Category: Instruction

Tips and Tricks about Private Labeling and FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)

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Instruction News

Using Amazon’s ‘Request a Review’ Automatically with ZonMaster

Amazon’s Big Change

Not so long ago Amazon began rolling out a new feature in Seller Central – a button that let’s you ‘Request a Review’ for an order.

The button appears on your orders page inside Seller Central.

When you click this button and the button on the following page, Amazon will send an email to the buyer asking them to review their purchase.

That’s nice. Because finally, we have an accepted, Amazon-provided, way to ask buyers for a review.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it is 3 clicks PER ORDER (1 to select the order, 1 to click ‘Request a Review’ and 1 to click the ‘Are you sure?’ button). If you sell a lot, which is everyone’s goal, then that is a lot of clicking and time wasted.

That is why ZonMaster is happy to announce a fully automated way of requesting these reviews, and it couldn’t be simpler.

How to Configure Automatic Review Requests

1) Log in to Zonmaster

2) Go to your Store Settings page (under the settings menu)

3) Enable the ‘Request Reviews’ switch

That’s it. Zonmaster will then automatically request reviews for you using Amazon’s new feature.

You might see this:

That means you haven’t given us the necessary permissions to access your Seller Central. Click the button and follow the instructions.

What You Need to Know

1) You have NO CONTROL over the content of the email Amazon sends. The good news is that it means they will send it in the right language for your order.

2) Reviews can only be requested from orders DELIVERED between 4 and 30 days ago (this is also an Amazon restriction)

At the moment ZonMaster offers no further filtering or configuring of who these requests go to, but that will change in the coming weeks. We wanted to get this feature out to you as soon as possible.

3) Review Requests count as emails. If your ZonMaster plan lets you send 500 emails that means 500 emails OR Review Requests. You will see them displayed on your dashboard in a different colour on your Monthly Send progress bar.

4) Stop sending Review Request emails of your own. Amazon rolled this feature out so they would have some control over the requesting process. This means you should stop sending any emails to buyers whose primary purpose was to request a review. Emails should only go out if they contain additional relevant information about the products the buyer bought. This has not changed. Amazon has been saying this for years, but now they are enforcing it by suspending email priveledges from sellers they think are simply asking for reviews.

5) Review Requests will not go to Refunded or Returned orders.

We hope you’re as excited about this new feature as we are. It will save you TONS of time and get you a lot more reviews, all while staying in Amazon’s good books. It’s a win win!

Categories
Instruction Updates

New Customer Filter – Subscribe & Save

We’ve added a new way to filter (or target, depends on your point of view!) customers.

Subscribe & Save

This filter is found at the bottom of the ‘Stop On…?’ dropdown in the ‘Exclude’ section while editing an Email Template.

Remember this is an EXCLUDE not include function so this is what they do:

1)  ‘Is Subscribe & Save Customer’ means: this email will NOT go to S&S Customers

2) ‘Is Not Subscribe & Save Customer’ means: this email will ONLY go to S&S Customers

Perhaps a little backwards, but we didn’t want to clutter the interface with more options!

As always, this is a new feature so please give us your feedback on its effectiveness. And if you have any other suggestions for filters or other improvements we are always keen to hear them! Use our ‘Contact Us‘ page to get in touch.

Categories
FAQ Instruction

Getting Notified by Email and SMS When You’ve Got New Reviews and Feedback

On your store’s settings page, you can set up notifications that will tell you when reviews and or seller feedback have come in.

You can update some of these, and configure other settings, on your Amazon Store’s Settings page.

To get there go to the ‘Settings’ menu and select ‘Store Settings’ (or click here)

Then click on your store’s name.

The Settings

The optimal settings are these below:

You will get notified about negative Seller Feedback and products Reviews. Because Amazon is currently making it very difficult to match reviews to orders, we suggest setting the ‘notify on matched’ to ‘All’.

Then click on your email address or your SMS number (or Twitter name) and we will send you notifications.

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FAQ Instruction

How to Edit the Settings of Your Amazon Store

When you signed up with Zonmaster you gave us your Amazon Seller info – Seller ID, MWS Auth Token, Send From email address etc.

