Month: March 2021

Selling Globally

During this seemingly never-ending Covid19 pandemic people around the world are turning to online shopping. If you are focused purely on Amazon.com and the American market you are missing out on the huge opportunity of selling globally, the likes of which we have not seen in eCommerce since the early days of online shopping.

How big?

Europe is the second largest economy (based on GDP) in the world, and with just a few clicks Amazon lets you access that marketplace. In this article we are going to cover some of the reasons why you should be selling globally and some top tips on how to go about doing it.

First: Why?

Profits

eCommerce reports predict non-US shopping trends to have a 5x increase in the next 5 years. With the right budget, product, and optimization, you can successfully launch a product and get your slice of the pie.

Ease of Selling

Amazon provides FBA in all of the world’s major marketplaces. Selling in Germany (or Japan or Australia) is no more difficult than selling in the US – ship your products to an FBA warehouse and let Amazon do the rest.

Build International Listing (BIL) Tool

As if FBA didn’t make it easy enough, Amazon also offers the BIL tool. BIL allows you to manage offers for multiple marketplaces all from one main marketplace. Once you make changes to your offers, BIL automatically scans for qualifying listings in other markets and updates them for you. It is designed to save you time and money, as you don’t need to update each individual market separately.

The Tips

If you are now motivated to give international selling a try, let’s look at some top tips for a successful launch.

1. Find The Right Product

Not every product translates well to a new marketplace. Investigate marketplaces just like you did when you chose your first Amazon.com products. Look at what sells, what reviews say and what fits your budget.

Don’t forget to do keyword research in the marketplace as well!

2. Find The Right Supplier

Every market has its own special needs when it comes to product manufacturing. On top of that, different suppliers have different understandings of local packing/product requirements. That means you need to find a reliable product supplier capable of manufacturing to your specific requirements.

3. Hire A Local

Perhaps it goes without saying, but, if you are putting a listing on Amazon Japan you need to have your listing in Japanese. Or German for Germany, Italian for Italy, etc etc.

Despite advances in machine translation, do not be tempted to simply translate your English listing using Google Translate and post it. First of all, the translation will be horrible (sorry Google!). Second, it is not just the words, it is the meaning. Different cultures will want to focus on different aspects and the best way to bridge this gap is to hire a native speaker of the your target language and someone who lives in the target country. A freelancer can even help you identify unique cultural pain points you didn’t think of.

4. Use Single Sign On (SSO)

It’s easy to get tangled up with numerous seller accounts spread over different regions. SSO eliminates that problem by providing you with one spot to sign-on, using only one username/password. From there, you can choose which marketplace you want to look at. 

SSO currently supports the following markets: North America, Europe, Japan and India. In order to do this, you must:

1. Sign into your Seller Central account.
2. Link your seller accounts by going to the Inventory tab, and clicking on “Sell Globally.”
3. If you have an eligible seller account, it will appear here along with a “Link Accounts” button. Select which account you want to connect, and click it.
4. If you do not have any eligible seller accounts, Amazon will give you the option of creating one and then linking it.

5. Use The BIL Tool For One-Stop Listings Management

As mentioned previously, Amazon’s BIL lets you manage multiple listings from one marketplace. You simply link the parent from your existing marketplace to the listing in your target marketplace. BIL will then go and automatically edit the child listings for you, as long as they actually exist. 

For access to BIL you need the following:

• Have a Professional Seller account in good standing.
• Operate linked accounts between regions.
• Run a North American and/or European Unified account if you intend on selling in either places.

You should be aware that even using BIL you need to:

• Manage inventory levels for marketplaces
• Ensure your product meets local regulations for packaging.
• You must manually remove listings in the individual marketplaces if you wish to suspend them.

6. Choose Your Fulfillment Type

For selling Amazon products from the USA to the UK, you have to take a deep look at your business’ needs. There are multiple ways to sell within the EU market. Here are the options:

• European Fulfillment Network (EFN) is tailored towards less experienced sellers. In this type, Amazon covers all of your logistical needs. You ship all your items to one warehouse, and Amazon takes care of shipping them across borders in exchange for a fee.
• Pan-European Fulfillment (PEF) is for sellers who deal with large volumes of products. You ship everything to Amazon and they store it in a warehouse closest to where they predict the most customers will buy it. You do not pay any fees for shipping across borders.
• Multi Country Inventory (MCI) lets sellers choose which country they want to ship their product to. They can divide things up as they see fit, with a maximum of 5 countries allowed. 

