”Secrets to Selling on Amazon
Transcript of the SD Direct Webinar Presentation by James Hyatt
3/21/2023
Speaker 1
Welcome to SD Direct. I’m Karen Marchetti, the president, and welcome to our program today on selling on Amazon. Before I introduce our speaker today, I did want to tell you that we have a new membership plan where you’re going to save 50% off all workshops, including the workshop that James has planned for us in April, and we’ll tell you more about that later. So let me introduce you to our speaker today. James is the founder and CEO of Rank N’ Bank, an Amazon advertising agency. He helps manufacturers and brand owners improve Amazon’s strategies. He manages eight figure Amazon brands, and he has helped generate more than 10 million in revenue for clients over the last 24 months. So I’m excited to hear how he has done that since I’m on Amazon as well. So let’s see if we can switch this to James.
Speaker 2:
Thank you so much. Well welcome everybody to today’s SD direct presentation. My name is James Hyatt. I’m CEO and founder of Rank N’ Bank. We are an Amazon advertising agency, and today we’re going to be talking about elevating your brand, attracting new customers, and improving your bottom line on Amazon. So if you’re here today, this workshop is for you if you’re a brand manufacturer or private label seller who, uh, sells products on Amazon, physical products on Amazon, or if you currently sell products online with e-commerce, but you’re not on Amazon yet today, you’re going to learn how and why you need to establish your brand on Amazon, how to overcome the challenges associated with selling on Amazon, how to optimize your brand and product listings, how to generate more organic sales from paid ads, and how to utilize feedback from customers, both good and bad.
I wanna start off with some statistics to get you excited about the opportunity with selling on Amazon. And so over here we can see in 2020 Amazon’s revenue. Now, this is the.com, the marketplace was 386 billion. Also in 2020 there was 1.5 million active sellers in a total of 6.3 million sellers. So this many have accounts to sell, and these are the active ones. Here in 2021, we can see the growth of the revenue from 3 86 to 469 billion in total revenue and 6.5 million active sellers with a total of 9.5 million. There’s almost 2000 new sellers that join Amazon every day. Okay?
So these are some really big numbers and with a lot of clients that we work with, if we can shave just a portion of the market share for the products that they sell, it does much better than their online stores, and sometimes even online and retail combined.
It’s a growing opportunity for you as a brand if you’re on there. And what we’re gonna talk about today, as far as optimizations and advertising and reviews, as far as selling in the marketplace, there’s 16 regions you can sell. And so I want you to just grasp where else can you list your products. And also, almost simultaneously be listed in Europe, Asia Pacific, middle East, and Americas. Okay? Right now there’s 16 different regions that you can sell your products on Amazon. So this is not just a one place, but truly you can open up a global business. I’d like to start this off by just talking about a little case study. We have a client, a brand called Seraphic Skincare. When she came to us in December of 2020, she had really done Amazon all on her own.
And so she had created the product listings. She had sourced some of these mitts, like an exfoliation mitt, from overseas had got it to the us. She did her own design using Canva, wrote the copy, and got it up there. It was one of these things where she was kind of a first mover in the market, and she got to the point where she was doing about $20,000 in gross revenues just on that one product. When she came to us, she wanted to really solidify her success. It was kind of on a whim that she had gotten to this point, but she wanted to know how to sustain it over the long term. And so we analyzed her product listings, and we found that her listings were not fully optimized,and so she wasn’t using all top seven images.
Her title bullet points and descriptions weren’t being used to the full extent that they should be, and she didn’t have some of the new branding features, like a plus content brand story, et cetera. And so we came in and we implemented some of the strategies that we’re gonna be talking about today, with the images and the titles and the descriptions, and getting her products to rank for specific keywords.
By the end of 2021, I think one of our best sales months was around $330,000 in one month. So from 20,000 to 330,000, and then over the entire year of 2021, she did around $1.7 million. The reason I’m telling you this is because people need to understand that Amazon is not just a place for selling products anymore, but it’s a place to build your brand.
And so that’s what we’re gonna focus on today in the talk. And we’re gonna go through this and I’m gonna do a deep dive on her brand and actually show you on Amazon some of the things that we’ll be exploring. So let’s talk a little bit about the benefits of selling on Amazon. If you’re a traditional brand, maybe you’ve sold retail for a long time, or maybe you have your own Shopify store or e-commerce store.
The benefits of selling with Amazon is that we have fulfilled by Amazon, which is their logistic networks of fulfilling items. The number of subs, subscribers, I think there’s over 150 million prime members right now. It’s one of the largest search engines for products. So more than half of people’s searches start on Amazon when they’re looking for a product. The barrier to entry is very low as far as the amount of money you need to spend to get on the digital shelf of Amazon.
It’s very easy to advertise. You could start out with a budget of $5, $10 a day and scale it all the way up, and you get to leverage Amazon’s capital. They’re continuously pouring hundreds of millions of dollars on developers and designers and coders to make the Amazon platform work better for their consumers. This is really important when we want to think about the idea of leverage.
Depending on where you’re at in your journey with selling online, it’s always beneficial to be able to leverage and utilize the investment of someone else. They put a lot of time and energy into developing a site that would convert and building trust with consumers. And so if we can just join them in that and have our products up there, you’re gonna see that you have a much better conversion rate than typically on your own e-commerce site or Shopify, et cetera.
