My Amazon Guy | Seller Consulting for Brands and Manufactures Selling on Amazon
Growing Your Amazon Sales
Adam Hesit is one of the most respected thought leaders in the Amazon selling space. Steven Pope has become increasingly close Amazon friends with Adam and in this video we detail how we helped Adam change his brand name and save a $700,000 brand from major legal challenges.
0:00 PROLOGUE
0:26 NIGHTMARE LEGAL SCENARIO
3:39 STATE OF BRAND NAME CHANGES
7:19 REASONS TO CHANGE A BRAND NAME
11:20 AMAZON TICKETING PROCESS
21:10 JOB OPPORTUNITIES
23:58 MAG SERVICES
At this link you can find the Google sheet which you can download and make a copy to use however you like.
Article written by: Cynthia Miller
Editorial Recommendations are designed to help consumers make informed decisions. Consumers, publishers and Amazon are all incentivized to ensure that the items mentioned are worthy of recommendation, and relevant to the search term provided. The easiest way to select products that meet this criteria is to look at the Best Seller Ranking (BSR) of each item, and whether they are organically ranking for the given search term.
This is great news for sellers whose products are already well reviewed and maintaining a high Best Seller Ranking. But what about newer products, or those that have been stuck on the second or third page of SERP? How can Editorial Recommendations work for products that are not already dominating their category? Expanding your focus from the onsite recommendation to a larger, omnichannel affiliate and editorial perspective is the way to harness the full power of this ecosystem.
Every seller wants to appear on the first SERP for their category, on the keywords with the most search volume. But real estate on that page is limited, and Amazon is carefully monitoring every pixel to ensure that revenue is maximized. An Editorial Recommendation (ER) that surfaces for “queen sheets”, has to perform well, or Amazon will not show it to customers.
Performance for Editorial Recommendations is measured by the purchases they drive. If customers click on articles, read each word and click on each item, but ultimately don’t purchase, the ER is not helping to drive sales, and is therefore not performing for Amazon. The ER must drive sales. To drive sales on a search term like “sheets”, the items mentioned in the ER must be very popular, and appeal to as many people as possible. The best way to choose items for such a short-tail keyword is to choose items that already rank on that 1st SERP.
Therefore, sellers that want to be noticed by publishers, and included in these articles, need a two-pronged approach. A mid-tail strategy to get their foot in the door with Editorial Recommendations, and an external affiliate strategy, to drive traffic to the pdp from external publishers whose affiliate links signal to Amazon that this is a product worthy of the 1st page.
Expanding the focus from editorial mentions inside of Amazon, the up-and-coming seller needs to access the massive scale of affiliate publishing being done by the biggest players in media. These publishers are huge, unlike individual influencers, and have trusted websites, email lists, social media presences and even push notifications. They are recommending lots of products, and their traffic is highly valued by Amazon. Traffic from these sources can help boost an item quickly from the 3rd page to the 1st.
So how can a product on the second or third SERP compete with an Editorial Recommendation? By targeting lower search-volume keywords. With a less competitive keyword, the ER has a better chance of rendering in the first place. Although there are fewer searches, the searches are more specialized, and the products recommended are more likely to be salient to the customer. So, a search for “twin sheets for girls” rendering an article full of twin-sized sheets with children’s prints will be more relevant.
Sellers can look for these mid-tail keywords in their own data. We can help identify those keywords that have moderate search volume, but also aren’t already covered by ERs with the highest BSR products. Each ER impression builds brand awareness, and each ER driven sale drives improvements in BSR.
Once the item is more competitive, the product’s organic listing should start to rise to the first SERP for the more generic or short-tail keywords for their category. Once this starts to happen, an ER featuring the product and targeting those short-tail keywords can start to gain share of voice. Once the product is organically appearing on the first SERP, and ER is rendering, the seller can optimize their sponsored posts to maximize their presence on that page.
If you are interested in learning more about editorial recommendations, reach out to hello@hbwcommerce.com with the code “MyAmazonGuy” to receive 20% your 1st month’s invoice.
Article written by: Maxi Gampl
Like our society, our economy is in a constant state of change. This affects governments as much as corporate and business owners. Special times like the current pandemic are accelerating digitization processes and strengthening e-commerce over local commerce. We monitor the market and tell you what’s changing and what new trends this means for your business.
In times of social distancing, mandatory masks and the risk of contagion, many Americans are giving up shopping in the city – but not shopping per se. Rather, they continue to consume, just online. Even before the pandemic, e-commerce was growing steadily, but COVID-19 has now accelerated that process. In the third quarter of 2020, e-commerce accounted for nearly 20% of total retail sales in the US.
The big beneficiaries are currently the retailers who are represented online. Those who only operate a local business but do not offer their products online are currently facing major challenges. If it hasn’t been relevant to be represented online recently anyway: now at the latest, retailers should get their online strategy right and discover e-commerce for themselves. E-commerce will continue to grow.