You can update some of these, and configure other settings, on your Amazon Store’s Settings page.

To get there go to the ‘Settings’ menu and select ‘Store Settings’ (or click here)

Then click on your store’s name.

You’ll end up on a details page like this:

Editing Email Address

To edit your Send Email From Address click on it and a small popup window will appear where you can enter the new address.

PLEASE READ THE ‘About the ‘Send From’ Email Address’ section on that page before editing the address. If you change the email address to an email that is not authorized with Amazon your emails will be sent to Amazon but not to your customers and you will have credits removed from your Zonmaster account.

If your email address has not yet been verified by you with Zonmaster you can ‘resend’ the verification email to your address. The verification email will come from Amazon Web Services and you’ll have 24 hours in which to click the link.

Please note that it can take up to 30 minutes for the email to sync with us after you have verified it.

Refreshing the MWS Auth Token

Amazon expires the Auth Token once a year. They will send you an email warning you that it is coming to an end. When you renew the Auth Token the token MIGHT change, so please paste the new token into this page. Just like with the email address, you click on the Token text and a popup will appear. Once you have saved it a ‘Recheck’ button will appear and you MUST click on that to complete the update.

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FAQ Instruction

How To “Force Send” To Old Orders

1) Start By Setting Dates

Technically you don’t HAVE to do this, but, it is strongly (x 1000) recommended. Edit your email template and go to the “For Orders Placed Between The Dates:” section under “When?”. Click in each field to show the date picker and choose a start and stop date.

 

(of course, you have to fill out the rest of the template. We’re just talking about the specifics needed for Force Send here)

2) Save Your Template

3) Scroll Down To “Force Send”

and click the “Send It” button (which doesn’t really send it, but takes you to a confirmation screen)

4) Read the Confirmation Screen

We will tell you the rules of who will get your email template. Read them carefully.

5) Type “AGREE” in the field

This is so that you have to pause and think!

6) Click “Schedule Emails”

This would queue up your emails

OR

Click “Get me out of here” to go back to the email template details page.

NOTES

  1. Don’t to ‘Force Send’ an “ASAP” triggered email. Results will be unpredictable.
  2. If you have an ‘end date’ make sure it is after the ‘start date’
  3. ‘Start Date’ and ‘End Date’ apply to ‘purchase date’ of an order
  4. We can only send to orders that are in our system. During your free trial, we only go back 5 weeks. After your free trial, we go back varying times depending on your subscription level.
Categories
FAQ Instruction

Inserting Images into Email Templates

Inline Images

You can upload and insert an image into your email by using the ‘Insert Image’ icon in the toolbar. Unfortunately, there are two of these! You need to use the rightmost one (if you hover over it it will say ‘Insert an image from your computer’).

 

Images from ShortCodes

There are also some image resources in our shortcodes. Things like product images should NOT be uploaded and manually inserted. Instead you should use the %%product_image_small%%, %%product_image_medium%% or %%product_image_full%% (we strongly recommend small!) shortcode.

A Word About Images

Remember that images are not guaranteed to arrive to your customer. They may have images switched off on their email client or device. Images should be seen as SUPPLEMENTAL to the message of your email, not vital. This means ALL images – logos, products, buttons, clever memes, etc etc. Don’t depend on them.

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Instruction FAQ

How to use ShortCodes in Email Templates

Why Use ShortCodes?

One of the things that makes a system like Zonmaster so powerful is that you don’t have to write an email for each and every product and customer. By using shortcodes you can substitute in things for the current order automatically. Back in the old days we used to call this ‘Mail Merge’. It adds great flexibility to te emails you can write.

ShortCode Format

All Zonmaster shortcodes take the form of %%short_code%%. The shortcode is the whole thing – from the opening %% to the closing %%.

In some shortcodes – like %%review_link%% – you can enter in your own text. So, the shortcode looks like this: %%review_link:your text here%%. What that means is that after the shortcode name (in this case, review_link) there is a colon (:) and then you can write your own text. So you can have %%review_link:click here to leave a review%%. Try to avoid using punctuation inside your text (sorry about that. We’re working on it)

DO NOT style the text in a shortcode. i.e. DO NOT bold, italicize, color etc etc a shortcode tag.