And so that leads me into the future of retail, right? I think in this year, we finally saw the on the chart where people using social media on their phone, their attention to that platform finally has caught up and surpassed television and radio. So more and more people are engaging with advertisements and websites on their mobile device and their desktop. This is only going to continue to grow, and especially the market for advertisements, right?
We’ve seen Amazon coming out with more promotions regarding their advertising products. We’re seeing with Facebook and Instagram and Shopify, streaming advertising, right? So if you’re not on board yet with e-commerce, this is something you absolutely want to start looking into investing in. And if you’re already here, we’re gonna talk about things that you can do to continue to grow your business.
So I’d like to start here with establishing your brand on Amazon. To establish your brand, we have something called brand registry. All right? Brand registry is where you take your trademark and you submit that to Amazon, you upload a couple of other documents, and now they understand that you are the owner of this brand, okay? When you do that, it’s going to open up your ability to access new marketing features such as the brand store, the brand story, and a plus content.
The other thing that you’re going to get access to are things called Amazon posts, customer engagement, subscribe and save transparency and brand analytics. Okay? And if you’re new to the whole selling on Amazon idea, typically when it started, it was pretty big for wholesalers and retail arbitrage, people purchasing name brands from the store to discount, and then reselling that on Amazon.
And to do that, you can just list on these product listings that are already there. You don’t have to create your own. But in the past two or three years things, Amazon has seen that people are going there to shop more for brands. And so they’re starting to invest and deliver these new marketing products for us to be able to use. And we’re going to go through that today, but it’s really important – you have to have your trademark for your brand to use these marketing features. Okay? The first step is listing optimization. One thing that we really specialize in is this service of optimizing a listing. We want to look at a couple things. Number one, your category browse node, and number two, your titles, bullets, and descriptions. So we’re gonna come over here really quick, and this is continuing on with our Seraphic Skincare example.
And this is one of their top product listings here. It’s this exfoliating mitt, okay? And the way that Amazon organizes things is with a browse tree, okay? And you can think about this like a family tree with all of your relatives and everything. Well, in this case, it’s based on the categories. And so we can see the main category here is beauty and personal care, personal care, and then scrubs and body treatments. And so it’s very important when you set up your product listing to put it in the right category. A lot of times I find sellers have accidentally put it in the incorrect category, and that’s going to make it hard for the algorithm to show your product correctly when people are searching for it. Okay? So that’s number one. Number two is going to be your titles, your bullet points, and your product description.
When working on Amazon, on the backend, we use things called feed files. And this is an Excel template where we can upload all of the content for our product listing. And a lot of times we find that our clients or prospective clients or just sellers in general are not utilizing all of the real estate that’s available to them in the title and the bullet points. And these are the area that Amazon looks at it, the system looks at this, it looks at the keywords that are in your title, in your bullet points, and then it uses those to match against the customer query, and that’s how your product is going to be found. And so these are the foundational things that have to do with the SEO or the search engine optimization of your product listing to be able to even get found. So that’s the first place. And as Karen mentioned before, we are gonna be doing some workshops in April, and we’re going to do a deep dive on this, and we’ll be going through every single little minute thing, spending a whole hour just on the optimization of the product listing.
So let’s continue here. It looks like we’ve got something in the chat. Let me just see. Yep. Okay. Janie says, my college age son doesn’t watch TV. Only computer and phone, right? And so he’s probably on maybe the tail end of the Millennial age, maybe Gen Y or Gen X, one of those. And that’s only gonna continue to happen more and more. And so how do we get our brand, our products in front of these people? It is gonna be through e-commerce. Excellent. Thank you for sharing that. If there’s any other comments, please feel free to share. We want to engage with you during the presentation and make this as valuable as possible. So part two is going to be top seven images and video. Okay? So let’s scroll back over here to this listing.
And let’s look at these top seven images. All right, so top seven images. A lot of people just take the main picture of the product, they put it up there, maybe they have a picture of the product packaging, and that’s also up there, but that doesn’t really do much for the consumer. What we want to do is we want to illustrate the benefits and the features of the product and the branding in our imaging. And so that’s where we see right here, we’re doing that. So we take the product and we expand it, right? And we have some text on the page, plus we have the logos look very nice. We have a comparison chart here. We have the instructions on how to use the product, and then we have a nice kind of cross-sell image here. And also we are featuring some of the social media icons, okay?
And so this is no longer just a generic product, but we are creating this to be a brand. And that’s what’s important about these top seven images. A lot of the times we want to look at the product reviews, we want to look at the keywords. How are people searching for this? What’s the most important thing? And you as the seller, you may think that you know what that is, but until you really go deep into the keyword research and analysis and looking at the reviews, you can’t be certain. And so once you can identify those, building those into these images is going to help you with your conversion rate, your engagement on the page, and ultimately getting people to purchase your product. The other part is going to be the videos. Thanks. Videos – they’ve been around for a little while, but they are newer.