Setting up an online store is easier than ever these days: there are a wide variety of store software that enable even non-professionals to start their own e-commerce business in a short time.
But an online store alone is often not enough. In particular, brick-and-mortar retailers who now want to take off online face challenges when it comes to processing sales. Ideally, an enterprise resource planning system should be established or expanded to handle both online and in-store sales – as well as sales that were generated online, for example, but are collected in-store. Both the employee in the store and the online store must be able to see at any time which products are still in stock and how often.
As of January 1, 2021, United Kingdom has left the EU Single Market and Customs Union. With this date, many dealers in the US will need to be registered for VAT in the United Kingdom.
Otherwise, the packages will already be intercepted at customs and can no longer be delivered to buyers in the United Kingdom. If you sell products there, you should check accordingly.
In the U.S., there are only two states with a general sales tax – namely Florida and Missouri – that do not tax online sales by out-of-state sellers through economic nexus.
2021 will possibly be the year in which various states, such as the aforementioned Florida and Missouri, but also Kansas, will no longer hold sellers or dealers responsible for paying sales tax on third-party sales, but rather the operators of the platforms, such as Amazon or eBay. After all, it is often the platforms that store the sellers’ goods in their own warehouses like Amazon for example, and ship them from there. States such as Washington or California therefore hold the platforms liable for sales tax arrears.
It is expected that other states may soon follow suit with such a regulation.
Due to the stringent requirements for sellers to be taxed on remote sales, many states have still been lenient in tracking unregistered sellers. However, as three years have now passed since the law went into effect in 2018, states’ patience is wearing thin and they are beginning to track down unregistered out-of-state sellers.
For traders, this means that it is now necessary to catch up on the corresponding registrations and to pay the tax on distance sales with immediate effect in order to be safe from possible penalties.
As a new form of commerce took over the market with e-commerce, this naturally had an impact on tax and even today there are regular changes to tax laws to accommodate the progress of e-commerce.
We could see a similar development in the future with virtual events. These have been around for a while, but COVID-19 has made them enormously popular, making them attractive to the tax authorities. We expect the first tax changes here in the near future.
Companies in the manufacturing and production of goods have often worked with middlemen who eventually sold their goods in their stores. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying reduction in face-to-face contact and shopping experiences in the city, manufacturers and productions are now rethinking their distribution activities.
Thus, online sales are becoming more and more attractive in current times, making direct sales an easy way to sell products directly with a larger margin – which in turn has tax relevance for businesses.
The year 2021 will be dominated significantly by the COVID 19 pandemic and will have an impact on the work of many companies, which will have to rethink previous processes and revise their business models. This, of course, has fiscal implications for businesses and accelerates the growth of e-commerce. Individual states are monitoring these developments and responding with appropriate tax changes.
Have you filed your brand registry but your store is not showing up on your Seller Central account?
2. After you enter the Store Page, select the store that you wish to locate the Entity ID for by clicking on the “Edit Store” button:
3. Once you enter the store that you need the ID for, look at the top of the screen. The link displayed at the top will have the Entity ID embedded into the link, usually the set of numbers and letters following “EntityID=ENTITY.”
4.
After you’ve copied the Entity ID, you can use it to directly identify the storefront that you need Amazon to fix.
Entity IDs are used to identify the Brand store and are ideal for letting Amazon identify which Brand they need to fix with your Brand Case issues.
For example, if there is an issue with a Brand Store not connecting with the Brand Store link, you can add the entity ID link to the case.
This will help Amazon get to your cases faster, and therefore solve the issues faster and with less confusion from Amazon.
5. Fill this form out with the email address to add such as email @ myamazonguy.com and all of your brand/s to register.
6. Hit send
Recent UI changes in November in 2020 require you to file tickets through Brand Registry to get basic changes like a title, bullets, or category change made.
To Setup a One Time Password on Seller Central:
1. Log into Seller Central
2. Click Settings / Login Settings
3. Add mobile authenticator app
4. Scan QR code
5. Enter Code, done!
Google Authenticator Download Link:
3. Click Edit on 2-step verification settings
4. Hit “Add new app”
5. Pass the OTP code
6. Download Google Authenticator App
7. Scan QR code and enter code Google Authenticator Download Link:
The post was written by guest writer Drew Estes. Drew is a copywriter and digital marketer at Massview.
If you’ve spent any time learning how to sell on Amazon, you know this much: to earn significant organic sales, you need to show up on the first page of search results. And to show up on the first page of search results, you need to generate sales and get tons of product reviews.
Without a solid review count, shoppers won’t trust you enough to buy your product. So how do you get those initial reviews?
The video above covers four key ways to increase your Amazon review count:
This is what each strategy entails:
If your product has fewer than five reviews, this is a no-brainer. Sign up through the Advertising section of your Seller Central account, enrolling any products with a low review count. Amazon will incentivize customers (with gift cards, for instance) to leave reviews after purchase.
