Author: Team Zonmaster

Phil Smy, a passionate software developer and tech entrepreneur with over 25 years of industry experience. Phil’s journey has taken him across diverse industries, from online gambling to kids toys, providing him with invaluable insights and expertise.

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FAQ News

All About the Amazon Opt-Out

Amazon.com, Inc. (“Amazon”) recently began blocking messages that are sent to buyers who have chosen to “opt out of unsolicited messages” from Amazon. Many sellers have come to us with questions, so we’re sharing our answers here.

What does it mean if a buyer “opts out of unsolicited messages?”

Buyers who have opted out of unsolicited messages will only receive emails with information that is critical to completing orders, including product customization questions, delivery scheduling or issues with a shipping address. As of March 31st, 2017, Amazon offers a way for customers to opt out via the emails and website.

What happens if I send emails to these buyers?

No penalty will be imposed for attempting to send an email to a buyer who has opted out of unsolicited emails. Amazon will simply block the message, and you will receive a notification that the buyer has opted out. Currently, this is the only way to identify buyers who have opted out.

What if I need to contact the buyer?

You can send messages to the opted-out buyers if you have information that is critical to completing orders. The messages should be sent directly from Buyer-Seller Messaging and the subject should be “Additional Information Required.” Sending non-critical information by this method could result in a penalty, including suspension of your seller privileges. Non-critical items include shipment confirmations, product manuals, out-of-stock notices, and feedback or product review requests.

How can I avoid sending additional emails to these buyers?

Forward the Amazon opt out notification email to the personalized email address available on your ZonMaster Dashboard. We suggest setting up an autoforward filter in your email (read more here). ZonMaster will add the buyer’s email address to the Amazon Opt Out list and never send them another email.

Can I identify buyers who have opted out of unsolicited messages?

Amazon does not currently provide this information to sellers in Seller Central or through their API. We’ll provide an update as soon as opt-out information becomes more widely available.

Please contact us if you have any questions.

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News Instruction

Mastering the Block – Part 2…automated

As you know a lot of people are reeling from Amazon’s changing of the rules about allowing customers to opt out of emails from sellers. Some people think that this means that you can no longer contact customers. This is not true. If you try to contact a customer Amazon will not deliver the message and will inform you that the customer has opt-ed out. They then expect you to not try to contact the customer via regular methods again.

A couple days ago (3 days after the new policy from Amazon) ZonMaster implemented the bulk blocking tool.

Now we announce another method that might be easier for you: setting up and automated rule in your email to simply forward Amazon’s notification email to us. We’ll do all the rest.

When you log into your ZonMaster account now, on the dashboard in the lower right you’ll see an ‘Additional Info’ box. In there will be a cryptic long email address. This is your personalized email address for forwarding Amazon emails. Do NOT use this address to try and communicate with ZonMaster as it is not human monitored.

In most mail systems you’ll need to verify an email address to forward to. We’ll discuss that below.

All mail systems are different, but, in general here are the steps you need to follow:

  1. Log into ZonMaster and get your personalized email address
  2. Log into your email client (example: Gmail)
  3. Set up a rule. We suggest something like (again, this is how you would do it on Gmail)
    1. Match on subject CONTAINING ‘Your message to a buyer could not be delivered’ or has the words ‘buyer has opted out of unsolicited messages’
    2. We also suggest ‘archiving’ the messages so that they don’t appear in your inbox (or notify you on your phone).
    3. Forward message to your a new address
      1. In Gmail you’ll be taken to a screen to add the new address. Enter your personalized email address from the ZonMaster dashboard. We’ll get notification and email you back a code to authorize
  4. Apply to existing emails
  5. Sit back…we’ll do the blocking and blacklisting for you

It’s early days for this system. If you experience any difficulties in setting this up send us an email via the Contact Us form and we’ll do our best to walk you through it.