There’s less sellers that are utilizing them. And so this video here is for the product. So I’m just gonna play this in the background while I’m speaking. And what this does is it brings the product to life, okay? You may think that video production is super expensive, that it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg, but in reality, there’s vendors and service providers now that can get it done, you know, for a very economical price. And the video just adds so much more life to the product. No longer is it a static image on the page, but instead, we can actually see it being used, the quality of it, different occasions where it would be used. And so if you’re not yet using video, you’ve got to start using video on your product listings and get those up there. And if you have multiple videos, that’s even better. Okay?
All right, listing optimization, part number three. So brand story and a plus content. And this is where we start to get into more of marketing features that are only available to you if you are a brand. So if we come back here to our example, and we scroll down on the product detail page, the first thing that you’re gonna see is the brand story. And this is pretty much brand new – this only came out less than eight months ago, and then it only got rolled out to the rest of the sellers three or four months ago. So if you’re not utilizing this module, this can be an excellent place for you to start with your optimization. And so we can see with the brand story, we have a really nice image on the back here that goes with the colors of the brand.
And then we feature an Instagram like picture. We’re showing all the different products in the catalog, and then we even have some information to focus on the founder, some questions from her. And then these are really neat. This is essentially a cross-sell section. So I can click on that and it’s gonna take me over to this product, which is also being sold by the same brand. So that’s the brand story. If we continue down here, we get into what’s called a plus content, okay? And this is where we can continue to tell the story of the brand and we can go deeper on the product itself. And so at Rank ‘N Bank, we like to design these big, beautiful, lifestyle images that really show off the quality of the product. We can show them how to use the product, and then we can tie everything in with the nice tagline, slogan, and just make this product look beautiful, right?
And that’s really what we’ve been able to do here, with this a plus content in the brand story. So think about comparing this to another product listing that maybe doesn’t have as much content and is not as detailed in the branding. This is why this product has become a number one seller, because everything’s been thought through carefully, and a lot has gone into the branding and you can see the reviews and the sale price, right? So it all contributes together. You really can’t just put a product up there anymore and only have a couple reviews and not really good content and hope to really be successful on Amazon. All right? So we’ve talked about some of the foundational things that go into optimizing your product listing. We talked about the images, video title, bullets and description, brand story and A-plus content.
And all of those things live on the product detail page. But what about optimizing your brand? What about going deeper? Okay, well, that’s where Amazon introduced something called the brand store and Amazon posts. So we’re gonna go over here and I’m gonna show you the brand store, okay? And so this is the brand store for Seraphic Skincare. All right? So what is the brand store? Well, the brand store is very much like your own website, but right on Amazon, okay? And so we can see as we scroll down here, you can feature these big image modules and show off the different products. We also have some lifestyle photos kind of showing how the products can be used together. And then we start to give them direction on how to shop the store, right? So they can look at the exfoliating items, the glow items, right?
And then we feature all of the products down here where you can hover over these and then click into those actual product listings themself. And we have a nice piece that kind of ties it all together, towards the bottom here with some important things for the brand that people can relate to. Now, outside of the homepage, you can build these additional pages. This would be called a subpage. And this is where we can go deeper on the specific product line, okay? And so one thing that you’ll notice, or you may not notice, is there’s no advertisements for other brands products, okay? So we don’t have competitors that can place on our brand store. When somebody clicks into the brand store, all they’re going to see is our brand’s products. And this is one thing that makes it very unique, and I would say still not a lot of sellers are utilizing these brand stores. And so, again, if you haven’t done this already, this is a great place to start with your optimizations.
All right, let’s see here. We’ve got another quick question from Lori. She says, do they have their own website as well as they sell their products? Yes. In most situations, they do have their own website. We’re seeing Shopify being more and more popular for that. But some people do still have a traditional build on WordPress or another site builder like that. I will say that most of the time we still see a majority of the sales coming through Amazon, unless their site has been up for a long time and they spend a lot of money on Google ads or Facebook ads, pushing that traffic to the website. But you know, we’re even seeing people that are investing in Google or Facebook ads pushing traffic to their website. Those customers are still going back to Amazon searching the brand name and purchasing there.
So this is why you’ve gotta cover all the bases, right? And that’s what my hope is today, is to show you, hey, look at some of these new things that are coming out. If you’re not utilizing them yet, start thinking about how you can, here’s some examples of what we’ve done in order to, you know, promote brands and we’ve seen it being successful. Maybe, maybe some things that you can even model for your own products. The other one that I want to cover quickly is Amazon posts. So this is also a newer feature, and Amazon posts is a image sharing feed just like Instagram, where you can post a very nice lifestyle picture or product picture, and then you can link to your product, and then you can also have some text down here, to explain what is happening in the post.
Okay? And so these Amazon posts will appear on your brand store, and then they’ll also appear on the product detail page itself. And so this is something where you want to be posting three to five times per week, and we create really high end images and content for these posts because you also can link to other categories, right? And so if I were to just click on this category here, you would see this is under personal care products, and there’s a lot of different brands, but we have the opportunity to be discovered if someone was searching via the Amazon posts, okay? And we’ll go deeper on this in a later workshop, but I just wanted to introduce it to you so that you knew it was available.
