How to Sell More Amazon Products 

Through Differentiation

By Karon Thackston

A little over a year ago, I met Chris Guthrie online. “Keen” doesn’t even begin to describe the level of common-sense smarts Chris has when it comes to successful Amazon sales. The fact that he created the AmaSuite collection of seller tools (and made it available to the public) so others can follow in his footsteps only goes to show the standard by which he lives. I’m excited to have Chris back as a guest on the Marketing Words blog and I know you’ll be enlightened by what he’ll share today.

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One major mistake new Amazon sellers make is creating a “me too” product.

What does this mean? It’s defined as creating a product that’s exactly like the competition but doesn’t add any extra value. These sellers forgo differentiating their products and simply ask the manufacturer to add a new label. This is not the way to build a great sellable brand.

With just four steps, I’d like to outline how to differentiate your product with a methodology I’ve applied from the beginning of my Amazon sales career … successfully!

Step 1: Find What’s Working

The best way to see what’s working well is to look at the Best Sellers category for a product. Take note of the product images and you’ll quickly see what’s drawing people in.

If we look at the six best sellers for “grill brushes” (aka BBQ brushes), here’s what we see:

● Most of the top sellers have thick bristles with multiple rows.
● A lot of the titles say “18 inches.”
● Every listing except one has 5 bullet points.

Step 2: See What’s Not Working

Reviews are and will continue to be a goldmine. It’s the best opportunity for finding what people like and dislike about a product in their own words.

The BBQ brushes in the first, third, and fourth positions look quite similar and would be a perfect example of applying differentiation through analyzing reviews. They’ve all got thick bristles, are 18 inches long, and — best of all — there are 2,896 reviews for us to look at.

Yes, that’s a lot of reviews and certainly a healthy amount of time. But it’s the upfront work you’ll need to get moving in the right direction.

Flaw #1: Bristles end up in food

Flaw # 2: Bristles not long or wide enough for infrared BBQs

Flaw #3: Handle breaks easily

This just goes to show that no matter how well a product is selling, you can always find improvements to meet demand.

Next, we need to understand which is the most important differentiation to pursue because that naturally leads us into our ideal BBQ fanatic.

Step 3: Aggregate Your Findings

As you look through the reviews, you’ll start to see very clear buckets. Your picture of a disgruntled customer will take shape and it’ll start to become very clear which problem you should attack first.

In our case, BBQ brush bristles falling off is a major problem and has the chance of causing major health problems — none of which we want to be responsible for. So now it’s time to unleash a bit of creativity into your own findings…

Ask yourself this question:

What is one thing I can change to this product that would make this product better?

Often, with physical products, it can be as simple as the material, packaging, or dimensions. Think of the smallest leverage point to allow the biggest impact for your customer — and your business.

Once you’ve answered that question and determined which modification is the most important to your product, you’ll need to find a manufacturer. More specifically, one that’s already producing BBQ brushes similar to what we’re looking for.

If you haven’t done this before, you’ll need to follow a few guidelines so you know what you’re talking about.

Step 4: Find Your Manufacturer (Remember to Be VERY Specific)

Finding the right supplier to source your product from is an entirely separate conversation, but typically you can find a supplier via Alibaba.com if you’re just starting out. The key is to make sure the supplier you work with is receptive to making changes to the product for you so that you can release something that is truly differentiated.

A few things before we go:

When you contact the supplier, be as descriptive as possible about what you’re looking for. This includes the size of the pallet, order quantity and, of course, your modifications. Try to communicate as many as possible.

Many of the strategies I use to produce a differentiated product can take a lot of time, but that’s the reason why I built AmaSuite. One of the software tools available inside AmaSuite helps you analyze every review for a single product and look for frequent combinations of the same words. With this information you can quickly determine some of the commonest complaints customers have about a product, as well as what people like the most.

(SOURCE)

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WHO CAN HELP ME SELL ON AMAZON?

