Amazon SEO Tips: 5 Lessons Sellers Can Take From Great On-Page SEO

By Erik Matthes

Marketplace selling is a dog eat dog world – you have to win the Buy Box, and competition to get there can be tough. Shoppers are looking for fast and cheap deals, and won’t spend too long agonizing over which seller to buy from.

So, how to succeed?

Amazon SEO best practices and tactics can be used by ambitious sellers in order to maximize product listings. Thankfully, we’ve got some Amazon SEO tips to help your products rank better.

First things first: Optimize within your platform in 2017

As we all settle down after the hype of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s time for merchants and sellers to regroup and get ready for another year of trading in 2017.

Before we launch into these five SEO strategies, it’s important to emphasize that Amazon sellers should be optimizing primarily within the Amazon platform itself. (Nathan Grimm’s awesome blog on Moz from 2014 covers Amazon’s search ranking factors).

If you treat optimizing your Amazon listings EXACTLY like optimizing your website in search engines, you are going to struggle. You have to know the difference – these tactics are transferable, but you should never lose sight of the end goal – more Amazon sales.

With that said, let’s launch into our Amazon SEO tips:

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1. Longtail keywords in product names

Longtail keywords are big in SEO right now and they are useful for Amazon sellers, too.

Shoppers are on a mission and they know what they want – longtail keywords help customers identify your products more accurately. Give your products the best possible chance of ranking and converting by using longtail keywords in your product titles.

• Use accurate and specific keywords in your title – listing product features like colors and sizes will help improve your conversion rates. Amazon is always looking for more conversions because conversions lead to more sales on its platform. By giving Amazon what they want (more sales), you are getting what you want, too (more revenue).

• Put brand names in product titles to help you rank for branded search terms. Be specific.

• Use an Amazon keyword research tool to help you identify keyword opportunities.

2. Unique content

Unlike search engines, Amazon doesn’t penalize duplicate content – but having boring manufacturer content isn’t going to help conversions. 

To stand out:

• Differentiate yourself from competitors by providing more product data. Don’t make people hesitate because they aren’t sure about key product features – always give the user as much as information as you can.

• Provide content that will satisfy both the shopper who wants to make a purchase fast, as well as the browser who is doing market research and will come back later.

Just make sure to avoid huge walls of texts above the fold and use concise language. And, take advantage of formatting features like bullet points and bold text to better sell your words.

3. Competitor analysis

The key to Amazon SEO success is holistic competitive analysis. Don’t just focus on the obvious facts in front of you, delve deeper into the customer experience to get real insights on how to beat your competitors. Ranking within the seller marketplace takes strategic research.

Competitor analysis should be keyword focused. Answer these questions when doing your research:

• What words are your competitors ranking for?

• What keywords are popular?

• How have your competitors approached product titles?

Look outside Amazon to get inspiration, but bring it back to the platform for implementation.

Price is another factor to analyze. While you shouldn’t always compete on price, it can definitely help.

Competitor pricing is a super important factor for making it into the Buy Box – you can use software that will strategically change your prices so that you can win it. Sometimes a cent can make all the difference and it can be worth it – just be careful about selling too low and undercutting profits in the long-term.

Product filtering (colors, sizes) can also make a big difference to conversions – look at how your competitors have approached filtering. Try to offer more flexible options.

Finally, make sure that your products are nearly 100% available – Amazon doesn’t like to rank unreliable sellers.

4. Product imagery & accurate product data

Complete product data and imagery will help increase your conversions. Just like good on-page SEO, Amazon SEO is all about giving users as much information as possible and helping them make the right decisions by being accurate and informative.

Understand that:

• People like to zoom in on images – include high-quality product images on your product pages. Try to offer as many angles as you can.

• Product dimensions must be perfectly clear – returns and negative reviews often come from people thinking the products was a different size.

Don’t let negative reviews and returns impact your seller ranking and always be upfront about a product’s size. A great way to visually communicate product dimensions is to include another item next to your product for comparison.

5. Customer review acquisition

Social proof is increasingly important for B2C and B2B sellers, both online and on Amazon.

• Customer reviews lead to more sales – encourage people to leave feedback by including a review prompt in the parcel, or in your emails. Don’t be too pushy and try to offer an incentive if you can.

• You ideally want to receive both reviews for your products as well as ratings for you as a seller. Customers look at both, and each metric can impact their purchase decision in either direction.