7. Look Into FBA Export

FBA Export is slightly different – it lets you ship internationally from a single location. Under this option, Amazon stores everything in one US warehouse and ships products to international buyers for you. 

The benefit of FBA Export is that anyone, anywhere who has access to Amazon can buy from you. With over 60 countries all purchasing from your market, there’s a lot of growth potential. 

8. Use Zonmaster

Of course, Zonmaster lets you manage all your customer contacts and review management (and more!) regardless of what or how many marketplaces you sell in around the world. Zonmaster supports ALL Amazon marketplaces, from Europe to North America to Australia to Asia. All in a single Zonmaster account – yes, even the ones starting at $6.99 a month!

Start your free trial today! We have some exciting new features coming soon that will change the way you work!

It’s an interesting dilemma. Amazon has one page per product/ASIN. But there may be multiple sellers offering the same product. How to choose who is the ‘highlighted’ seller?

The ‘highlight’ is called the buy box, and the highlighted seller is known as ‘winning the buy box’. Winning the buy box has a HUGE impact on sales. Over 90% of purchases on Amazon are made through the buy box.

In this article we’ll take an in-depth look at the buy box and what you can do to win it.

How Does Amazon Pick The Winner?

Amazon uses AI to model what it thinks a user would do to choose a top buyer for a product. It does this by asking a series of questions.

• Which offer has the best price?
• Which offers are in stock and are Prime?
• Which ships the fastest?
• Does the seller have positive feedback and reviews?
• Does the seller have enough stock to fufill the entire purchase?

It therefore goes without saying that you need to pay attention to these factors (and more) to win the box. We have another article about account health that can help.

Being Eligible for the Buy Box

To be eligible for the buy box you must have an account in good-standing Professional Seller account (if you aren’t a pro-seller then you can only win no-competition buy boxes).

If you’re a Professional seller, you can determine if individual items are eligible for the Buy Box by going to Manage Inventory in Seller Central, clicking Preferences, and selecting Buy Box Eligible in order to display eligibility in the Manage Inventory grid. 

What Steps Can You Take To Increase Your Chances of Winning the Buy Box?

Competitively Price Your Listings

Price is an important factor in winning the buy box – but it is not always about the lowest price! As stated above, price is just one factor in Amazon’s decision making process.

You should investigate Automated Pricing to help you in this area. Amazon has their own Automated Pricing Tool inside of Seller Central and there are also third-party companies that offer a similar service.

Seller Central offers a very lightweight repricing solution for sellers just starting out with repricing. Its Buy Box rule lets you price below the current Buy Box winner by any amount that you set. This works well if you are a smaller seller who has consistent competition and you know how much you have to beat them by in order to capture the Buy Box. 

Third-party rule-based pricing works in much the same way but typically gives you more options to choose from. You’ll often be able to change how you compete based on the competition’s fulfillment type or ratings, what to do when you’re the only seller for a product, and how to react when a product isn’t eligible for the Buy Box. 

Faster and or Free Shipping

We covered this extensively in another article, but, to summarize:

Fast – and ideally free – shipping increases conversions, average order value (AOV), marketplace benefits and customer loyalty.

The easiest way to offer great shipping options is to be use Amazon’s own FBA service. Being part of Amazon Prime also helps!

Focus On Customer Service

Amazon measures Customer service in a variety of ways, including (but not only)

• Negative Feedback (note: not Product Reviews, but Seller Feedback)
• A-to-Z Guarantee Claims
• Credit Card Chargebacks

In Amazon-speak this is know as the Order Defect Rate.

You have to keep this under 1%. Over 1% and you risk account deactivation! Monitor your Seller Feedback and Product Reviews using Zonmaster to stay on top of this.

For the buy box specifically, keep your Cancellation Rate below 2.5%. And if you have decided to not use FBA, make sure your Late Shipment Rate is below 4%.

Keep Inventory Levels

Check your inventory levels to make sure you can fulfill orders. You can do this with either the Amazon Selling Coach or even inside of Zonmaster – where we are looking to launch inventory alerts in the near future!

There’s Not Always A Winner

In extreme cases, Amazon might remove the buy box from a listing page – even if there are sellers offering the item with it in stock. If you ever see that (as a buyer) you know that none of those sellers are what Amazon considers good! Don’t fall into this trap!