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress. –Jeff Bezos

An established and successful business should not treat selling on Amazon as child’s play. Do not feel like every part of an expansion into the Amazon marketplace needs to be bootstrapped. Many affordable and even free services are out there that instantly solve basic issues. For more complex or wide-ranging assistance there are Amazon experts that allow a company to avoid costly bumps in the road. Keep in mind that a highly successful brand or product off of Amazon is likely to be highly successful on Amazon as well. Do not be afraid to try or even invest a little to speed up the road to Amazon profits.

It is easiest and safest to start with what is free. If a company already has an online storefront or website then contact your ecommerce site partner. They may have integration with Amazon that allows for seamless creation of listings based on the information already contained on your website. This eliminates much of the administrative hassle of creating listings for an entire catalog that are thorough and accurate. A few clicks and, voila, hundreds of items are available on one of the world’s biggest stages!

Once products are for sale consider incorporating some Amazon specific software. The exact package may depend on your business type, integration plan and sales volume, but there are solutions for almost any business. They can often be combined with the work of virtual assistants to outsource all tasks that are not core to your main business.

There are a small, but growing number of business consultants with a focus specifically on Amazon. Beware of one-size-fits-all courses promise to teach everything about Amazon. Every company has specific challenges and opportunities, so hiring a consultant that can understand a business and then implement actions catered to meet those needs is best. They can be expensive, but hiring the right consultant can be an obvious choice for established companies that have all the pieces necessary for huge Amazon sales except the knowledge of how to enter and succeed on the platform.

All of this being said, one of Amazon’s primary goals is to make selling on their site easy. Many of the best lessons are learned “on the job” so taking the first step of simply opening an Amazon account and listing products is sage advice. Only by trying will a business learn if Amazon is a good fit for them and potentially capture their share of the profits made from selling on Amazon.

(SOURCE)

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How to Calculate Your Amazon Profits with Seller Central

By Shane Stinemetz

What is the most exciting part about being an Amazon seller? Getting sales, of course! Prior to those first sales, the Amazon seller road is paved with apprehension and self-doubt. Newbies toil over the same questions…

• What if my boxes are not labeled properly and Amazon rejects the shipment?
• What if my product does not sell?
• What if my first reviews are negative?
• What if someone hijacks my listing?

But, the mindset shifts after the first organic sales start to trickle in. I remember the relief and elation I felt when I got my first automated shipment notification from Amazon saying that my product was shipped to San Antonio, TX.

That was the moment that I finally believed I could be successful selling on Amazon. It was a great milestone, but the journey to becoming a profitable Amazon seller had just begun. We in the Amazon circles need to talk more about what it takes, and what it means to be a profitable Amazon seller.

Over the past nine months, I have been working with the Jungle Scout team to build Fetcher, a profit analytics tool for Amazon sellers. I have had the chance to talk with hundreds of Amazon sellers about their biggest challenges.

80% of the Amazon sellers I talk to are really struggling with bookkeeping and accounting practices.

Very few sellers have a watertight system in place to calculate and monitor performance metrics. Tools like the Profit & Loss Statements, Balance Sheets, or Cash Flow Statements are critical for monitoring profitability, and they are being forgotten about in an industry where sales are sexier than profits. I suspect that…

Most Amazon sellers do not really know their profits!

Shocked? Not me. I was in the same boat. I struggled to evaluate my own profitability as an Amazon seller during my first six months in the game. But eventually, I learned that if I did not change my practices and priorities, my business would fail.

So, what should be the most exciting part about being an Amazon seller? Having the confidence to say with certainty for the first time “my business is profitable!”

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Amazon data does not lie. It is just a matter of finding the right data and asking the right questions during analysis. In this post, we will put our Sherlock Holmes caps on, and I will take you inside one of my personal Seller Central accounts to demonstrate some best practices for locating the hard-to-find data and cracking the great mystery of profitability.

We will study all of the pertinent data from Amazon’s most recent reporting period that lasted from September 15th – September 29th. All of the data we are going to analyze comes from one of my actual lighting products that I sell using FBA.