Okay? So switching gears a little bit here, we’re gonna talk about organic versus paid traffic. And when we talk about organic traffic, I want to make sure that you understand what that is. Organic traffic is simply traffic that you received to your product detail page where you didn’t have to pay for a click. So if somebody searches exfoliation mitt, your product shows up organically, they click on it, they make a purchase that didn’t cost you advertising dollars, whereas with paid traffic, you are paying to sponsor a keyword to show up in that placement. So for exfoliation mitt I might have to put a bid of a dollar, and maybe I get a click at 75 cents, and so that click costs me 75 cents in order to get that person to the detail page. But there’s a very synchronized relationship between Amazon SEO and Amazon PPC. And so I want to teach you a little bit more about that and how to utilize it to influence your sales, okay?
And so that’s why we’re gonna talk about the halo effect and also ranking strategies. Earlier in the days of selling on Amazon, you could optimize your product detail page with really good keywords and the title and the bullet points. And because there wasn’t so many products, you would gain rankings, you would gain organic rankings and you would make sales. But as more and more sellers have come to the platform introducing more products, more people spending money on ads, some of the cost of advertising has gone up. And also the difficulty to rank a product, much like Google, with ranking websites, however, there is something called the Halo effect. And so what that means is I spend money on ads in order to make sales.
I’m also going to gain organic rankings for that same keyword, because of making a sale, even though I paid for it. And so, as you are working on ranking your products for particular keywords and showing up higher in the search algorithm, you want to have a strategy where you balance your organic sales and your paid sales, and depending on what you’re trying to do, whether it be launch a product or be as profitable as possible, or just maintain where you’re at with your sales, we’ll determine what you do with that strategy. But it’s important to know, you can’t really only sell on Amazon without ads if you are a brand, you need to be doing some of the basic work with the advertising, which we’ll talk about in a bit. So speaking of advertising, there’s three different types.
The first one is called sponsored products. And I wanna show you a quick example of that here. So if we do exfoliation mitts, then I’ve typed this into the search bar, and you can see the first four placements here. These are actually sponsored ads. You see this little sponsored icon. So these brands, are paying to show up for this keyword here, and if I click on this, they’re going to pay for that click. Now, excuse me here for a minute, I have somebody is making some noise here, so I’m just gonna see if I can mute these really quick. All right, I think we’re good now. Thank you. Okay, so these are the sponsored placements. These are sponsored products. Sponsored products is typically your bread and butter. It’s where most people spend money because they see the best return on investment.
If you scroll down on this page, you’ll also find other sponsored ad placements here under the highly rated. And then if you scroll down, you’ll find even more down here, right? So Amazon has done a good job of kind of hiding these sponsored placements, amongst the search engine result page. And if you are not aware of that as a consumer, then you know, you’ll probably click on that and you may end up making a purchase. And that’s what the sellers are hoping happens, right? So Amazon’s got sponsored placements all over the place. There’s even more, if you click into the product detail page and you scroll down, you’re gonna see this advertising real estate here as well. You can see that this is sponsored. This is called a carousel ad. So if I scroll on this carousel ad, all of these products are paying to be showing up in this, in this placement, okay?
Now, the other advertising product is called Sponsored Brands. This is only available to you if you’re a registered brand on Amazon, and this placement shows up at the top of the search here. So we can see this company is advertising smooth out this issue here and achieve healthier skin. And then they’re showcasing their products here. So this is a very good advertising placement. It’s at the top of the page above the fold. It’s got the branding, the products right there. So you could even call out to them with this copy, and make them click on the product. The other thing that’s great about sponsored brands is it’ll also lead you to the brand store. And so you can see, I just clicked on that ad, and now I’m on this brand store.
Again, there’s no other advertisements for other competitors. So this is where there’s so many different things going on with Amazon. You’ve got to think about your strategy and how you’re going to attack it, because depending on where you’re at in your journey, there’s a million things that could be done. And really you want to focus on one thing at a time and make sure that you’ve got that dialed in, and then you can move on to the next thing. Sponsored brands is kind of like that. With sponsored products, typically, if you’re not running any ads or you’re already running ads, we want to come in and optimize those first, get your base really selling well, and then we can move on to the sponsored brands, and then sponsored display, which we’re gonna talk about in a minute. Now, it looks like I have a couple questions, so let me just take a peek at the chat here. Let’s see.
Okay, couple questions here, but I don’t quite understand them. So, Carrie and Janine, if you just want to clarify your question there, I can come back and visit it in a moment. All right, one other placement here is sponsored display. This is the newest of the three placements, and that’s going to show up on the product detail page. And so we can see this advertisement that’s showing up here. And then we have another one that’s showing up here. Now, sponsored display. This is also another one here. These are the ads that follow you around the internet, okay? And so you’ve gone to this product detail page before, maybe you’ve clicked on an ad or you’ve found it organically. Now, if they’re using sponsored display, these ads are going to follow you around, not only on Amazon, but if you jump off of Amazon, you go to another site, another website, you are liable to see that ad pop up there as well and kind of follow you around.
