Transcript
Emily:
With 200 million Prime members and counting, the Amazon marketplace is a critical piece of many brands' ecommerce strategies. Shopping on the platform is fast and self explanatory. Getting a foothold as a seller, not so much.
Larry:
Hi. I'm Sales Factory Ecomm Supervisor Larry.
Emily:
And I'm Emily, VP of Digital & Ecommerce.
Larry:
And this is our wheel of Amazon questions.
Emily:
We've compiled some of our partners best and most frequently asked Amazon inquiries, and we're letting fate decide which ones we tackle today.
Larry:
Let's see what we learn when we take the wheel for a spin.
Larry:
All right, give her a spin. Strategy. All right. What fulfillment model should I use?
Emily:
That's a great question. This does depend if you're a vendor or a seller. If you're a seller, you basically have two fulfillment options. There's FBA and FBM. The basic concept here is FBM, is you fulfill it yourself. So that's utilizing your drop-ship partner or whatever system you may have at your point of manufacturing. And then FBA is fulfilled by Amazon.
Emily:
We've actually found for a lot of our partners that going FBA is actually cheaper than FBM. So that would be one of the tips that I might give a potential new seller is that you may think that your fulfillment process, you already have great shipping discounts, but definitely think it's worth the time to explore FBA as an option just to see if it might be cheaper for you in the long run.
Larry:
Also consider the ever important Amazon Prime badge, almost exclusively available to people who fulfill with FBA.
Larry:
All right.
Emily:
Larry, how much should I spend on Amazon advertising?
Larry:
This is a really tough one, but the answer's usually yielded through category analysis. We'll do a deep dive to look at the category as a whole, competitors and products that are winning, and try to come up with a game plan based on the numbers we're seeing in the category at that time. Looking at things like seasonality and how saturated the market is. There are so many factors. We can't just give you a number outright, but we know the right questions and the right places to look.
Emily:
What are my options for Amazon advertising?
Larry:
There are two main buckets of Amazon advertising; traditional PPC, which is just known as Amazon ads. That is what almost everybody enters into the Amazon advertising space has. There's no limit to spend and there's no minimum to spend, but it's a good way to get your feet wet and understand how the platform works and start testing out categories.
Larry:
Once you get over the hump and you feel like you're ready for a larger investment, you can talk about Amazon DSP, which is their demand-side platform. Think about it as sort of the next level of Amazon advertising where you're competing with much larger budgets.
Emily:
The cool thing about DSP is that it is not just on platform on Amazon, it's also off platform. So it gives you the opportunity to advertise your Amazon listings on other websites.
Larry:
Can I dispute a bad or unfair review?
Emily:
I'm going to throw that to you.
Larry:
You cannot, but in the case that the reviewer violates an Amazon policy, you can request it to be taken down. Otherwise, if it's just an authentic opinion, no, you can't dispute it. So that makes it critical at the onset of your listing to be created, you try to think about what people are going to criticize your product for doing or not doing well so that you don't get those types of negative reviews.
Emily:
All right, next one.
Larry:
How do I price my product competitively?
Emily:
Yeah, so Larry has already touched on doing a category analysis. This is another great use case for a category analysis. Understanding what exists out in the marketplace and what those things are priced at will definitely help you to understand where to price your product. Also, we can't just focus on Amazon. The Buy Box on Amazon does go out and look at other retailer websites, and if your price on Amazon is higher than let's say walmart.com, you may lose the Buy Box and you'll definitely lose your ability to advertise on Amazon.
Emily:
So we want to make sure, yes, we look at the ecosystem on Amazon so that we're competitive across the marketplace, but we also want to look at our products across other retail websites.
Larry:
Good answer.
Larry:
All right. How do I get reviews on Amazon as a new seller?
Emily:
The number one thing is to use Amazon Vine. So Vine Voices is a program of, essentially it's a pool of reviewers that Amazon trusts that you offer up free product to them, and in turn they are asked to put up a review. Now, there is nothing that requires them to put a review up, but we see about an 85 to 90% review posting rate based on the free product that we give away, and that's a really great way to jumpstart the reviews on your listing.
Emily:
The other thing that you should be utilizing as a seller is the request to review button. This is a really an unknown tool that sellers have on Amazon. It does take some manual work. You have to go into your orders and actually hit request to review, but you could just set a calendar reminder once a week and just go through and press all those request to review, and you don't know what you might get back from that.
Emily:
How can I transfer administrative control of my Seller Central account?
Larry:
This is a tricky one because until recently, this was nearly impossible, but Amazon's updated some policies, and now if you have access through the original administrative account used to set up the seller account or vendor account in the first place, now there is a function to transfer ownership over. I wouldn't recommend you go into that lightly though, because that's a permanent change. If you have the opportunity to change it, make sure you have all your ducks in a row before you go and do that.
Emily:
All right. Do I need a brand store?
Larry:
You do not, but we highly recommend it. It's an extremely powerful way to promote your brand and lean into what I think is a really underutilized aspect of Amazon, which is education. Amazon provides a great opportunity for you to teach your consumers why your product is better than the competitors, and the brand store is the best way to utilize that educational aspect.
Emily:
Another hidden advantage of a brand store is actually Amazon attribution. Let's say you set up an ad on Facebook, you can actually go through the brand store and set up a little attribution link. As long as the traffic on that Facebook ad is driving to the brand store, you can actually attribute all the way from that Facebook ad to a sale on Amazon. This is a hidden trick that Amazon doesn't necessarily put out to the whole world, but that's definitely a hidden benefit of the brand store.
Emily:
All right. Is there anything I can't sell on Amazon?
Larry:
Yes, there are lots of things you cannot sell on Amazon. Weapons, for example, specifically firearms. You can't sell drugs or drug paraphernalia, and certain adult content is not permitted. There's a whole list that we can get you if you want to know more, but yeah, a lot of things you can't sell on Amazon.
Emily:
All right, our last one. How do I sell internationally?
Larry:
Amazon recently changed some stuff back in July. If you're selling in North America in any of the marketplaces, Mexico, United States, Canada, you're already selling in all three. So if I'm selling in the United States, my products are being offered in Mexico and Canada automatically.
Larry:
Now, to get to any of the other marketplaces, it requires a simple application, but Amazon also recently rolled out another tool called the BIL, or B-I-L, which is Build International Listings. It takes your products that already exist on Amazon and will translate them over to whatever language the country that you're now setting up a marketplace listing in. While there's a few other regulatory steps to get through, the big stuff, which is typically surrounding content, is much more streamlined now, and that's another thing we can help you with.
Larry:
Well, we're out of time for today, but let's keep that wheel spinning with more questions to come.
Emily:
We're here for you at all phases of your Amazon journey, so let us know what's on your mind.
Larry:
And we want to learn more about how we can be an e-commerce partner for you, so leave us a comment or send us an email.
Emily:
Until next time.
Larry:
No MEs.