are often the most stable route for launching a product on Amazon. It’s true you can run a successful Amazon project without much funding. But to do it really successfully, Amazon follows the model of the J-Curve, meaning you put a lot in before you start getting a lot out.

#70 Why Launching a Product is So Hard?

I just received an email from an email automation company about changing what they do. Instead of sending out emails for you, they now automate Amazon’s new “request a review” button.Amazon’s been trying for quite some time to edge out communication between sellers and buyers and they recently got rid of a lot of sellers’ ability to send emails to customers. Now, when you want a review, you need to go into orders and click a button for each order you want to request a review from.These email services are morphing into button pressing automation. Amazon will continue to restrict buyer/seller contact, and will probably eventually edge out that ability as well.

#69 Amazon Puts Automation Companies Out of Business

Coronavirus has officially hit Amazon. Two employees in Italy and one in Seattle. There was a joke online that said now that Amazon has contracted COVID-19, the rest of us can expect it for free within two days—at least those of us with a prime membership. Amazon’s building Mini Fulfillment Centers. In an article by Supply Chain Dive, Amazon’s reported to be building smaller ship houses to get customers product in one day or less. The delivery windows are somewhere in the ball park 5-10 hours. This is now available fore up to 300 million products. There are pros and cons to this for sellers (higher sales, higher expenses). Amazon is decreasing Multi-Channel Fulfillment fees to push people to use them as a fulfillment option. It’s a little more flexible than selling on Amazon directly (for example, you can have customers ship returns back to you instead of them), and Amazon’s always trying to do more to get into other markets. Looks like they’re taking on Shipstation now. A list of the new fees can be found here.

#68 Mini Fulfillment Centers

Get consistent, SIMPLE reporting on key metrics. The key word here is SIMPLE. Agents have limited time for each account and you don’t want them spending all of their time compiling data. You want them doing things to help your account. Give them objectives, not tasks. If you hired a good agency, you’re not working with less skilled people for a smaller price tag, you’re working with highly skilled people for less time. In other words, it’s most effective if you give them problems you can’t solve, then let them figure it out. It’s expensive and inefficient to try and just delegate data entry and carry-out tasks. Ask lots of questions. The goal of the agency is not to grow your account—it’s to grow your account with the least amount of effort. For this reason, a lot of agencies will work really hard in the first few months, at which point they can automate many of their tasks. But to automate and to innovate are not the same. They’re polar opposites, actually. Don’t expect them to do everything. Have a very clear scope, and temper that scope with reality. Most people hire an agency because it’s cheaper than hiring a full-time employee. If that’s the case, don’t expect them to do logistics, customer support, ads management, copywriting, and creative work. At least, don’t expect them to do it well. Even a well equip team will struggle to do all those aspects well.

#67 4 Tips for Working With An Amazon Agency

You can probably guess that the answer is no. If you’ve ever searched for “Yoga Matt,” you’ll know that there’s plenty of space for product duplicates. The question is, are there advantages  to having a unique product? And that leads to another question: are you building a brand or selling products? If all you’re doing is selling products, I would say you SHOULDN’T have a unique product. If you are building a brand however, you SHOULD have at least a couple of products that are unique to you—or at least differentiate your brand. Both approaches can be successful. Just know that the main difference is that you have greater sales volumes potential if you sell a trending product, but it’s hard to rank; and conversely, it’s easy to rank for a niche product, but it might not have a developed customer base yet.

#66 Do I Need a Unique Product on Amazon to Succeed?

Brand Registry is a program that Amazon offers that gives certain privileges and programs to trademark owners.Benefits of Brand Registry are greater control over your listings, A+ content, listing videos, product display ads, and beta programs.Brand Registry is simple enough to sign up for. All you need is a trademark, a seller account, and a brand of products.You for sure want Brand Registry if you plan on keeping control over your Amazon listings. Listing hijackers are everywhere and you want to be able to get rid of them easily. Brand Registry helps you do that.The benefits of Brand Registry also help your listing convert better.Link to the application: https://brandservices.amazon.com/

#64 - What is Brand Registry and Do I Need it?

The short answer is YES! Absolutely put a video on your Amazon listing. But a couple of things to consider:It doesn't need to be fancy or professional. Sometimes simple iPhone videos perform best anyway. So don't overthink it, and don't overspend!People WILL watch your video, so give them something useful. Tell them how to use the product and the benefits they'll get from using it.Keep it short. Amazon's always changing the length of the video you can upload, but try and keep it under two minutes. Really good videos probably don't need to be more than 30 seconds.Don't link to ANYTHING outside of Amazon. It won't post because Amazon doesn't like poachers.

#63 Should you put a video on your listing?

Ads are getting more competitive, which means more expensive. It’s important to make sure that you have a good advertising strategy to keep your advertising campaigns profitable and low cost. Use mid-tail keywords. At first, these don’t look super appealing because there’s not an apparent winner as far as sales volume goes. But if you can find several mid-tail keywords, it’s just as good as finding short-tails, and it’ll be cheaper.Target products, not keywords. Because it’s a specific product, and not a search term for several products, you can get clicks for a fraction of the cost.Bid higher on low-ACoS keywords. It sounds counter intuitive, but it’s way more profitable to bring a keyword with a 10% ACoS to a 20% ACoS than it is to bring a 40% ACoS to a 30% ACoS.Organize your campaigns well. So much money is lost in translation because data is hard to access due to poor organization. Link to Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s8QncDFx0s

#61 - Four Things to Keep Amazon Ads Profitable

LINKS: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/how-amazon-s-liability-for-third-party-30990/ https://www.sfweekly.com/sponsored/amazon-accountability-needed/

Episode #60 Should Amazon Be Liable for Bad Products?

Amazon is instituting the ability to leave ratings without reviews. This probably dilutes the efficacy that written reviews have in the algorithm. This is good, in my opinion because it gives smaller businesses a chance to compete with bigger brandsTax forms are out for the year. If you made more than $20k in revenue, Amazon will send you a 1099-K form. These are now available for tax purposes.

Episode #59 Is Amazon Getting Rid of Reviews?

-FedEx returns after a one-month exile from Amazon. Now third-party sellers can again choose the carrier to ship their packages. My opinion on this is that it’s temporary. Amazon is only interested in monopolies, and sooner or later FBA will be the only fulfillment channel on Amazon. Every month they get more efficient, and with a bigger network of fulfillment centers. No one will process orders better than they will. Let’s face it, Seller-Fulfilled-Prime wasn’t really that great anyway (super expensive), and Amazon wants to do away with it. -I personally don’t think counterfeits are as big of a deal as people are making them out to be, and I think people should really stop complaining about it. The only way Amazon’s going to be able to get rid of sellers is by making it harder to prove a product is real. Honestly this makes life a nightmare for sellers, so I would rather play the long game and wait for bad seller to show their colors and get suppressed by Amazon than truncate my ability to launch and iterate on products. -Sellics updated their article on Amazon’s A9 (why it’s title May 2019? I have no idea). Basically, Amazon now says that the 250 characters in backend keywords does not include spaces or punctuation. In other words, the 250 characters (formerly 249 bytes) now only entails actual letters. Sellics advises that you still keep your most important keywords at the front of your 250 character list. My take is that if you believe the algorithm works at all, you probably don’t even need the 250 characters 

Episode #58 FedEx Returns, Counterfeits, and an Algorithm Update

Grow your revenue without growing your overhead

hubhopper

#65 In the news

hubhopper