With an overwhelming percentage of sales happening through the Buy Box because of its prime page real estate and easy checkout flow, it should be one of the primary metrics you track for the health of your Amazon account. If you have the margin to play around with prices and you can use an automated repricer, you are going to have a leg up on the competition. But if you don’t, remember that there are many other factors at play in earning that coveted spot. Putting effort into improving all of them will go a long way towards securing your share of Buy Box wins.

Back in the heady days before Covid19 (remember them?), if you were serious about sourcing products from China or other Asian countries you would have got on a plane and gone to one of the major trade fairs in China or Singapore designed to help you connect.

Now that getting on a plane for 18 hours has lost its appeal, let’s look at other ways you can connect with reputable sellers in Asia.

Alibaba

The behemoth in the market is of course Alibaba. Formed in 1999 by Jack Ma and friends from his apartment in Hangzhou, Alibaba has rocketed up to a valuation of over $75 Billion (yes, with a B). Alibaba, unlike other sites like eBay and so on, was built from the ground up to be a B2B (business to business) connector site. It is the biggest database of Chinese factories on earth.

But, it is not JUST Chinese factories. You can filter on location, and often non-Chinese suppliers will be better priced and more hungry for your contract. Of course, quality varies from supplier to supplier (you should always get a sample), but multi-million dollar businesses have been built on little more than a search on Alibaba.

GlobalSources.com

A rival to Alibaba, GlobalSources.com also has an impressive database of Chinese and Asian suppliers. Some suppliers ONLY list here (citing better rates than Alibaba), so it is definitely worth adding this to your list of places to check when you want to find interesting products to sell on Amazon, or a factory partner to develop your own idea.

HKTDC (Hong Kong Trade Development Council)

HKTDC have a great website that includes a section on sourcing suppliers and partners. This is often overlooked by the beginner, but the site has a lot of resources that are worth reading to become familiar with the region and the marketplace.

They also have a great list of upcoming events, both in Hong Kong and internationally. Sign up for their newsletter to get updates.

Industry Newsletters

Every industry and sector has a governing body, or more than one, and many of these produce online newsletters or have a mailing list where they talk about industry news. If you are, for example, interested in producing or sourcing toys then you could look at something like the ‘China Toy & Juvenile Products Association’ and sign up for their mailings.

Again, treat this as what it is – your business. Becoming familiar with the industry and the community around not the consumers but the manufacturers will give you great insight into the process.

Trade Shows

Even though many trade shows are now on hold due to the pandemic, many of them still have websites or hold online versions of the show. There are general trade fairs, industry specific trade fairs and also trade fairs aimed directly at helping you find a supplier that is Amazon-friendly!

Some to look at are:

• the famous Canton Trade Fair (officially call the China Import and Export Fair)
• the Jinhan Fair for Arts, Crafts and indoor and outdoor decor
• China International Toy Fair (aka China Toy Expo) – toys!
• Speilwarenmesse (Nurenberg Toy Fair in Germany)

The list is pretty much endless!

Agents

There are agents who can help you find suppliers. Often they are American companies with Chinese offices (or Chinese companies with American offices!) and have good contacts with local Chinese suppliers.

Definitely be wary here and do test runs before any big purchases. Also once you settle on an agent, ask around to see what others say.

Importer Databases

This used to be an expensive option, with companies like Zepol charging thousands to get a look into their database. But with companies like ImportGenius coming online the price of admission has dropped dramatically.

Definitely worth a look at if you want to see who is bringing what into the US.

Buyer Services

Many of the major sourcing websites also offer a companion buyer service that will look for local Chinese suppliers and factories that match the criteria you supply. Often this is a good, cheap alternative that can be done in parallel – without obligation – with your own sourcing and research

Are you an Amazon seller aiming to amp up your eCommerce game? Do you want to win more customers and skyrocket your sales? If your answer is a resounding yes, then you’re in the right place. Welcome to our comprehensive “Amazon Seller Guide to Fast Shipping.” Let’s dive into the exciting world of 2-day delivery and explore how this game-changing strategy can drive your business growth.

Why Amazon Sellers Need Fast Shipping

Embrace fast shipping, and you’re not just appeasing your customers’ need for speedy gratification. You’re engaging in a strategic move that ramps up vital business metrics. We’re focusing on four main points: soaring conversions, increasing average order value (AOV), reaping marketplace benefits, and establishing unwavering customer loyalty.

Supercharging Customer Conversions

Customers are drawn to fast shipping like bees to honey. It offers them a VIP experience and satisfies their desire for instant gratification. By offering speedy, free shipping, you can increase your conversion rates by up to a whopping 300%!