This is an easy way to get those first few reviews, so long as you’re getting full-priced sales. The cost and effort are minimal for a great payoff, so you’ll want to try it for any new product. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last long, and you’ll soon need another strategy.
Amazon Vine is similar to the Early Reviewer program in some respects but can be much more effective. To simplify a bit, it works like this: Amazon has a group of top reviewers called Vine Voices. You give them a free sample of your product, and they write a review. Unlike other methods, this means you don’t even need to make initial sales.
Vine is free for now (aside from the cost of the product you send them), but this is subject to change. So far, the only cost is the product you provide to the Vine Voices. It’s a great program, but there are a couple of catches.
First, Amazon Vine is invite-only. Go to your Amazon Seller Central account and click on Advertising. Unfortunately, if you don’t see Vine, you’re not invited. Some people have been able to call Seller Support and get on the list, but not often. To make sure you’re eligible, you should register your brand on Amazon.
The second catch is that Vine won’t be available once you have 30 reviews or more. This is a much larger maximum than the Early Reviewer program, but it’s still not huge.
Overall, the Amazon Vine program is a must, if you have access. With some exceptions, it practically guarantees reviews. You’ll likely have Amazon’s best, most-trusted reviewers, leaving feedback for your product.
What’s the simplest way to get a review from a customer? Ask them for one.
You used to be able to just send an email, but Amazon now allows buyers to opt-out of receiving non-essential seller emails. This has led to a big drop in review rates.
However, there’s still hope: you can click the Request Review button inside Amazon Seller Central. For every sale, you simply click the button and let Amazon message the buyer to ask them to review your product. Amazon has optimized this messaging to maximize reviews.
Clicking the button is no big hassle in the beginning, but as your sales grow, thousands of sales mean thousands of clicks. A good problem to have, sure, but tedious nonetheless. Massview users get access to the Monocle Chrome extension, which allows sellers to automate review requests and avoid the hassle. In our tests, the Massview team found we received 3x more organic reviews when using this feature.
When automating your review requests, you can set a delay between product delivery and when the customer receives the request. Be sure to wait an appropriate amount of time after product delivery (Amazon allows a range of 4 to 30 days), so your customers have the chance to use the product a bit before they receive the review request.
What if you’re not getting as many sales as you want? You need sales to get more reviews, and you can’t buy reviews.
This is where rebates come in. You can’t require shoppers to leave reviews, but with third-party seller tools like Snagshout or Masschat, you can offer cashback to increase sales and get a higher review rate in the process – all while staying compliant with Amazon’s Terms of Service.
These review programs earn a solid 20-30 percent review rate and have a minimal cost (the amount of cashback you pay the customer, plus a small fee of about a dollar per deal).
Rebates still count as a full-priced sale, meaning your reviews still get the Verified Review badge. This setup boosts your Amazon Seller Ranking and launches your product toward Page One search results.
The downside of this method is the higher relative cost per sale. You’re sometimes selling products at a loss in order to boost your sales velocity and review count.
However, when you can maintain the minimum number of sales per day to make Page One, customers will start finding your product on their own, and your organic sales will increase until you no longer need to offer rebates.
To learn the minimum daily sales you need to put your product on page one for your keywords, try out Massview’s Free Plan.
Massview offers a full suite of tools for Amazon merchants at every level of experience and budget. These include:
Try Massview risk-free today. All paid plans come with a 7-day Free Trial.
Generating reviews on Amazon has always been tough. With most review generating strategies there is no way to tell if a customer is going to leave a positive or negative review. The solution is to target repeat customers.
Our strategy is to comb through each of the orders and find the repeat customers who are more likely to leave a positive review and specifically reaching out to them. Amazon has a relatively new feature where you can request a review from customers and they will send out an official email from Amazon asking the customer to leave a review.
You can also set up an Automated Review Request email campaign from a third party service to send these requests out for you. There are several different tools to choose from. We recommend Feedback Whiz as they have the functionality to specifically target repeat customers. You can create an email template that can be sent to all of your loyal customers asking them to leave a review. It is a great set and forget tool that will save you time and a lot of effort.
Depending on your sales volume one methodology might be preferable. When you are just starting off you might not need a third party tool for this strategy. But once sales start to grow, you’re going to have to find a tool to handle customer review requests.
When a customer wants to return an item, Amazon will send them a return label. This label, however, does not have any order identification and not all customers provide a packing slip with the information. It then becomes quite difficult to determine which order the item came from for your records. Luckily, there is a way to find this information on Seller Central.
Each return label provided by Amazon has an identification number called an Amazon RMA ID. This is the number that Amazon assigns to the return for their own identification. Using this RMA ID, you can find the original order ID that is linked to it by cross-referencing the RMA ID with the Returns Report. On Seller Central under Reports, you can access the Returns Reports for both FBA and MFN orders. Download the MFN returns report and you will see a column labeled “Amazon RMA ID”. Simply search for the RMA ID from the return and you will be able to find the corresponding order ID in column A.