So these are the, one of the newer ad placements from Amazon. You can actually target specific categories of people. Uh, you can create an audience. So you’re not, you’re not only, uh, bidding, you’re not really bidding on a keyword, um, but instead you are bidding on, uh, exposure to specific audiences, right? So I could say I want to target people that have purchased, uh, skincare product in the last 30 days, or I want to target people that have a lifestyle where self-care is more important to them, right? And you can get pretty granular with those sponsored display ads, and
then you can be sending traffic there. So again, it has to do with your strategy. Yes, at some point you probably want to be using all three, but that really depends on what your budget is and what your goal is as far as, you know, utilizing the advertising spend.
And so, just to kind of bring this full circle with the Seraphic Skincare, the first thing that we did is we optimized the product listing. So we went through and we took new product images, we did the graphic design on the top seven, we wrote the new sales copy, we built out the brand story, we created the A-plus content. Once the foundation was built, that’s where we started spending on the advertisements, because if you’re going to pay to send traffic to your product detail page, you want to make sure it’s going to have the best conversion rate possible. Okay? And so I just want to set the record straight there
and let you know kind of the order of things that we do as we’re moving through the process. So once we’re at this point where we’re ready to spend money on ads, okay, we’ve got to think about what is our, what is our goal?
What is our strategy, right? And depending on the size of the brand you are, you may have a different goal than a startup does, or, somebody who’s been selling a similar product for a long time. So I’ve put these three main goals that we come across with the agency, which is brand awareness, a product launch, or scaling profitably. And so, depending on what you want to do, you’re going to utilize those different ad placements strategically, and you’re gonna set your budget for different products at the sku level. So it’s very important to sit down with someone, whether it’s your own internal team or it’s a trusted advisor, and talk about for each one of your products or product line, what are we going to focus on this month? And for the example of Seraphic Skincare, when I started working with them, she just wanted to try to get as many sales as possible because it was going to help build up her reviews.
And then as she built up her reviews, she could slowly start to increase the price and then become break-even, and then profitable. And so we did that for her product, and it worked really well. And then when she had additional cash flow, she was able to invest in newer products like the Razor and the exfoliation lotion, and the Face Mitt. And again, we started out with a similar strategy on those. So running ads had a lower price on the product, pushed the sales, even if the ACOS was a bit high. And then once those start gaining traction and reviews and momentum, then we can optimize those ads for more profitability. And that’s really where those mitts are right now, we want to make sure that we get a 20 to 30% ACOS on those products every month that we’re spending money on ads.
And so it really depends on where you’re at in your journey, but you want to have a goal, because that’s how you’re going to determine – if your current strategy is successful or not – is having this goal. Okay, so we already spoke about this. The journey, your budget, where are you at? I’m not sure everybody who’s on the call today, but typically the people that I work with, it’s either a brand new startup and they’re just launching their products. They’re gonna have a smaller budget, they’re gonna probably need to go for break-even, or a little bit of profit. Then you’ve got middle of the line companies, they’re more established. They already have a set marketing budget, and they’re trying to make as much money as possible on those product listings.
So we’re shooting for a very specific target as far as return on investment. And then sometimes I’ve worked with a lot bigger brands, and they have other marketing campaigns outside of Amazon where they’re spending a lot of money. And so they just want to make sure to show up anywhere and everywhere for their brand name, and also specific keywords regardless of the return, because they know eventually the lifetime value of that customer is going to make them profitable on the backend. So you’ve gotta set your strategy – there’s no “one strategy fits all.” And make sure to spend the time doing that when you’re, when you’re going through. And we’ll talk more about that during the workshops as far as how to do that and how we break that down.
Speaker 1
James, I think Carrie was asking about fulfillment. Are these clients sending their product to Amazon and Amazon is fulfilling? How does it work?
Speaker 2:
Great, great question. Okay, thank you for clarifying, Karen. When you sell on Amazon, as far as what we’re talking about today, there’s really two ways that you can fulfill your products. Number one is called Fulfillment by Amazon, and that’s where you have your manufacturer, let’s say they’re overseas, you have them create the product, ship it to the us, and then that product gets delivered to an Amazon warehouse, okay? Once it’s received by the warehouse, they check that product in, they put it on the shelf, and then when you make a sale on Amazon, the Amazon
employee at the warehouse will pick that product off of the shelf, they’ll put it in the bag, and then they’ll ship it to that customer who purchased from you. Okay?
The other one is called Fulfilled by Merchant, and this is where you have your own warehouse, okay? And so let’s just for a very simple example, let’s say that you’re a newer seller. You’ve ordered your products from the manufacturer, they ship them to your address, your house, and at your house you have a thousand units of the widget. And instead of shipping all of that product to Amazon to fulfill, you list it on Amazon. And when you make a sale, you go into your garage and you pick out one of those items, and you put it in the shipping box, and you send it yourself to the customer. Okay? Now, of course, there’s bigger brands that have their own warehouses, and they have their own team of employees that work at the Warehouse, right? Those are the two different ways that you can do it through, through Seller Central. Now, there is another platform called Vendor Central, and that’s where you would be selling your product directly to Amazon, and then they would do all the fulfillment and everything, but they also control the retail price, and that’s more of a, they call that a vendor relationship, versus just selling your product to the customer yourself and having Amazon fulfill it.
So hopefully that answers the question.
Speaker 1:
Thank you.
