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.

Categories
Updates

[New Feature] Enhanced Sales Stats Graphs

We’re trying to expose more of the statistics we’re gathering to you, the seller. The latest one is more detailed sales stats for your items. Through a series of graphs we offer you greater insight into number of units shipped and returned, as well as reviews that items have received.

First, on the items listing page (https://www.zonmaster.com/items) we give you an overview of the last 30 days of sales, and how your items have performed. It’ll look a little like this:

sales_graph1

We show you levels only for items that sold in the last 30 days. If you hover over a bar you’ll see the details in the top left.

You can click on the bar and that will take you to the specific page for that item, where you’ll see another graph, breaking down that item’s sales by month for as long as we have data:

sales_graph2

Hovering over the data points displays the info in the bottom left, showing you units shipped, returns and reviews for that month.

Finally, if you click on one of THOSE data points you’ll be taken to that month’s info, broken down by day:

sales_graph3

Once again, hovering over a data point will show you that day’s stats: units shipped, returns and reviews. You can go backwards and forwards through the months by clicking on the ‘Previous Month’ and ‘Next Month’ links at the top of the graph.

We hope you find this information useful! Let us know.

Categories
News

[News] Amazon Brand Gating – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

As most of you Amazon sellers know, Amazon is implementing tighter control over the selling of recognized brand names on their platform.

Here’s what we officially know:

  • Amazon will start charging new sellers a fee to register to sell a brand
  • These sellers will need to register their authorization to sell the brand
  • The one-time fee will (normally) range between $1,000 and $1,500

Here’s the important bit: the fee applies to NEW SELLERS only (at the moment). This is direct from an email the Amazon spokesman Erik Fairleigh sent to CNBC:

“If a seller is already selling brands on Amazon that are now subject to a fee, they are not required to pay the fee to continue selling those brands. The fee only applies to new sellers of particular brands. Sellers can see whether a product requires a fee to sell when they search for that product using the “Add a Product” tool on Seller Central.”

So, if you want to START selling Nike shoes you’re going to have to pay. If you did it before, though, you can do it again.

Who Wins?

There are 2 big winners that we can see

  1. The Customer! The whole reason Amazon is doing this is to ensure that when the customer buys a Nike shoe they are getting a Nike shoe. No one can – or should – complain about a marketplace that is looking out for customers.
  2. Private Label Sellers. Private Labelers Win Again! If you’ve been following the ethos of selling Private Label goods (which you probably have, as you are reading this on ZonMaster.com, which is aimed at helping private label sellers get the best from their work). There might be an extra bonus here, if Amazon decides to fight counterfeit goods even of smaller sellers.

Who Loses?

Sadly some people will take a hit. Especially Arbitrage and Liquidation Sellers. Amazon isn’t really helping matters by not publishing a complete list (though, as stated above, it’s pretty easy to find out if a product is subject to a fee).

I’ve read other places saying how it is worse for the consumer and Amazon. This is not true. As I said, the consumer gets a huge boost in consumer confidence, which means they have a huge boost in the confidence of Amazon. Losing a few sellers – either because they can’t afford the fee, or can’t get the authorization to sell – is NOT going to hurt the consumer and it will not raise prices. Sorry, it’s true.

If you want to read more, there’s a great article over on CNBC. Please don’t trust public discussion forums as a source of reliable facts about this. A lot of people are screaming, but mostly because it affects their arbitrage business.

Categories
News

[News] Beginners Plans, Beginners Prices!

At ZonMaster one of our goals is to bring these sales-boosting services to people just starting out selling private label goods via Amazon FBA, when you need it most.

So today we’re announcing two new plans.

Mini Plan $6.99/month

  • 500 Emails Per Month
  • Full Access to all ZonMaster features like Seller Feedback triggering, Review Matching, Pre-Made Mail Chain Templates, etc etc.

Mini Plan + Attachments $9.99/month

  • Same as above, but with file attachments available on your emails!

With these new plans we give you a chance to do all the sophisticated emailing that the big boys do, at a fraction of the price. When you’re ready to move up to a bigger plan, you just move up. No problem!