Sales Performance Metrics

I gave Sales a hard time earlier, but it is true that Sales are the lifeblood of any retail business. Seller Central tracks and displays sales in various formats. The challenge is weeding through the mess of data to find the relevant stories. For sales analysis, I recommend starting with a high-level view and going progressively deeper into the details.

Analysis Level 1

Start with the Amazon Sales Dashboard to get a quick snapshot of your sales performance.

The most noticeable piece of information is Ordered Product Sales. This lighting product generated about $2,900 in revenue over the reporting period. Great, but what does that really mean for me? Not much.

Next, take a look at the sales trend line. My first observation here is that this product appears to sell best in the early part of the week. I was curious enough to test this observation over a wider date range, and I confirmed that sales and conversions for this product are almost 15% higher between Monday and Wednesday than during the weekend period. Now that is actual data we can work with!

A quick analysis of the data suggests that shoppers are more inclined to search for, and purchase this product during the beginning of the work week. This is a simple example of analyzed data that can drive effective tactical business decisions.

I am going to test the data analysis by increasing Pay Per Click spending by 10% on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I will evaluate the results in three weeks and see if my marketing campaigns continue to convert at a higher rate during the start of the week. Naturally, that will also mean an increase in sales 

Analysis Level 2

After a quick look at the Sales Dashboard, I like to move onto the payments report to get a better idea of how my Amazon expenses are affecting revenue, and ultimately, my profits. Here is my most recent payment statement for the lighting product.

I always run a quick cross-check on Amazon fees to ensure everything is in line with my expectations. For this product, I set a performance target to keep Amazon fees under 40% of total revenue.

Revenue = $2,735.81

Amazon Fees = $927.44

Amazon Fees / Revenue = 0.34

Amazon Fees = 34% of Revenue. Check!

THE WATERLINE TECHNIQUE

Think of this target as a waterline to observe. As long as Amazon fees stay under 40% of total revenue, the alarm will not go off, and no action is required. But if the waterline is exceeded, an investigation ensues and a business decision is required.

Let’s pretend that Amazon fees had been 42% of total revenue, and the alarm had sounded. In this case, I would either adjust my target or take the necessary action to get back on track. Raising prices or lowering PPC spending could be quick solutions.But those actions can have a butterfly effect.

Why not try to lower Amazon fees? Yes, it is possible to control Amazon fees. Manipulating FBA fees to your advantage is a baller move. It will require an advanced understanding of how FBA fees work and how they relate to your inventory turns. This guide to FBA fees can help get you to baller status.

Refunds

Use the refunds section to quickly calculate return rates. The waterline technique is critically important in managing refunds. Why?

REFUNDS RANT

Most Amazon seller can not afford to spend their time investigating every single refund. Our time is better spent growing our businesses. Refunds are a massive part of the game because Amazon is built on a foundation of almost limitless customer service.

In my opinion, Amazon is a customer-driven platform. Not a seller-driven platform. Think about it, Amazon will allow a customer to purchase my lighting product and nine very similar products in one transaction. The customer can install all ten products and evaluate them for three weeks before selecting one product to keep and returning the other nine.

I do not think this is any reason to get discouraged, but it does mean that sellers need to come to grips with higher return rates than in typical retail markets. Rant over 

For this lighting product, I set a quality target of 6%. Meaning, the refund rate in dollars should be 6% or less of total revenue.

Revenue = $2,735.81

Refunds = $132.56

Refunds / Revenue = 0.048

Refunds = 5% of Revenue. Check!

Some Amazon sellers prefer to calculate their refund rate in terms of total units refunded versus units sold. That view is easily available by going to Reports >> Business Reports >> Sales and Traffic and then filtering the pivot table with the right-hand column.

Personally, I care more about the financial impact from refunds, which is why I calculate refunded dollars against total revenue. Also, Amazon credits some refund fees back to the seller, which would not be captured doing a units-based refund calculation like the one above in the Sales and Traffic pivot.