Speaker 2:
All right, so continuing here, “management system for success.” Okay, so this is on the tail end of the PPC, and I just want to say, what we’ve found that works well is really being very organized with your strategy on the advertising. And when you get into the Manager and you’re creating ads and you’re picking keywords and you’re setting bids, it feels like there’s a million different things going on. And so what we like to do, and what we’ve done is we’ve created something that’s called a PPC calendar. And on this calendar, it shows every day of the week, and there’s a specific task or a specific action that the team will take on the account for that day of the week. And by doing this, and on Monday doing bid optimizations, Tuesday doing keyword research, on Wednesday harvesting keywords, on Thursday sending out the weekly reports, and then on Friday looking for wasted spend and cutting that. Doing that methodically in an organized way.
Every week we’ve seen constant growth of the accounts that we manage versus more of just a scattered approach where you go in there and if something looks like it’s doing well, you click some buttons and make some changes. If it doesn’t look good, you turn it down, right? And it, it sounds a little funny, but <laugh>, that’s a way that a lot of people manage the ads, is they just go in there once or twice a week and make some changes, right? But we have to think about the power of the advertising system, and also as we’re spending money, what is the return that that’s money, that money is getting, and how closely and how tightly are we controlling those budgets? Another thing I wanted to mention is automation. So you’ll see this more and more in the Amazon space, and it’s a company that’s selling a software or a subscription to a software that you can just plug in your Amazon account and it will automate all of your Amazon advertising.
And it’s a very seductive idea where this is this hands-off approach where we’re just gonna let the software do it, we’re gonna let the algorithm run and, and manage the bids. And believe me, I’ve tried many of these programs over the years, and I still believe in the manual management of the advertisements. Now, yes, some automated software can be good, but you cannot have a set it and forget it approach. You need to have someone that’s in there looking at what the system is doing, what is the logic behind the changes that it’s making, and is that in alignment with what we would be doing if we did it manually?
The other tough thing is with the advertising, you’re studying the customer search terms, and so you’re evaluating how is the market searching for this type of product? What keywords are they using? What key phrases are they using?
And a lot of times the automated software is only making decisions based on the data. And so the click through rate or the conversion, or the cost per click, and it’s not able to analyze those trends like a real person or an analyst would be in the account. And so what I would say is someone there, okay, I heard some, somebody came up real quick. If you have a question, please drop it in the comments and I will take a look. So it’s not to say you can’t use automated, just don’t get sucked into the seductiveness of only using the automation, you know, keep eyes on the account. Amazon also continues to change things that are available to you in the ads. And so having somebody in there can see those changes and then alert the team or come up with new strategy to implement.
Okay, that was just an, oops. Got it. Okay. So now we’re gonna move a little bit into some of the common issues that I see when we’re helping manage these accounts. And you’d be surprised that even some brands that have been around for 20, 30 years when it comes to dealing with their inventory on Amazon, it’s almost like they’re a brand new company, right? And so this is probably one of the biggest concerns, issues, challenges that we see, and it’s running out of inventory. I know that sounds funny, but to go back to that halo effect, when we’re doing a good job of pushing a product for specific keywords and focusing the ad spend on those keywords and improving our organic rankings, you can end up in a position where maybe you were only getting a thousand people looking at your page before, but now that we’ve hyper-focused in on a top a couple of these top keywords, your traffic jumps up to 10,000 views per month.
So you go from a thousand to 10,000, and all of a sudden you sell out of all of your inventory really fast. And I know that that sounds like a good problem to have, but the issue is when you sell out and then you don’t have any more product to sell, then your best seller rating on Amazon slowly starts going down, and then you lose the rankings and you lose all this momentum that you had. And so, sometimes with the clients we manage, even if their sales are doing well, if they don’t have the inventory to support additional ad spend and additional sales, sometimes we have to kind of turn that down a little bit until they can get more inventory in. And that also goes in line with inventory projections and knowing, looking out into the future how much inventory we do we need.
And if you find yourself struggling with that, we’re gonna talk about ways that you can overcome those challenges in the workshops. Amazon has some internal tools that we can look at, but I can also give you more ways of thinking about your inventory that will help you as well. And finally, is just the combination of FBA and FBM. So as we were talking about before, kind of the definition of what those terms are and what they mean as far as fulfillment, you can run what is called a hybrid approach. So you can ship FBA inventory on a product, and if that product is getting low and you’re right in the middle of shipping another load of units to FBA, you can turn on your FBM, and so you can
continue to make sales on that item and just ship it from your own warehouse until the FBA inventory is received and gets checked in and now becomes available for sale.
But this is a big one. This is a really big one. You want to have this figured out before you start investing a lot of money in your listings and your ads and everything, and it’s a simple one to forget about. You know, people get excited – “Oh, I got 500 units, I’m ready to start selling.” And, it’s like, “okay, well if I sell these 500 units in the next 30 days, how quickly can you get more inventory?” It would be eight to 12 weeks. You want to put this money behind the product, you want to really get it going, and then we’re gonna sell out, then what’s gonna happen? So, just something to think about.
The next one is catalog management. Okay? Catalog management has to do with how your product listings are organized on the
backend of Amazon. And so we get into a couple of things, organization, parent, parent-child variations and backing up your data. And this is one of those things that definitely is one of the top 1% Amazon sellers is having a team that knows how to work and deal with the backend of Amazon’s system.