Elevating Average Order Value (AOV)

When you offer fast, free shipping above a certain spend, customers are motivated to pile more items into their carts. The prospect of free shipping encourages them to spend more, and that’s great news for your bottom line.

Benefitting from Marketplace Rewards

As an Amazon seller, fast and free shipping can boost your standing in two key areas: Organic Search and the Buy Box. Remember, Amazon appreciates sellers who drive sales, and your reward is improved ranking.

Solidifying Customer Loyalty

A term coined by Jeff Bezos, ‘The Flywheel Effect,’ describes a positive cycle of customer return prompted by a great experience. Offering services like 2-day delivery motivates this cycle, encouraging people to buy from you repeatedly, especially for consumable goods.

How Amazon Sellers Can Provide 2-Day Shipping

There are three fundamental methods: Merchant fulfilled, Marketplace fulfilled (FBA), and Third-party fulfilled.

Merchant Fulfilled

Using this method, you will use your own resources to manage, pack, and dispatch your orders. While it offers control and potential marketplace fast tags, it requires ample space and involves bearing all fulfillment costs.

Marketplace Fulfillment (FBA)

While FBA can be a simple option, it comes with potential challenges of unreliability and higher costs. On the bright side, shipping fees can be lower, and the benefit of being part of Amazon Prime could significantly boost your sales.

Third-Party Fulfillment

This method involves delegating your entire fulfillment process to a fulfillment service. While it might incur higher costs and potential scalability issues, it can be beneficial if you’re selling on multiple platforms like Walmart or eBay.

To handle all of this without losing your sanity, consider joining Zonmaster. As a part of our community, you can effortlessly master the Amazon selling scene and boost your business performance.

Join Zonmaster Today and unlock the full potential of fast shipping on Amazon!

Without a doubt, good use of Amazon PPC advertising can boost both sales and organic ranking. This can make a huge difference – if done right.

In this article let’s take a look at some top tips on boosting your Amazon Pay Per Click results.

Use Auto Campaign

Amazon makes entering the PPC space relatively painless by having an automatic PPC campaign generator, where they will suggest the best keywords to use for your product. If you already have keywords on your listing’s back end search terms Amazon will include those, but they will also supply what might be some surprising suggestions!

Start With Small Bids

Regardless of whether you use an automatic PPC campaign or roll your own, start with a low bid of 50¢ per keyword. This gives you a good starting point to monitor performance. Gradually increase your bids by 10¢ or so each week, monitoring the changes.

Smaller bids mean bigger profits (it’s better to spend 50¢ on getting a sale than $3!), and you might not need to throw away the extra money.

Research Those Keywords

We’ve got another article on here about keywords where we talk about how to find them. Using the tools mentioned should get you a big list to choose from. Once you have your list, set up a manual Amazon PPC campaign with a budget between $5 and $10 and closely monitor the performance.

Measure

It can’t be said enough – you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken.

Pick a time every week to sit for 30 minutes to an hour and check all of your product’s spend and return. Doing it at the same time every week gives you an easy way to compare numbers.

Don’t underestimate the power of metrics!

Build on Auto Campaigns

One of the great things about about Amazon’s auto-campaigns is that you can see the performance of keywords and mine those for your own custom campaigns.

Set up a new auto-campaign and move over profitable keywords from your low-bid auto campaign as clear winners start to emerge.

Do this weekly, along with your review mentioned above.

Listing Optimization

Not technically part of the PPC campaign, but, ensuring your listing is as optimized as possible will push through conversions.

As a reminder – we cover optimizing in some other articles – check that your photos, title and description are good enough and contain some good keywords.

A/B Test Pricing

Small changes in pricing can mean big changes in sales numbers. Test your pricing frequently. Cheaper does not always mean more sales (there’s a whole psychology behind pricing that maybe we’ll write an article about!). Sometimes you will get more sales by RAISING your price (and sometimes even raising it a lot).

Experiment!

Amazon is constantly working to tweak its FBA efficiency and increase its warehouse space. But it does prioritize certain sellers.

Last year Amazon announced that it was increasing the Inventory Performance Index (IPI) threshold that would avoid storage limits. That IPI number went from 400 to 500.

That’s nice, but what is the IPI? Lets take a look at it.

Amazon and Storage Limits

As of August, 2020, FBA storage limits are not applied to professional sellers with an IPI of 500 or higher. Storage limits are also not applied to new sellers who have been active for 6 months or less.