Closing Balance

Lastly, confirm the Closing Balance is exactly what is in your bank statement.

Everything appears to be in good shape with this product. All high-level targets were met. This is the bi-weekly financial analysis I do every time Amazon closes a reporting period and issues a payment statement.

Analysis Level 3

The next level of analysis goes much deeper. To get there, we will need to adventure into the raw data reports. There are three primary data reports that I use.

1. Payments Report

This is the line-by-line raw report that generates the bi-weekly Payment Statement we just analyzed. Many Amazon sellers are unaware of this report. Here is how you find it…

Downloading this file will give us a complete record of every single orders transaction that occurred during the reporting period. Call me overly cautious, but I use this report to quickly confirm that the data in the summary is correct. I like to make sure I am getting paid correctly  It is also a great place to catch odd transactions that would otherwise go unnoticed.

The raw file looks like this. Yuck.

Tidy up the data with a few pivot tables and you get a nice breakdown of fees and revenue.

The pivot table catches a strange charge called “Goodwill” for $7.66. It turns out that Amazon probably got an earful from a customer and decided to take responsibility for some mishap. Amazon initially charged me for the activity, but they will credit me back with a miscellaneous adjustment in my next statement. I will keep an eye out for it 

2) Transaction Report

My favorite report can be found here: Reports >> Payments >> Transaction View >> Select Dates >> Download

It offers a cleaner look at every transaction over the selected date range…including promotions! The raw file is pretty hard to work with.

Clean it up into a pivot table and you get a solid breakdown.

This can be a lot of work, but at least we have learned exactly where the money is going and how much Amazon owes me for the reporting period. Are we done with Amazon expenses yet? Nope! Did not see any advertising charges in there?

3) Amazon Pay Per Click Reports

To find your report: Advertising >> Campaign Manager >> See Ad Reports (small button above “Daily Budget”) >> Request Report >> Download

What a beauty…

Go go gadget pivot table…

This report covers a bigger date range than we have been studying (one of the challenges with Seller Central), but you get the point. The report is available and it accurately reflects my advertising spend and sales for this lighting product. There is plenty more data in the report that ought to be analyzed regularly. Pay Per Click lovers will want to check this out.

OKAY! We have torn through all of the necessary Seller Central reports to calculate Amazon revenue and Amazon-specific expenses. We have Amazon Fees, Refunds, Promo Rebates,and PPC spend.

But there is still a lot missing from these reports. Amazon does not factor in the costs to manufacture and ship each unit (Cost of Goods Sold). Additionally, they do not know the other overhead costs required to run my business.

To accurately calculate profitability, I will need to parse together all of the data reports we collected, mix in my Cost of Goods Sold, and add any other overhead costs. This is the hard part.

To make things a little easier, I built a fairly sophisticated Profit Calculator. If you would like a copy, please plug in your email address and I will send it right over.

(SOURCE)

- Was this article helpful for you? Tell us on the comments below!

Selling Shoes through Amazon FBA: Why 

We Added Shoes to Our Sourcing Strategy

By Rebecca Smotherman

Today we’re going to start a three-post series here on the blog, covering our experiences over the past year as we’ve ventured into selling shoes through Amazon FBA. This first post will start off with the reasons we decided to sell shoes, and then in the next two posts we’ll give a summary of the lessons we’ve learned about sourcing shoes through online arbitrage and prepping shoes to send to the FBA warehouse. Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks!

If you’re not familiar with our story as a couple and as business partners, Stephen is the one in our marriage with the business experience, and I (Rebecca) am the one who came into this whole FBA thing with a bit of skepticism. Now that we’ve been working on the business together for a few years, we’ve found areas where I gravitate more than Stephen (check out our post about my experience getting into online arbitrage, for example). It’s been a work-in-progress to get to the point we’re at with our current roles in the business, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve – but for now we’ve found a system of sourcing that we love and is profitable for us.

One key component of our current sourcing strategy for Amazon FBA is selling shoes.We added shoes in the fall of 2015 (about a year ago, at the time of this writing), and after a slow start we are pleased with the difference this category has made in our business and are continually looking for ways to expand our shoe inventory.