Everything is done via these feed files, which is like an Excel file here. I just need to mute a couple other people. Okay, I think we’re good. It’s like an Excel file where you upload this data, but the problem is you get these layers and layers of, of data information about your catalog, and sometimes they get stuck. And so the information that appears on your product detail page is not what you want it to be. Okay? And this is a really big problem. If you’ve been selling on Amazon for any length of time, I’m sure that you’ve dealt with this, whether an image gets stuck or you’re trying to change a title and you can’t.
So knowing how to deal with this really comes down to you’ve got to find the talent, or you’ve got to roll up your sleeves, get in there, be willing to do the dirty work,
but it’s a little scary because if you do the wrong thing, you could end up deleting your entire catalog. So it’s not something you want to do if you are not comfortable with the system, or you haven’t spent a lot of time doing those things. And so this is a big challenge.
The next one would be account health issues. Okay? This is also an area where, in order to overcome it, you’re going to have to be in alignment with people that that can help you. So listing suppression and
plans of action. So as Amazon has become more of a household name, the rate of people suing them for liability issues has gone up.
And so we’ve seen over time Amazon adding in more restrictions for supplement brands as far as the ingredients that are in there, or if it’s FDA approved. Also we see, we’ve seen things where like
electronic products can catch on fire and it’s just a bad situation. So what you have now is Amazon runs these bots through product listings, and if it finds keywords that it doesn’t like, then it will suppress your listing. A suppressed listing means that it’s not searchable on Amazon, it can’t
be found, and that you’re probably going to have to submit something that’s called a plan of action in order to get that listing, the suppression removed , and active again. And so, if you find yourself in this
situation, number one, you need to just take a deep breath, relax, even if it is very
stressful, you know, just calm your mind.
Number two, when you’re dealing with Amazon seller support, you need to, as much as you can, try to keep it a formal conversation and not get pulled into it emotionally. You know, “you took my
product listing down, I’ve been selling this for the last 30 years. You know why, why we’ve never had a problem before?” That’s not the kind of language that you want to use with them. Instead, it’s just,
“Hey, this product listing was suppressed. I found out that this was the reason why, you know, here’s what we’ve done to fix the issue, and will you please relist the item?” And then they’ll come back
to you and they’ll tell you if that’s going to resolve the matter and they’re going to
accept that, or if there’s something else that they want. And unfortunately, on Amazon, you’re guilty until proven innocent as far as it goes with your product listings. If you’re dealing with any of these right now or you’re going through it, there are some resources on the market that you can look
into, and read about if you’re into reading books. There’s some courses, or there’s service providers who can help you take care of all of these things. They just need to get some information and they can submit that, on behalf of you, to Amazon.
The final one here is seller support. And so this is a big issue that, you know, no matter where you’re at in your journey with selling on Amazon, you’re gonna hear people complaining about seller support.
Well, why is that? Well, the big reason is there’s a high turnover rate with these support people. Usually they’re from overseas. It can be a little bit hard to understand them sometimes, and they don’t always know really what they’re doing. So a lot of times they’re just trying to refer to their training manual. If you have a particular question and it doesn’t line up with the words that are in their book, right, they’re just gonna give you a copy and paste answer to your issue, which
probably isn’t gonna solve the issue. The other thing is you can spend a lot of time on the phone with these people and it doesn’t really resolve what’s going on.
So I just want to let you know that there are three different ways that you can approach seller support. When you create a case on Amazon, you have the option to send them an email, you have the option to give them a phone call, or you can do instant chatting with them. And really, depending on
the issue, kind of determines which route that we’re gonna take as far as how we contact Amazon and talk to them. If it’s something where it has to do with brand registry, that’s going to be through
the email, because you can’t call them. If it has to do with the catalog and getting something fixed, that would be a great reason to call them. Or if it had to do with FBA, anything to do with like shipping your product to Amazon and them receiving it, you could do that.
Or if you just needed something simple like downloading a particular report or understanding why did the fees increase on my product, then you could just send them a chat. The other little tip is, depending on when you call during the time of day and the time zone you’re in, you’ll get these different departments. So if you call late at night U.S., you’re probably gonna get a team over in the Philippines or maybe India. If you call later in the day, maybe in
the afternoon around 1:00 PM or 2:00 PM, you’re potential gonna get the Costa Rica team or the team that’s in Arizona. Okay? And really what I’ve found is, depending on the issue, it does matter which of those teams you get in contact with. And that’s something that we learned just from doing this for a long time and having to contact support – is which one of those teams is accessible, and how to in touch with them.
And then if you ever have like a really serious issue, you’re gonna be getting in touch with the performance team, and that’s the one that’s going to be able to reactivate your account if it gets
suspended or reactivate a listing if it gets suppressed, something like that. So it can also help to know based on what kind of issue you have, which team you want to get in touch with and those are some of the things that have helped us over time be able to deal with these particular issues.
The last thing I would just say is persistence, right? I kind of have this motto in my head where it’s like, I’ll just keep going on a problem until I hear like a lot of “nos.” So if I’m hearing that multiple times from different people that I talk to, then I start to think about maybe we need to try this a different way.