• Don’t be afraid of the occasional negative review or seller feedback. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a 100% positive seller rating might not always increase conversions; people often find that a figure in the 90s is more realistic and truthful. (After all, no one is perfect 100% of the time).

• Bad Amazon reviews are legendary – a really funny, outrageous, or unfair negative review may actually galvanize other customers into “retaliating” with positive reviews.

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There will always be things that keep Amazon sellers up at night, but by following these optimization strategies you can win the Buy Box and succeed as an Amazon seller.

What Amazon SEO tips are you going to be trying out in 2017?

(SOURCE)

7 Lessons I Learned Launching 23 Products on Amazon in 2016

By Spencer Haws

As I reflect back on my business this year, I realize that I’ve had a lot of both ups and downs.

I sold my software company, Long Tail Pro, and that was a huge win this year.  On the other hand, I’ve launched several products on Amazon and some of them have performed terribly.

However, some of my products have also done quite well…selling more than I expected.

I started the year with the ambition of launching 15 new products on Amazon by July.  Now that the year is over, I’ve gone from selling just 5 products at the beginning of the year to now selling 28 total products!

Today, I want to share the lessons I’ve learned by launching 23 new products on Amazon in 2016.

1. Taking Lots of Swings Can Work

I recently read the book, “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” by Adam Grant and there is an entire section dedicated to the fact that innovation is often achieved by those taking lots of attempts.  The more swings you take, the more chances you get at hitting a home run.

This was true for Thomas Edison, who had tons terrible ideas (thousands), but also had some great ones (light bulb, phonograph, movie camera, etc).

In 2016, I took this idea to heart and launched as many products as I possibly could.

The end result is that my Amazon FBA business revenue grew by 433% in 2016! (In full transparency, I only started selling on Amazon in March 2015, so I didn’t have a full year in 2015 to compare to 2016).

While some of these products were more unique ideas, many of these were generic ideas without any originality.  In fact, some of these were simply ordered straight from Aliexpress and quickly launched on Amazon just to see if there was a market there.

This is the only way I could have launched so many products in a year.

2. Unique Products Sell Better Than Generic Products

As I look back at what products are selling well for me, I can clearly see that unique products are the big winners.

So, while I launched lots of “generic” products, the few unique products that I launched are the ones driving most of the revenue.

What I mean by “unique” is that its has very few or no products exactly like it on Amazon.  The competition for the exact product or variation is extremely low.

So, if I was selling shower-heads, and I was the only one selling a pink shower head or a shower head with some other unique feature, that is what I’m considering unique here.

I’m not necessarily talking about a patented product or revolutionary design (although that’s on my bucket list).

When I look at my listings, I count that 8 of my 28 listings have what I would consider a “unique” feature that helps them stand out from the crowd.   These 8 listings easily drive over 80% of the sales.

So, going forward for 2017?  I’ll be focusing on more unique products and not messing around with the generic or copy-cat type products.  In fact, I’m already in the process of designing a couple of truly unique product ideas (would require a special mold to create, etc) and see more unique ideas as the future of my business.

3. Unique Products Have a Higher Price Elasticity

If you have a unique idea, you will have less competition.  As a result, you can typically raise your price and drive higher margins without impacting your sales velocity.

Customers are willing to pay higher prices when you are the only one (or one of the only ones offering your product).

If there are 4 or 5 pages of your exact product on Amazon, you usually can’t get away with raising your prices.

As a result, not only have I found that my more unique products sell more, they also have the highest profit margins.

4. Some Winners Can Become Losers

When I started 2016, I had 5 total products and 3 of those were what I would call big winners.  The sales volume increased dramatically in January for one of my products and I needed to reorder.

Instead of looking at the average sales over the previous 3 or 6 months and taking an average, I simply looked at what was happening in the most recent month and ordered a full container load of this product (yes, it’s an oversized product).

Over the next couple of months, the sales of that particular products started creeping downward.  This trend continued pretty much the entire year, until this once great selling product has become a dud.

I’ve done everything I know to revive it: giveaways, huge discounts, sponsored ads, and more.  However, at the end of the day, I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that I’m going to most likely drop this SKU from my lineup.

The 2 big reasons I see for the drop in sales: negative reviews and it’s a generic product.

For 2017, I’ll be focusing more on quality and innovation.