Categories
News

Dealing with Amazon’s Shoppers Opt Out of Unsolicited Emails

Amazon updated its Buyer-Seller Messaging system on March 28, 2017, to allow shoppers to opt out of unsolicited emails sent from third-party merchants.

You can still email shoppers asking for reviews and feedback, though. Want to make sure you don’t email a buyer who has opted out again?

Now using ZonMaster’s Bulk Order Blocker  you can paste in as many Amazon Order Numbers as you like and we’ll make sure – in one fell swoop! – that those customers no longer get emails from you. This solution is not ideal (as you still have to gather the order numbers) – it’s a stop-gap until we can implement a fully automatic system.

If you have customer email addresses you can use ZonMaster’s Bulk Blacklist tool (which we’ve had since day 1). That let’s you paste in email addresses and we’ll stop them from getting any emails in the future.

Categories
Updates

Send Template Based on Fulfilment Channel

It’s the simple things that can be the most powerful!

We’ve added a feature that quite a few of you have asked for – sending templates based on how the order was sent out. A new menu on the template settings let’s you choose this. All old templates by default have been set to ‘All’.

Send Emails Based on Amazon Fulfillment Channel with ZonMaster

 

FBA vs MFN

In know 99% of you know, but SEO requirements on this post insist I put this in here 😉

FBA means Fulfillment by Amazon. You’ve sent you stuff to Amazon, somewhere in the world. They store it in their warehouse and do the Pick, Pack and Post.

MFN means Merchant Fulfillment Network. You have the goods somewhere outside of Amazon (either in your garage or at some 3rd party warehouse) and are simply selling on Amazon. When an order comes in you pack it up and send it out.

These things are sometimes called AFN (Amazon Fulfillment Network) for FBA and FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant) for MFN.

Categories
Updates

New Trigger: Stop On, or Send To, Orders placed with Promotions

Follow Up On Your Promotions

Often the people you give Amazon promotion codes to you want to treat extra special. Well, now through ZonMaster, you can automate this as well!

What are we calling Promotions

There are really 2 kinds of promotions – the kinds YOU give out and the kind Amazon gives out – like free shipping. In the case of the latter you don’t really have any input or control over them. So, when you specify promotions in either the send to or stop we do NOT include those. We’ve performed an analysis of over 100,000 orders with promotions and think this is a fair assessment of what a promotion is and isn’t. (If you feel differently please get in touch via our Contact Us form!)

How To Set It Up

It’s pretty much like our other Send To and Stop On items.

Send To

To send an email to an order that received a promotion go to the Send Trigger menu in your email template and choose ‘Order Used Promotion’

ZonMaster Send To Options

Stop On

For Stop On it is similar. Go to the Stop On Review? menu and choose ‘Order Used Promotion’

ZonMaster Stop On Review Options

That’s it!

This feature came out 100% because of user requests. If you are a ZonMaster subscriber and have some ideas for new features please let us know!

Categories
Updates

Getting More Positive Seller Feedback

I’m sure you know this already, but, people are lazy. This can sometimes go in your favor, if you know how to take advantage of it.

We have a new shortcode available for your email templates that DOES take advantage of this irrefutable fact to get you more positive seller feedback.

The shortcode is called ‘positive_feedback_link’ and it in this post we’ll describe it’s configuration and usage.

About the shortcode

The ‘positive_feedback_link’ shortcode has 3 parts (two of which are optional)

  1. Short Code Identifier. Obviously mandatory, it is the way we know you want this code included. Usage: %%positive_feedback_link%%
  2. Customizable Anchor Text. Optional. If you want your link to say something special like ‘Click here to give us great feedback’. The Anchor text is anything after the colon (:). Usage: %%positive_feedback_link:Click here to give us great feedback%%’
  3. Customizable Pre-Filled Comment. Optional. When the Seller Feedback Form is pulled up on Amazon it will have this text prefilled into the comments box. Play nice! Don’t go over the top. The comment text is anything after the pipe character (|). Usage: %%positive_feedback_link:Anchor Text|Shipping was fast, and customer service was great!%%

When your customers click the link the page they land on will have 5 stars selected and ‘yes’ to all the questions. Something like this.