These plans offer the best value of ANY Amazon Seller auto-responder/Customer Relationship Management tool on the market with features that rival any of our, erm, rivals! We also offer unparalleled customer service.

You will not find a better, cheaper, AND more effective way to improve your Amazon business that you’re starting up than these plans on ZonMaster.

Categories
Updates

[New Feature] Send Emails in Response to Seller Feedback

This is something that a lot of you have asked for!

We’re happy to announce that now you can send a specific email template triggered by whether the customer has left Seller Feedback (as opposed to a product review) on an order.

seller-feedback-menu

For negative (or neutral) feedback of 3 or under this is available for everyone.

If you want to send an email based on Positive (4 or 5 star) seller feedback you need to have given us the additional permissions needed to access certain special reports from your Seller Central account. (This feature is also free for all ZonMaster customers). To learn about this, read this blog post.

How To Use It

You don’t need us to tell you, we think, but here goes: a lot of you want this trigger so that when someone leaves you positive seller feedback you can send them an email asking them to leave a product review. The exciting thing you can do with ZonMaster is this: these emails can be stopped from being sent to people who have already left a review by using our ‘Stop On Review‘ setting!

stop-sending-to-reviewers

 

We hope you find this feature useful! If you have any questions or issues with it don’t hesitate to contact us. As some of you know, we strive to have the most responsive customer service in the biz.

Categories
Updates

[Update] Goodbye Big Red Button

UPDATE: The video that is/used to be linked to on this page is out of date. See updated instructions here inside your ZonMaster account.

 

A couple of months ago we rolled out the Seller Central Prep page which required you to run Google Chrome as a browser and install a plugin to help us match up your orders.

It was, let’s be honest here, a huge pain in the you-know-what.

From today we are discontinuing the Big Red Button. Instead, we are asking you to authorize us with a couple of ‘read-only’ permissions on your Seller Central account.

The advantages are as follows:

  1. We do the heavy lifting of pulling down this extra customer info
  2. We also will grab your Seller Feedback (triggers and alerts coming soon!) – positive AND negative.
  3. You don’t need to run Google Chrome

We’ve created a little video that instructs you on how to do this. You can watch it below, or click here.

Please note that while this video  talks about Amazon.com,  but if you are a European or Indian seller you need to do the same thing, but by going to Seller Central Europe or Seller Central India (the rest of the instructions stay the same). If you are selling in more than one market (i.e. you have an Amazon.com and an Amazon.co.uk account registered with ZonMaster) you’ll need to do it on each platform.

This process will GREATLY increase your review matching rate and we strongly encourage you to do it.

Unfortunately, the request you send to us has to be handled by a real person on the ZonMaster team, so give us time to answer the request. We’ll send you an email when we’ve done it.

[arve url=”https://youtu.be/yBz1KBNQwsI”]

Categories
News

[News] Amazon Changes Reviewer Policy

Amazon has updated its review policy again, but this time, it’s for shoppers—not sellers. See the latest “Customer Review Guidelines”

Previous Version

Who may write a review?

To post a review, customers must spend at least $5.00 using a valid credit or debit card. Prime subscriptions and promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the $5.00 minimum. Customers in the same household cannot submit a review for the same product.

Current Version

Who may write a review?

To post a review, customers must spend at least $50.00 using a valid credit or debit card. Prime subscriptions and promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the $50.00 minimum. Customers in the same household cannot submit a review for the same product.

What does this change mean for me? 

The $50 rule applies to the account, not the purchase. Items under $50 can still get reviews.

Some testing on our end has found that shoppers with accounts with less than $50 spent total were still able to leave product reviews on products they have purchased. It’s possible older accounts are grandfathered in and this change does not affect them.

The only change is that new shopper accounts that have spent less than $50 total cannot leave reviews yet.

Can Shoppers Still Leave Reviews on Products Less than $50?

Yes.

Can I still offer discounted or free products in exchange for a review?

Yes.

Categories
Updates

[New Feature] All In The Family: Seeing Related Items

A lot of you are selling variations – different colour, container size, etc etc – of the same product. Now on ZonMaster you can see that!

On the items listing page we’ve put a small P in the box with the ASIN and SKU. That P will show the parent ASIN of the product. If there is any.

parents3

(sorry for the pixelization!)