5. Manufacturing is Capital Intensive

I’ve mentioned this in the past, but I think its worth re-iterating for anyone interested in jumping into Amazon FBA: this business can take a lot of capital.

Unlike digital products, if you start selling a lot you have to re-order inventory before you get paid from Amazon.  When you add in a couple months for manufacturing time, your bank account can run dry long before you get paid.

So, if you are bootstrapping this business. You might only be able to go one or two products at a time and may not be able to grow as quickly as you would like.

This lesson of lag time between manufacturing and getting paid was something that I quickly realized this year.

Fortunately, during the second half of this year the business has become cash flow positive, and my bank account is finally growing each month instead of shrinking.

This is just a big heads up for anyone considering entering the game.

6. Amazon is Great, and Amazon is Terrible

Amazon is an amazing platform with TONS of traffic.  Billions of dollars of product was sold in just one day during Black Friday this year (and yes, it was the biggest day of the year for me as well).

Selling on Amazon is a great way to tap into ready and willing buyers.  Amazon stores, packs, ships, and provides all the customers.  I never could have built the size of business that I have so quickly without Amazon as a platform.

However, there is also an ugly side to Amazon that I learned about this year.

Yes, like many of you perhaps, I’m always skeptical when a big corporation controls so much of my business.  I mean, they could shut us down at any point!

I was never shut down; however, I did receive quite a scare this year.

There was a safety incident that a customer had with one of our products, and the listing was closed by Amazon. (Don’t worry, the customer was not hurt or anything, it was a pretty minor thing.  And the customer ended up giving us a 5 star review after we resolved their issue through customer service).

Amazon does not communicate well (like all large corporations I’ve dealt with like Google, etc.).  They wouldn’t tell us what the safety incident was, but only that one occurred.

They wouldn’t tell us how to get our listing reactivated, but only that we needed to submit a plan to address the issue.

After several emails to Amazon, we still got no where, other than a very scary email saying that we could never sell the product again and if we did, they would shut our account down.

Whoa.

I decided to hire a consultant, Chris McCabe at EcommerceChris.com, and he was able to help me formulate a plan and get the listing reactivated.  I’m happy to say that we’ve addressed the issue, including additional testing on future batches, and this SKU is now one of our best selling products.

However, the fear of Amazon is still in me.

Yes, Amazon is great, but I definitely learned that they can have a darker side for your business as well.

I hope to become less Amazon reliant in the future by selling on my own websites and driving traffic through SEO, social media, and paid strategies.

7. Think Bigger

I recently attended Freedom Fast Lane Live in Austin, Texas.  Although the speakers at the conference shared almost no strategies directly that will help me grow my Amazon business, they did help me to think bigger.

In fact, as I networked with other attendees, I could see that perhaps some of my results have been limited by my own thinking.

I met Amazon sellers that started around the same time that I did that are doing between $3 to $5 million a year in sales!

I know it’s not healthy to compare directly to those around me, but this help me see that I could be doing so much more.  Yes, I got quite a bit done this year by launching 23 products on Amazon (okay, my employee Jake really did all the work), I now realize that a little bit more focus and perhaps a slight shift in strategy could help me grow this business much bigger than I have been thinking.

Seeing so many other sellers face to face and hearing their multi-million dollar stories, is inspiring.

I’m ready to think bigger, build real brands, and grow a true following around those products and brands that I create.

In 2017, I’m ready to take this business from the six figure to the seven figure level and beyond.

Are You With Me?

These are some of the lessons that I’ve learned over the past year launching rapidly and growing my Amazon FBA business.

I always love hearing about other people having success in their own business as well.

If you are selling on Amazon, I would love to hear in the comments below how 2016 went for you or what lessons you’ve learned along the way.

Overall, who is with me to start thinking bigger in 2017?

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3 Lessons Learned Selling $56k On Amazon in 6 Months

By Greg Mercer

It was the fall of 2015, and I was working with the Jungle Scout team to put the finishing touches on the release of the Web App. I was itching with excitement at the potential that the Web App had. I had been selling on Amazon for a few years by that point, and was accustomed to spending hours on product research to come up with new ideas. But now within a few clicks, I could pull from a database of millions of Amazon products to find a product that fit any criteria that I wanted. It was magical.

I was so excited to share the magic with others. The only problem was that the process of selling on Amazon was shrouded in mystery, and there was a knowledge gap between how Jungle Scout worked and how it could empower Amazon sellers. There are many people who share the high level strategies of selling, but all-important details were lacking in what the experts teach in theory, and how the process actually worked.