ZonMaster's Positive Seller Feedback tool

We hope you find this kind of short code useful!

Categories
Updates

New Shortcode – Review Link Button

Just a quickie.

Users like visual cues and often respond better to an image than the 1000 words it represents 😉

So we’ve added a new shortcode – %%review_link_button%% – that replaces the text link to have your customers review your product  with a button.

Give it a try and let us know how it goes!

Categories
Updates

Changes to the Email Template Creator

Adding All Items

A lot of you just have one set of templates, so you want those to go out to all your buyers. We’ve made that a little easier with our new ‘Use For All Items’ switch.

Turning this on (as seen above) means that this template will apply to all orders in the selected marketplace, regardless of which item was bought. It has the added benefit of being ‘always on’, so if you add new items for sale in Amazon you don’t need to worry about remembering to add them to your email template.

Choosing Individual Items

Some of you have a LOT of different items for sale, and our old way of choosing items for an email template just couldn’t handle it. We’ve now added a paged view of your items, complete with search box. Clicking the check box next to an items adds it. Simple!

Why Add Items?

We get this question a lot, so it’s worth addressing here. You have to add some or all of your items into an email template so the template knows who to send to.

 

Categories
Updates

More Stats! See your success in Category Ranking

In another new feature, we’ve rolled out Category Ranking stats and charts.

We’ve always shown you how Amazon is ranking your items. Now we are keeping a history of that, and showing you the trend in each Category. As with almost everything in ZonMaster, we track ALL your items for ALL the categories. We really hate limits.

How To See The Amazon Category Ranking

We’re showing this in two places. First is on the items detail page. We give you a quick display of all categories and whether things are looking up (or down).

For each category you can click on the name to go to that Category on Amazon.

Clicking on the ‘Details’ link takes you to a page showing graphs of all your ranking history, in all categories, for this item. We only started track from January 1st, 2017, so as of this writing the charts are pretty bare. Give us time!

If things are looking up the Trend line is in green. If not, it will be in red.

Amazon Category Ranking

This is just the first rollout of this feature. We will be improving the robustness over time.

Again, as always, this Category Rank tracking is available on ALL ZonMaster subscriptions.

Categories
Updates

Add Your Store Logo To Your Emails

Increase Your Brand Visibility

One thing that many Amazon FBA sellers strive for is brand awareness (we’ve linked in a cool article about building brand awareness). And one key to this in the crowded (dare I say ‘bustling’?) space of the Amazon Marketplace is a great logo.

Now in your ZonMaster email templates you can automatically include your store logo in emails going out to your customers.

Here’s how

1 – Upload Your Store Logo

  1. Go to your Amazon Stores page (here)
  2. Choose your Amazon store (you can have a different logo per store. Indeed, you HAVE to upload a logo to each store, they can’t be shared)
  3. Use the file uploader on the right to upload a logo.

We have a placeholder logo there for you (don’t worry, it won’t get sent out, even if you use the tags and don’t upload a logo)

The Logo Uploader

 

2 – Edit Your Templates

  1. Go to you Email Templates (here)
  2. Choose the Template you wish to edit
  3. Include one of the following tags in your email, whereever you wish to show your logo
    1. %%store_logo_small%% for a 100×100* sized version of YOUR Amazon store logo
    2. %%store_logo_medium%% for a 300×300* sized version of YOUR Amazon store logo
    3. %%store_logo_full%% for the full sized (whatever you uploaded) version of YOUR Amazon store logo

That’s it!

(* when we say 100×100 or 300×300 we mean that your logo will be resized so that it’s biggest dimension will be a maximum of 100 or 300 pixels. We don’t mean we’ll make your logo square, no matter what it is!)

Here at ZonMaster we’re committed to constant improvements in our service! Let us know how we’re doing.