If you click on an item and see it’s detail page, and it has ‘siblings’, you’ll see those listed below the Sales Rank and Inventory info.

parents1

Linking things at the parent label will help us match reviews better (as items with a shared parent actually get the same reviews on Amazon). It should also let you see families of items at a glance, and see their stock levels and more importantly for your ZonMaster use, let you see if they have the same number of templates, etc.

Please let us know if you find this feature helpful!

Categories
FAQ

[FAQ] Why Aren’t My Emails Sending?

This is the #1 question we get and of course there are many possible reasons, but here’s the top 3 reasons we’ve seen.

 

1) Incorrect Sales Channel setting on the template.

On each template you can set which purchasing Sales Channel (i.e. Amazon website that the customer bought from) this template gets applied to. If you don’t select a Sales Channel it will never get sent, even if it is active.  Unless you have a specific reason not to, we suggest setting the Sales Channel to ‘All’. The only reasons not to are if you have other templates that send out to other channels. The way Amazon works, it is quite possible your Amazon.com product will get sold on Amazon.ca (Canada) or Amazon Mexico and in this case your email wouldn’t go out. (Same is definitely true of Amazon.co.uk as Amazon shares across Europe).

2) Incorrect ‘Send to Orders Placed After’

We added this feature to help you migrate from another auto-responder platform. If you are not migrating completely disregard this field. If you are migrating you can choose a cut off date. Note that the date is for orders PLACED after. So even if your template triggers on shipping, this applies to the order purchase date.

3) Items Not Added

The Way ZonMaster works is that it checks an order to see if it contains any of the items in your template. If you don’t add an item to your template, emails will never get sent to purchasers of that item. At the moment we don’t have a ‘Apply To All’ setting…you need to add all your items. Also, if you add new items to Amazon, you need to come back to us and add those items into your email template.

Categories
Updates

[New Feature] Pre-Made Starter Packs of Templates

It’s not enough to know that you can send emails out to people based on triggers after they buy from you. The real question is what to say in the email!

We’ve put together a couple of starter packs of email templates – each with 3 emails, one focused on getting you more seller feedback, the other on getting more reviews. We will be adding more packs over time.

Right now it’s simple and basic but should get you going on ZonMaster in just a few clicks.

Step 1 – Log in to your ZonMaster account (duh!)

Step 2 – Go to ‘Starter Templates’ under the ‘Emails’ menu

Screen Shot 2016-08-25 at 2.41.46 PM

Step 3 – Find a Pack that suites your goal (reviews or seller feedback).

Screen Shot 2016-08-25 at 2.39.58 PM

Step 4 – Click ‘Copy To Account’ to copy the templates in the pack to your account

Screen Shot 2016-08-25 at 2.43.05 PM

Step 5 – Go to ‘Email Templates’ and click the (new!) ‘Quick Preview’ button to see what the template looks like.

Screen Shot 2016-08-25 at 2.43.58 PM

Step 6 – Edit as necessary (at the very least you will need to add in your items).

Step 7 – Activate!

Step 8 – Relax with a soothing drink, confident that ZonMaster is sending out your templates when needed!

 

We think that by adding these starter templates we can greatly speed up the time it takes to get up and running with ZonMaster.

Top Template Tip

Our Pre-Made Templates rely on the ‘product_nick’ (product nickname) variable. By using the a nickname for your product you can create a nice short name to go in the email templates while leaving your SEO-crunching product title in place in Amazon. Read more about product nickname here.

Categories
Updates

[New Country] Amazon.in (India) Support

We’re starting to roll out more territories and the first to go into trial is India’s Amazon.in.

When you create a new store you’ll see Amazon.in in the drop down.

Amazon India

Right now it looks like we can get all order and item information. What we CAN’T get is package tracking. Most of Amazon.in’s packages are set by Amazon’s own service, which does not allow external tracking. We are still getting ‘delivered’ notices, so all triggers should work.

At the moment our review matching plugin does not support India, but that update will come in the next few days.

We’re always excited to roll out a new territory, and India is certainly an up and coming market for Amazon Sellers! Now’s the time to take a look if you haven’t already.