I thought it would be a really fun challenge to do a case study of selling on Amazon: could I replicate the success I had had as an Amazon seller, but while sharing everything publicly?? It was, as they say, putting my money where my mouth is. I decided that I would cover everything, from coming up with product ideas, sourcing, importing, creating a listing, running ads, split testing, inventory management, and more. I would cover every step in detail, all victories and failures along the way.

Oh, and one more thing: all proceeds would be donated to charity. We ran a poll with all of you and you guys chose Doctors Without Borders. Fantastic!

Fast forward to late July, and we have some big updates. Since we started this case study (you can see some of the webinar recaps here), we have sold more than $56,000 in revenue of bamboo marshmallow sticks, called Jungle Stix!

Here is a screenshot of Seller Central’s dashboard that includes the sales figures:

But more importantly than the sales is the bottom line, and what we have raised to donate to Doctors Without Borders. May I have the drumroll please…..

For the first six months of Jungle Scout sales, we have raised $18,036 that will be donated to Doctors Without Borders!!

This is a fun picture that I took with the Jungle Scout team:

We will continue selling Jungle Stix, and raising more money. But I also thought that it would be helpful to reflect on the experience and pull out a few lessons that I learned along the way. So here are three lessons learned about selling on Amazon that may help you along the way.

LESSON #1: THERE IS ALWAYS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

In general, I am an optimistic fella. But when you are an Amazon seller, there is always room for improvement. That is because the market conditions are always changing, competition is always present, and customer needs change as well as Amazon’s policies. That means it is imperative that you are always testing and optimizing your Amazon listing.

Within the first two months of listing, we had the top organic ranking for the main keywords we were targeting, “bamboo marshmallow sticks” and “marshmallow sticks”. These are the screenshots, for “bamboo marshmallow sticks”:

and the search results for “marshmallow sticks”:

I wrote about how I achieved the top ranking in this post.

However, it would be a huge mistake to rest on my laurels and be happy with just being the top ranking product for any search queries relevant to our product. I initially put the listing together based on my intuition of what would work, but I am ultimately not the end customer. I needed to optimize and improve my listing based on hard data. I needed to run split tests on my listing.

Admittedly, I was a bit late to starting split tests. I was busy, and I never got around to it. Big mistake. I basically ended up leaving a good amount of money on the table by not optimizing my listing once Jungle Stix had started generating some sales.

One interesting test that I ran was a pricing test. If you look at the first page results for “marshmallow sticks” now, all of the products will be less than $20. However, when I first launched Jungle Stix, I priced at $27. That price may have been too steep, so I dropped it to $19.88 (don’t ask me why, I just wanted something less than $20). That decision though was just based on intuition. So I decided to be more data-driven with my pricing decision, and run a pricing test.

My hypothesis was that I could position the product as a premium product with a higher price point, and squeeze out a higher profit. I ran the test for a few weeks, alternating between the control version (priced at $19.88) and the variant (priced at $21.88). The test results were interesting, to say the least. I did not experience any noticeable difference in sessions (meaning people clicked through on the listing regardless of price). However, I there was a drop in sales every day, and also conversion rate. Fewer people wanted to purchase at a higher price. Here’s the kicker though: my profits increased by 24%

This is what the results for the Price Test came out as:

How hard was it to start and run split tests on Amazon? Dead simple. I used Splitly to automate the whole process, so after I linked up my Seller Account and selected my Goal (I opted for Profits as my main goal), I started running tests. And by “running”, I mean that I let Splitly do its thing and alternate variants every day for two weeks until a clear winner emerged.

Here’s a screenshot of the test results for most of the Key Performance Indicators.

-2% drop in Sales

-9% drop in conversions

-8% drop in conversion rate

-but most importantly, 24% increase in daily profit!

I highly recommend running some split tests on your product to squeeze out incremental improvements and sales. There are always tests to run, and always improvements to make. The trick is that you don’t know what they are until you actually test them. You can run them manually, by alternating between two variants every day at 12M PST (when Amazon refreshes its sales data every day), or just automate the process with Splitly. It is the easiest way to generate growth in a cost-effective and speedy manner.