Here are the main reasons we decided to add shoes to our FBA sourcing strategy:

1. Shoes gave us an opportunity to diversify our inventory.

Before fall of 2015, our main categories were toys, toys, toys, books, toys, home and kitchen, toys, and a smattering of sports, grocery, and health and beauty. We wanted to find a category where we could consistently source products and diversify our inventory away from being so toy heavy. Don’t get me wrong – we love selling toys and are always super excited when Q4 rolls around. But we wanted to branch out and try something new, and shoes were very appealing for us as a new category for diversification for reasons I’ll get into below.

2. Shoes have a high average selling price.

A relatively high average selling price (ASP) can be a step towards both saving time and increasing profits. Don’t we all want to make more money and spend less time doing it?

Think about it this way: You can sell one widget for $100 or ten widgets for $10 apiece, and you make the same amount in sales, $100. What about the prep and handling time, though? Those ten widgets require ten times the prep work, ten times the labels, ten times the handling to put into a shipping box. The FBA pick-and-pack fees will apply ten times to the $100 of sales. The one $100 widget, however, requires 1/10th of the prep work and only one pick-and-pack fee.

Shoes are a great way to increase the ASP of your FBA inventory. In 2013 and 2014 we sold a lot of $10 or $15 toys. A lot. In 2016, we’ve sold a much lower number of inventory items, but our ASP has gone up considerably because of the number of shoes we’ve sold. In the past three months, our ASP in the shoe category has been $71, while our overall ASP across all categories is now up to $34.

3. Shoes have fewer competitors for sales.

Shoes are a gated category for Amazon sellers, which significantly lowers the number of competitors on any given item. While many low ranking books or toys might typically have 100+ sellers, it’s relatively easy to find low ranking shoes on a regular basis with only a handful of sellers – or even one or none on certain variations.

When we got ungated in shoes, the process still required applying with a flat file and photos, so the number of competitors was even lower than it currently is. Now that automatic approvals are a regular occurrence, the number of sellers in the category has increased somewhat, but not enough for us to be unable to find listings with little or no competition. And even though some shoe sellers bemoan auto-ungating as the end of big profits in shoes, we’ve found that the recent round of brand and ASIN restrictions have further kept the competition at a minimum, and we believe it will continue to do so into the future. (You can watch our YouTube video for more on our optimistic view of the recent brand restrictions.)

4. Shoes provide an opportunity for me to source solely (that pun is for you, Stephen!) via online arbitrage.

I know a lot of people make big profits on shoes doing retail arbitrage, but not me. I tried it and hated it. Hated it. I mean it, seriously, I did not find even one pair of shoes to resell doing RA. Instead, I signed up for a couple of deal lists (Your Sourced Inventory and Gated List) and OAXray, and I’ve stuck with those for the past year. Over the course of that year, I’ve been able to switch from doing part RA/part OA across several categories to doing only OA, mostly in shoes with a handful of other categories. Before I started buying shoes, I couldn’t find enough inventory to buy online in other categories to spend my entire weekly sourcing budget. I would have to also go out and do RA to find enough inventory that fit my sourcing parameters.

Shoes changed everything for me as far as focusing on OA alone. My mileage records for 2015 prove it: I stopped recording mileage for sourcing at exactly the same time I committed to sourcing shoes online. Switching to only OA for shoe sourcing has allowed me to stay home more, put fewer miles on my aging car, and focus on other professional pursuits. Buying shoes through OA truly has allowed our business to make more money and spend less time doing it.

I do have to say, though, I wasn’t so sure at first that we would make shoes a permanent addition to our FBA inventory. After we got ungated in the shoe category, we decided to undertake a two-week experiment of spending the majority of our sourcing budget and time on shoes and then just see what kind of sales we could get before deciding whether or not to continue buying shoes. I’ll talk more in detail in the next post about why making a decision based on this kind of experiment isn’t the best idea when it comes to learning the shoe category, but for now I’ll just say we were less than enthused about the results. We asked a bunch of questions from people who know the ins and outs of the category, and after some soul searching (or sole searching – another pun! OK, I’ll stop) we decided to keep at it.