If you do fall below an IPI of 500 and have been a professional seller for 6 months or more you will be limited in your FBA storage. Limits vary and are calculated on a combination of:

• Your past IPI scores
• Sales Volume
• Available space in fulfillment centers

Your limits are updated every quarter, so even if you make some changes or improve your IPI nothing will change until the next quarter.

How is the Inventory Performance Index Calculated?

This, unfortunately, is some Amazon secret sauce that we cannot see the recipe for!

But Amazon does give us some insight into it by listing four areas on your Inventory Performance Dashboard.

Excess Inventory Percentage

The problem here is the definition of ‘excess’! Amazon’s view might vary greatly from yours. Excess is determined by Amazon to mean ‘units unlikely to sell in the current quarter’.

This can be because they are new listings (so Amazon has no idea if they will sell) or because you aren’t selling as many as you have in stock. For the sake of your IPI one thing you can do is drop the price on these items to get them moving. Once a good sales history is established Amazon is more forgiving of inventory. Or you can choose to have that inventory sent back to you and out of Amazon’s warehouse.

Amazon does let you know of the dashboard which are the offending items, so you can get a clear picture of what you need to do.

FBA Sell-Through

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon rewards sellers that are constantly moving inventory. Your FBA sell-through rate is calculated by the dividing the number of units sold and shipped over the last 90 days by the average number of units available in the warehouse.

The break down that rate like this:

• < 1.0 = Poor
• 1.0 to 2.0 = Fair
• 2.0 to 7.0 = Good
• > 7.0 = Excellent

Again, if you have slow moving items then either pull some or all of the inventory out of Amazon or reduce the price.

Stranded Inventory Percentage

Stranded Inventory is when you have items in the warehouse but the listing is not active. Stranded inventory is basically money sitting on the sidelines, so this should be a key metric that you look at!

FBA In-Stock Rate

Kind of the inverse of Stranded Inventory, this number tells you if people bought your product but it was not in stock. Not only do people not like waiting for their purchases, Amazon penalizes you big time if you don’t have items in stock (and are selling FBA of course).

Fix and Wait

Because IPI and storage limits are calculated only quarterly, it can be frustrating to be in a position of needing to fix it. We strongly recommend keeping on top of your inventory performance by frequently checking the Amazon Dashboard

Having the right keywords in your listings is a key component to building and sustaining sales of time on Amazon. For the purposes of this article you should think of keywords as falling into two categories:

Core Keywords

These are the core terms that shoppers are using to find your (and your competitors!) products. For these to be effective for you, you need to be better at optimizing your listings and also run better ads than your competitors.

Long Tail Keywords

Slightly less obvious keywords that perhaps your competitors haven’t struck upon. They have lower search volumes, but often indicate more motivated or interested buyers.

Top Ways to Find Keywords

Amazon Search Term Report

Let’s start with the obvious: Amazon’s own report that lists the words and phrases shoppers are inputing to find your products. Helpful for finding ‘real world’ words and phrases that sometimes, when you are so close to the product, you miss out on.

Auto-Target Campaigns

Let Amazon do the work for you! Amazon’s Auto-Target PPC campaigns will generate their own list of keywords. Always keep them running with a low budget. These are not for generating sales – though you might get a few. These are for generating valuable search data!

Other Listings – ASINs

In the Search Term Report mentioned above there is a list of terms. But also you will find a section that is a list of ASINs.

ASINs are a set of letters and numbers that start with a B and are around 10 characters long (eg: B08R988XHQ)

When you see these in the Sponsored Search Term Report that means that your product was listed on that ASIN. This often means that someone was looking for your product but found the competition! Examine that listing and see how you can incorporate things into your listing so you become the better match first time out.

Product Reviews

Product reviews are a gold mine of ‘real world’ language that people are using to describe a product. Incorporate these into your listing in a natural way to reap the benefits.

Don’t forget to examine the competition’s reviews as well!

Top Selling Competitors

While we’re looking at the competition’s reviews, let’s not forget to find the top-selling competitors in your category and find out what is so appealing on their listing that might be lacking in yours.

Non-Amazon Channels

It’s a big world out there! Look at competitive products on other eCommerce channels like Walmart, eBay and Target. Due to the differing nature of the marketplaces you might find different keywords and phrases to use for inspiration.

What’s Next?

After you find some new powerful keywords you can update not only your listings but also your PPC campaigns.

Don’t forget to checkout Amazon’s own suggestions for the effective use of search terms. That will keep you onside with Amazon and make sure your are getting the most bang for your buck!