LESSON #2: AMAZON HAS ROOM TO GROW

Amazon is not a zero sum game. By this, I mean that the customer demand is not a fixed number, but can always increase. So if I sell a product, it does not necessarily mean that a competitor will lose a sale. Instead, they can just get an incremental sale from somewhere else.

Frankly, the marshmallow sticks have sold far better in reality than I was expecting—what a pleasant surprise! But the success of Jungle Stix does not mean that other sellers of marshmallow sticks have suffered a loss.

Just for fun, let’s take a look at the data that we used in October 2015 to decide to sell marshmallow sticks.

This is the Jungle Scout extension data from that time:

LESSON #2: AMAZON HAS ROOM TO GROW

Amazon is not a zero sum game. By this, I mean that the customer demand is not a fixed number, but can always increase. So if I sell a product, it does not necessarily mean that a competitor will lose a sale. Instead, they can just get an incremental sale from somewhere else.

Frankly, the marshmallow sticks have sold far better in reality than I was expecting—what a pleasant surprise! But the success of Jungle Stix does not mean that other sellers of marshmallow sticks have suffered a loss.

Just for fun, let’s take a look at the data that we used in October 2015 to decide to sell marshmallow sticks.

This is the Jungle Scout extension data from that time:

And we tracked the actual data using the Web App’s Product Tracker to verify the demand. This is what it looked like:

In summary, it looked like there would be enough demand, with consistent sales. And after tracking some actual data for a while in the Product tracker, there didn’t appear to be any artificially inflated sales rankings due to promotions or giveaways. I was seeing Best Seller Rankings that were hovering around 400 to 1500, with some sellers generating 20 to 30 sales per a day. That was good enough for the green light, in my mind!

I also saw that there was “depth” in the market: sellers who weren’t in the top 5 organic results for “marshmallow sticks” were moving a healthy amount of product every month.

And the last aspect that I thought I could do to differentiate a product was offer greater value. While other competitors were selling marshmallow sticks in bundles of 100, I thought that I could offer marginally more product at the same price, and promote this in the listing. The incremental cost of goods sold would not be that much, but I’d be able to convert at a higher rate as a result of offering greater value.

Well, it turns out that there is a lot more demand for marshmallow sticks than I initially anticipated. Here’s a look at the Jungle Scout sales estimates for “marshmallow sticks” today, July 19th:

There are a lot more monthly sales than I initially anticipated based on the data I looked at in October! I knew that the summer and fall would be peak months because it’s a great time for campfires. However, even referencing Google Trends I would not have been able to know that there would be such a spike in sales. As of today, it looks like there are more than 8000 sales for “marshmallow sticks”.

Of the estimated 8000 units sold by the top 10 sellers of “marshmallow sticks”, we have captured roughly 15% of the market, with 1201 sales in the past 30 days.

I think that we will sell even more in the late summer months as we continue to optimize our listing, and demand stays strong as families spend time camping and roasting marshmallows. The key takeaway is that Jungle Stix are successful because there is existing demand, and we just created a product to capture a sliver of the existing demand.

LESSON #3: AMAZON IS A MERITOCRACY

Admittedly, the circumstances of me selling Jungle Stix are slightly skewed because it is a public case study. Presumably, people could have gone to Amazon and purchased Jungle Stix to support the cause, (if in fact they needed marshmallow sticks). However, I don’t think that this is the case.

We may have experienced more people visiting our page to see what’s going on there, but I don’t think that they went through and purchased. Therefore, we actually probably have a lower conversion rate than if we had done this privately.

This is an important point because we were not given much of an advantage just because it is a public case study.

I believe that the success of Jungle Stix is a result of 3 things:

1. Finding a good product (ie thorough product research)
2. Running promotions and sending follow up emails on all sales (promotional and organic)
3. Optimizing the listing through testing

Any one of you can do these as well as I have, and probably better.

The beauty of this is how much of this is nearly automated. Running some occasional promotions on Review Kick, and sending a follow up email campaign on every sale where I ask for a product review, I have been generating about 25 new reviews every month. This is what my review analytics look like in Review Kick:

 Moving up the Best Seller Ranks and making money on Amazon is not related to who you know. It is actually very formulaic, and replicable.

CONCLUSION:

My goal in running this case study was to make it as instructive as possible. I think that by sharing as much information as possible, and behind-the-scenes figures, we can all learn and improve. I am really pumped that we were able to run this case study together (we will continue selling and writing about this as well). And it is fantastic that we were able to raise money for Doctors Without Borders!