But most of the time if you, if you persist, you’re gonna find somebody who has more expertise. They’ve been working with Amazon for a longer period of time, and they know how to use the tools in order to
get you access to what you need and to fix your problem. I see a lot of sellers just give
up too early and they just end up having to live with the situation of the listing or whatever it is. But if you just continue to persist, then you can get it solved. All right, so we’re coming to wrap up this presentation here and what do we talk about today? So number one, how to
establish your brand on Amazon. We talked about, the number one way to establish your brand is your foundation. So your images, your titles, your bullets, your descriptions.
We talked about registering your brand with Amazon so that you can do the brand story and the A-plus content and the brand store and the Amazon posts. We talked about some of the benefits of selling
on Amazon, right? How easy it is to just sign up for an account and list your products. You can do
FBA where you send all your products to them and they fulfill everything, or you could choose to do it yourself. You also have access to over 150 million prime members who have their credit card in hand ready to make a purchase. They trust Amazon, right? They have one click purchase on there. They also have subscribe and save, right? And these are all things that Amazon has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in to give you access to utilize it. Finally, they’re gonna continue to invent and create the future of e-commerce with their advertising tools and the real estate and, and the marketing products that are available.
We talked about optimizing your brands and your product listings and how you wanna create that to be a cohesive ecosystem where when somebody finds one of your products, now they get exposed to all of the different assets that you have of your brand, and they can really shop your different products and look at your brand store, and then maybe they get an advertisement displayed from you.
We talk about how to generate more sales, organic sales from paid ads, and how it’s important to have a goal and a strategy when you set out to do your advertising campaigns. And then We talked a little bit about over overcoming common challenges with selling on Amazon, specifically in relation to your inventory management, your account health issues, catalog, organization, and even dealing with seller support. So I quickly just want to go through some of the services that we offer here at Rank N’ Bank so that you’re more familiar with what we do.
The first one would be consulting services, and that’s going to be in regards to number one, really just figuring out where are you at on your journey? What are the goals that you want to accomplish, and how are we going to get there? And so depending on what your needs are, we can put together a
custom strategy for you that we can then help you to implement and execute. The second, and this would be our biggest, most popular service, is the listing optimization. This is essentially all the different things that we go through in our process, and we can speak about that more later. But we can do the professional product photography. We can design your top seven images, we can do your title bullet points and descriptions. We can build A-plus content brand story, your brand store, right?
All of the foundational things we can do and we spend a lot of time with you to make sure that we get it done right. The final one is the advertising management. And so we can take a look at what you’re currently doing on Amazon, we can talk about your goals, and then we can put together a new strategy for moving forward. Also, what’s great about this service is we have a call with you every two weeks and we do provide weekly and monthly reporting to kind of keep you on track and talking about are we hitting the different metrics that we want to be hitting, for whatever your goals are. Finally, I just want to thank you for coming to this presentation today. I really enjoyed giving it. We, SD Direct, has some upcoming workshops where we’re gonna be going even deeper into this material.
And we’re gonna be exploring the ROAR process and that stands for Research, Optimize, Advertise, and Review. And on what we really just touched the surface of today, we’re gonna go super deep. We’re gonna get into the details. If you have specific issues or problems or challenges, you can bring those to the workshops and we’ll definitely get to those.
Here’s a couple of the bullet points that we’re gonna be covering.
How to assess your brand and define your business goals
how to optimize your products and catalog
the power of Amazon advertising and choosing the right strategy for your brand
and the importance of customer feedback and how to deal with that.
So we don’t want you to miss out on this. This information is from the top 1% of Amazon sellers and I’m sure there’ll be a link somewhere that you can click to reserve and it’s only $99 for the four sessions.
So with that, thank you. I’m gonna pass it back over to Karen and then she’s got a few details for you there.
Speaker 1:
So we have a new San Diego Direct membership program.
Individuals are just $99 a year, companies up to five members, just $249. And you can join at sddirect.org, become a member.
And the good news is that you’ll save 50% off on James’ workshop in April. Also 50% off in our June and October workshops.
And you will take 50% off our on demand workshop, the February copywriting workshio, which is also available online, and you get to use the SD direct member logo. So please become a member at
sddirect.org. Thank you for joining us today.
Were there any other questions? I actually had a question. James, when things are searchable on Amazon, all of those images that have text on them, is that text
searchable as well, or just the title description and bullets?
Speaker 2:
Yes, that’s a great question. As far as being searchable to Amazon, we have seen that it can help you a little bit if you put some of that information in there. But where it’s gonna help you the most is on Google, right? So those images are going to get indexed with the meta keyword data, and that will show up in the Google images search when people do search for particular keywords and whatnot. And then we’ve seen a lot of traffic coming from people searching in Google, the images showing up and then clicking through to Amazon. Also within the a plus content section, there’s something called hidden image keywords, and we’ve also seen that those can help you get indexed, and rank for additional keywords as well. So yes, you wanna make sure to fill out all that information, uh, when you’re optimizing your listing.
Speaker 1:
Wonderful. Okay, I think we’ve completed our questions. So thank you all for joining us today. Hope we will see you, starting next Tuesday at James Great Workshops. Thank you all for joining us.