Common Codes

Customer Name

To personalize your emails to the customer, Zonmaster offers a range of ‘buyer related’ shortcodes. For example, to use the buyers first name in a greeting you can write

Hi %%buyer_first_name%%

and in the resulting email that will come out as

Hi Bob

(assuming their name is Bob of course!)

Product Name

We always always always recommend that you use the %%product_nick%% shortcode when you want to include the name of what the customer ordered in an email. This way, if you’ve created a nickname (a shortened or different name for a product) it will substitute that.

Thank you for buying %%product_nick%%

Will result in

Thank you for buying World’s Best Widget

Store Logo

If you uploaded your store logo to your Amazon Store’s settings page on Zonmaster then you can include that in any email by using %%store_logo_small% (or medium or full).

Thanks again!

Bob from My Store

%%store_logo_small%%

Will result in

Thanks again!

Bob from My Store

All Zonmaster ShortCodes

You can find a full list here (always available under the ‘Emails’ menu as ‘Email Variables Help‘)

Categories
News Instruction

Finally! A/B Testing arrives to ZonMaster

A/B Split Testing now available on ZonMaster

I know, I know! You’ve been asking for a way to do split testing for some time! Finally we have the first stage of our solution in place.

What It Is

You can set a template to go out to all orders or to odd numbered orders or even numbered orders. Amazon pretty much splits these order numbers 50/50 and we’ve done a lot of testing – this does seem to be a good way to do the splitting. By sending one template to odd numbered orders and another to even numbered orders you can see which is more effective.

Split testing (also referred to as A/B testing or multivariate testing) is a method of conducting controlled, randomized experiments with the goal of improving a website metric, such as clicks, form completions, or purchases. Incoming traffic to the website is distributed between the original (control) and the different variations without any of the visitors knowing that they are part of an experiment. The tester waits for a statistically significant difference in behavior to emerge. The results from each variation are compared to determine which version showed the greatest improvement.

How To Use It

What we recommend is to set up two almost identical templates (you can duplicate a template by using the ‘Clone’ button when you’re viewing a template). Set one of the templates to be an ‘A’ template and the other to be a ‘B’ template.

Then change something like the subject line. Changing the subject line in one template and leaving the other alone will, then looking at the open rates, will let you see which subject line is more affective.

Or leave the subject line and change the call to action in the content of the email.

Change only 1 thing between emails – otherwise you don’t know what caused the difference results!

Where to set it

The ‘A/B Selector’ is available while editing a template.

Categories
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
Instruction Updates

Receive instant SMS/Email Alerts on Negative Feedback and Reviews

You know, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – our customers are the best source of ideas for new features!

This one came directly from a group of you that wanted a better way to hear about negative seller feedback and reviews. So we came up with this one: how about we notify you instantly via email, Twitter or even SMS?

So we did it!

Great Amazon FBA Customer Service

We think that for any serious Amazon FBA Seller – indeed for anyone serious about business – customer service is really important. Here at ZonMaster we treat it as priority #1 and I’m sure you do the same. Getting negative feedback from a customer is an opportunity to find out where you went wrong and to try and fix the situation. That’s why we think getting this notification as fast as possible is a good thing. Also, the faster you respond the better chance you have of rescuing the relationship with your customer. (Oh, did I just give a lesson on customer service?! Sorry!).

Anyway, now in ZonMaster you can configure notifications to be sent out on a store by store basis. Below I’ve got a video, but, I just want to make this point clear:

If you sell in Amazon US and Amazon EU (or India or wherever) you can (have to) configure these notification settings on a store by store basis inside ZonMaster. That means that notifications for a negative review in Europe can go to your European support team and the US ones go to your North American team.

Again, there is a video, but, the basics are

  • Log In To ZonMaster
  • Go To You Stores Page
  • Choose a Store
  • Edit the settings for Notifications. These are ‘inline editing’ fields, so just click on the values you want to change

 

Here’s a full video of making the changes

[youtube id=0vsCGaKat3Y]