Now it’s your turn: what questions do you have that I haven’t covered, in any of the previous posts or this post? What are your greatest challenges that you face as an Amazon seller or a soon-to-be seller? I’d love to help out, and will address your questions in the comments section, so share your comments below and let’s get everyone succeeding on Amazon!

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My Amazon FBA Story

By Adam Chudy

I don’t know who or how I came across Amazon FBA. I think it might have been Pat Flynn over at SPI and a few of his great podcasts with Ryan Moran, Jessica & Cliff Larrew, and Ryan & Daniel. Since then I’ve seen and heard it in a dozen places. It’s probably the darling of the internet business space right now and hopefully isn’t getting to crowded.

I’ve done a lot of FBA lessons so far (see below) but I haven’t really talked about my own story.

After getting excited about Amazon FBA, I decided not to wait and take action. The first thing I did, I would not recommend to anybody. I paid way too much money to take a course, that in the end I didn’t find much value in. I won’t name names, but I’d bet most of them are roughly equivalent.

Every single bit of information you could want is covered for free in amazing places like The Amazing Seller (and if you want a course, take Scott’s). If you are at all a self-starter and know how to search google, reddit, and a few facebook groups, every single bit of knowledge you could want exists for free.

Much like my description in “What and Why” I spent dozens of hours making lists in excel. I wrote down every single thing I use in my daily life, as well as all the things related to any hobby I could come up with. Caitlin did the same. I also used some various sub-cultures I was familiar with and worked my way through their popular websites looking for ideas. We had some promising items but nothing I was super excited with. Maybe I’ll revisit them in the future.

The first great idea we had came from Caitlin. While thinking about things like makeup she had a friend mention Z-Pallets. If you haven’t heard of a Z-Pallet, it’s a makeup case that’s empty and magnetic. As a guy I didn’t fully get it without a demonstration, but basically it lets you pop out all the original makeup containers you have in dozens of half empty cases and consolidate them in to a z-pallet since it’s magnetic. It’s a clever idea if you can picture it. Check out their amazon listing for a better idea.

We decided THIS was the BIG IDEA. When we examined our competition, there was only a single seller – Z-Pallets (this should have been a big red flag) and they were doing A LOT of business based on their BSR and some other metrics.

Mistake #1

Literally days before we were going to make a multi-thousand dollar order, I was doing some additional googling on the company. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just doing some reading. By complete accident I discovered that the product was patented. MAC cosmetics (a multi-million dollar cosmetic line), owned by Estee Lauder, was sued by little ole’ Z-Pallets for patent infringement and they won!

It turns out the reason NOBODY but Z-Pallets were selling these little magnetic make-up carriers, is they had managed to corner the market. Obviously the Chinese supplier could care less these items were patented. They simply removed any logos and were happy to sell them to any bidder. I was on the verge of owning several thousand make up pallets that I couldn’t legal sell anywhere. We dodged that bullet, mainly by luck.

LESSON #1:

Alwasy be suspicious of any item being sold by 1 or only a handful of companies. There’s very likey a good reason for that. It’s probably either a patented product or there’s no real demand. Be sure, because your overseas suppliers have no problem selling products to you that are patented in the US.

Back to the drawing board

I doubled down on my efforts of my list. I had about 3-4 tabs and hundreds of items. This was before JungleScout, so I was tracking everything in my spreadsheet. I had BSR, number of reviews, page rank, price, and more.

All that effort, yet I found my product by luck. I was at an “event” with friends and I noticed my product. It was something I knew existed, but was unaware it was becoming popular again. I made a mental note to write down the idea in my phone and after we made it back home I punched it up in Amazon. It met most bit of the criteria I’d been looking for (check out the criteria in this post).

Next Steps

Once I checked all the stats (like we discussed here) and saw this made sense, I jumped to finding a supplier. After dozens of emails, we landed on our favorite. They happened to have 2 versions of the product I liked that didn’t take any real modification and they were prompt in their responses with good English.

We ordered samples and we thought they were great! Next thing we sent a test order for 500 each. The day our first set of boxes arrived, I couldn’t have been more excited. A local photographer handled our photos (and did a great job), I wrote the copy for our pages, and started sending.