I’m so glad we did! I was afraid all the hype about shoes was just that…hype. But for us, shoes have lived up to their incredible reputation as an Amazon FBA profit powerhouse.

Shoes aren’t for everyone, and we’ll spend some time over the next couple of posts discussing the ways we’ve run into issues and learned to overcome those obstacles. Our hope is that this series of posts will give you a way to make an informed decision about whether or not to try out the shoe category.

Do you sell shoes on Amazon? Do you have any reasons to add to our list above? Let us hear from you in the comments! We would also love to hear your questions about selling shoes as we continue this blog series over the next couple of weeks.

(SOURCE)

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Top 4 Tips For Creating A Profitable Product Page On Amazon

By The Selling Family

After you have been selling on Amazon for awhile you will most likely come to a point where you need to create a product page on Amazon in order to sell an item.  Whether it is a private label product, new to market retail arbitrage product or even your own unique bundle.  These are all great examples of times when you will want to make your own listing on Amazon.  Bringing these types of product pages to Amazon can be very profitable.  But the key is you have to do them correctly.

There is nothing worse than creating a product page on Amazon and then having it just sit there!  Talk about wasted time, wasted energy and even wasted money on product that is just sitting around not selling.

Over the years that I have been selling on Amazon, I have seen some really bad listings. Ok, truth is, I’ve even created some really bad ones!  I’ve seen (and I’m sure you have too) product pages on amazon that have keyword spammed titles, bullet points that are paragraphs long (they are called bullet POINTS), no product descriptions and even images that leave me simply confused as to what I will receive when I place the order.  

Our main goal here at The Selling Family is to make sure that you are able to succeed and be the MOST profitable possible selling on Amazon.  So, in order to get you started created profitable product pages on Amazon here are my

1.  Creating A Product Title That Answers The Important Questions

What is the first thing that you read on a product page?  The title!  This is the part of a page where someone makes the decision if they even want to continue on and see what this item has to offer.  The title should give the buyer enough information to make a sound choice on purchasing your product.  All the main details should be included.  Brand, Model, Size, Quantity, Colors, Patterns, Etc.  The key is to include the important stuff and leave out the fluff.  Keep it short and sweet.  

Don’t get caught doing this:

2.  Writing Bullet Points That Highlight The Best Parts Of Your Item

The bullet points are the second place on a listing that someone is going to read.  They should know right away after reading the bullet points if the product you are offering has what they are looking for or not.  Your bullet points should highlight the major features of your item.  We want to answer their questions before they even think of them.  This is just leading the buyer through the final process of deciding to purchase your product.

Does this make you feel like this is an awesome product to purchase?

3. Product Descriptions Help The Buyer Know How They Will FEEL 

So you have gotten the buyer this far.  Now, it’s time to close the deal.  Use this section to write about how the buyer will feel or what they will experience when they purchase your product.  If you have any last details that you need to share or important facts about the company or product, this is where they should go.  

4. Keywords And Search Terms Are What BRING YOU The Buyers

Keywords and Search Terms are a very misunderstood aspect of creating product listings on Amazon.  This is why we end up with spammy titles and products showing up in irrelevant searches.  Sellers are just dumping every keyword they can think of in the search terms, whether they fit or not.  Plus they think that if the title has a bunch of keywords in it, they will show up first in results.  NOT THE CASE.  

Keywords should be positioned neatly throughout your listing in appropriate places.  Your title should not have extra words just to get keywords included.  The search terms are where you get those extra keywords that are relevant to your Amazon product page.

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Overall there are 8 key elements to making a profitable product page on Amazon.  If you would like step by step instructions on creating your own product listings check out our Profitable Pages video course.

(SOURCE)

- I definitely agree that a good product page does wonders for sales. How about you?