Launch Day

We launched with the friends and family approach and quickly racked up 20-30 reviews. Because we picked a good niche, we pretty quickly were bouncing between page 1 and 2 and at one point were all the way up to top 5. Unfortunately, things were not all well. We were in St. Louis visiting friends and I woke up to a fantastic surprise. Over night we had 100 sales when typically we were running 10-15 per day.

Excitement went to a bit of worry. Did our coupon code get out? Had our page been hacked? I checked our promotions and everything else I could think of and it all looked normal. I called my partner and he saw the same thing, so I decided to enjoy my day and have fun on vacation.

Mistake #2

When creating a promotion, under “Step 3: Additional Options”you have to know to click “Customize Messaging” which then shows more settings. Under those settings is a very innocent looking box that says “Detail Page Display Text”. For God knows why, that box comes pre-clicked.

YOU  MUST UNCLICK THIS BOX!

By leaving it clicked, whatever promotional code you create will displayed on your amazon listing. Think about that. You’ve now created a giveaway that makes your product $1.00 (or whatever amount) and now the entire world can see that. Now if Amazon gave even the slightest shit about user interface for sellers, this box would clearly labeled something like “Would you like to display this advertisement on your amazon page?” – Yes or No. It would probably then force you to confirm that again. Instead it’s prechecked and isn’t even shown automatically. Rant over, back to the story.

We did not unclick the box. For several days it sat on our listing with a code to make our product $1.00. Eventually some enterprising person noticed this and the next thing we knew over 130 of our items had been ordered in a few hours all by people with exceptionally Asian names living in New Jersey.

We might have figured this out a big quicker, but at the time we didn’t understand that sales show up in roughly real time, but promotional codes show up on a lag. Again, I don’t understand at all why this would be the case, but it took another day for all those sales to suddenly go from profit to huge losses as negative $19.99’s began to hit our account in mass.

LESSON 2:

We learned 2 incredibly important lessons. The first many Amazon sellers have learned the hardway. When you do a giveaway BE CAREFUL! The Amazon user interface for sellers is shit and it’s promotional interface is the worst of all. You MUST make sure your promotion is not displaying on your page. (Side note: showing it on the page can be useful as well. We have a 20% off code if you buy more than 1 of our items, which is displayed all the time.)

The second lesson is to really understand how your dashboards work and when numbers are going to hit. You can’t assume it’s all real time and if you have spikes in sales with no clear reason (change in page rank, external sales drivers), you need to very quickly figure out what is going on. If we’d understood that we may have managed to cancel that promotion earlier.

Rolling On

Now losing those 130-140 products on an order of only 1,000 hurt. There was a silver lining though, it boosted our rankings quite a bit and seemed to have a lasting affect. We kept up our solid sales of 10-15 a day and were feeling quite good about ourselves. Expansion was already in mind. Our product and category makes it pretty easy to roll out variations that are damn near limitless. We had recouped most of our upfront capital and were ready to move forward. That’s when we learned we had screwed up.

Mistake #3

We had been so excited to get started and get selling that we did not test our products thoroughly enough. The item I’m selling isn’t something I personally use, so I didn’t have much personal experience. The samples to me looked good and seemed good quality. I had assumed that was enough and it really, really wasn’t.

Turns out, the products were very cheaply made. After using them for a few hours to a few days (or a bit longer), a large percentage (probably over 20%) were breaking! Shit shit shit! What to do?

First of all, I don’t want to sell a bad product. I’m not interested in screwing anybody. I want to sell the best product possible at the price point we’re targeting. I believe that happy customers and good reviews are the key to a good amazon business. But I hadn’t done my due diligence and now I was going to pay for it.

I use an automated email system to send follow-ups to buyers, and request a product review and to let me know if they had any problems we would take care of it. A LOT of negative emails started to roll in, and we didn’t have the track record or enough good reviews to easily sustain it. Every complaint that occurred, I did my best to resolve. We were giving full refunds (so total loss there), a code for an additional free product (another loss), apologizing profusely, and telling them to keep the one they had. So we paid amazon fees twice and lost 2 products. The loss per bad item were wracking up.

I could live with the losses. The real worry was 2 fold – bad reviews would completely tank our sales long-term and that Amazon would potentially bad our product or account over reviews/returns. Amazon doesn’t want you selling junk and if they see a return rate they consider too high or too many bad reviews, they’ll ban you. They’re also known for having an appeals process that can take months and is maddeningly opaque and hard to work with. There are horror stories of some faceless drone in a cube, unfairly costing sellers hundreds of thousands of dollars over misunderstandings or bans for no real reason.

Luckily good customer service can go a long way and we prevented a good chunk of bad reviews and got other people to change theirs to average based on the quality of our customer service. We ate a lot of product and refunds, but it was well worth it.

Lesson 3:

You must understand your audience, particularly if you aren’t your own target market:

• Who is going to use it?
• How are they going to use it?
• Is it built for their needs?

Quality, Quality, Quality. The #1 rule is quality. This will not only save you a lot of headache and prevent losses, it’s also just the right thing to do. You should be proud of your company and your products.

You need to make sure that the product is built as well as it can possibly be built for your price range. Test the thing. Beat it up. Twist it. Drop it. Pull on it. Use it every day for a week as many times as your audience might in a month. Make sure it holds up. Have other people use it and see if you missed anything. Be willing to pay a bit more for your product and don’t nickel and dime your supplier to the point they’re incentivized to cut corners.

Starting Over

Let’s not forget, while these problems are my fault for weak due diligence, they originate with our manufacturer selling us crap. While we dealt with returns we were also dealing with the manufacturer. I sent some nicely worded emails, explaining the problem, along with a lot of photos of defective product. My questions and requests were simple.

• Why are we having so many quality problems? Why were these products so shoddily constructed?
• What are you willing to do to correct the issue? We would like full refunds on every defective product
• We would like a discount on the next order to compensate for all the losses we’ve taken

Essentially they told us to go pound sand. They gave us samples. If we didn’t like the quality that was our own fault.

Clearly those weren’t acceptable answers, so we had to go back to Step 2 and find a new manufacturer. The first thing we did was take our products to someone with a lot more expertise than us and explain why they were breaking and how they should have been built.

Armed with that new knowledge we sent out another 20-30 requests to new manufacturers. We used the same detailed but general questions from before, along with much more product specific requests. We quickly narrowed it down to 10ish suppliers and asked for pricing. They varied more widely than I would have imagined and we cut it to 5. There was also some negotiation around sample costs and order costs and got all 5 within a reasonable distance of each other.

Once the samples arrived there was no contest. One of the the manufacturers had managed to make exact replicas of our existing 2 products (which was crucial to prevent being setback to zero) and the quality of the products was exceptional in comparison to the other 4 (and the other 4 were way better than our originals). A bit more negotiation and we were off to the races. We didn’t just re-order our existing products, we expanded to 2 more, so that we’d have 4 variations rolling. Ultimately we are paying more per item with the new manufacturer, but it will save us from countless returns, refunds, bad reviews, and headache. It’s good business to pay a bit more for a much better product.

Waiting

Because it took so long to find a new manufacturer, our top seller sold out. It’s a good problem to have but was a real bummer. We missed all of November and December. Out of our 10-15 sales a day, it was constituting about 70%, so that was a blow.  We were excited for the new order though, but it did require a big jump in capital. We were going from 1,000 units ordered to 4,000 so we kicked in some more cash and waited. The entire process and shipping took about 40 days and actually just arrived the week of Christmas. The new units should be on their way to Amazon as we speak and our company should be back on track.

Looking Forward

Along with that order came another sample variation and about a lot of additional variation examples for us to look through. I full expect we’ll be up to 6 variations by March with a goal of selling a minimum of 5/day and a stretch goal of 10. At that rate it will be full steam ahead, the company should be self-funding (cash flow positive) and the momentum can build! We’ve got ideas for at least another 5-6 variants as well as some unrelated product lines we’re excited to test.

Afterword

It’s pretty clear we’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve screwed up choosing a manufacturer, blew our first promotion costing us a ton of product, didn’t understand the lag in the dashboards costing us more units. We had a lot of returns and bad reviews. I’ve pretty much blown it almost every way you can in this game, with the saving grace being we picked a decent niche to work in.

The key is that I didn’t quit. Nobody gave up or panicked. We took each screw up, learned a lesson, and did better moving forward and are positioned to have (I believe) a 6 figure 2016. I’ll keep side hustling and so should you.

Did you get a lot out these 2 posts on our journey? Do you have any Amazon FBA questions? Do you have an FBA side hustle or are you considering getting in the game? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Putting together what I’ve learned in to an e-book or course is on my mind and I’d love to know what you think.

(SOURCE)

- What a journey to success! Do you have a similar story? Don't forget to comment!