To succeed on Amazon, it’s crucial that you have a sound business model, cater to your consumers, and market your product effectively. However, other key areas could help you increase revenue, avoid extra costs, and ultimately boost your bottom line.
From new seller incentives to bonus programs, Amazon offers plenty of opportunities to increase cash flow.
But don’t forget about possible overcharges, discrepancies, and costly shipping issues. With some knowledge, diligence, and expert partnerships, you can get reimbursed for hidden costs and fees related to inbound shipments, lost or damaged units, weight and dimension fees, and more.
So what specific steps should you take to boost profits and minimize costs? We spoke with an expert from GETIDA to dig into the details.
Whether you’re just starting your Amazon journey or are a seasoned seller, the platform has a few bonus incentives to push your brand forward.
New Seller Incentives
If you register your brand on Amazon and open a new account, they’ll reward you with a 5% bonus. This bonus is capped at $1 million, but this incentive program could put an extra $50,000 back in your pocket. This program not only applies to new brands but is also available to existing sellers who are expanding their brands into other countries.
Brand Referral Bonus Program
In addition to Amazon’s new seller incentives is a brand referral bonus program. If your brand is registered on Amazon, you can opt into this initiative and make the most of your non-Amazon marketing. If you use a special Amazon link to drive outside traffic into Amazon’s marketplace, they’ll give you a 10% bonus — with no cap. This program can be used for email campaigns, TikTok, Twitter, and other strategies.
Between FBA fees and Amazon seller fees, your brand could lose a significant chunk of revenue. What can you do about it?
Yoni Mazor, Chief Growth Officer and Co-founder of GETIDA, offers a simple solution: package smaller, lighter, and smarter when selling online.
If you’re a potato chip brand on grocery store shelves, you want to avoid deflated packaging that takes up as little space as possible. You want inflated chip bags that stand out on the shelves. But for Amazon sellers, consumers are already sold on your product from their online browse — you don’t need fancy, expensive packaging that will reduce your profit.
Shipping costs are often higher than necessary because products are big and bulky. Whether it’s deflating a soccer ball or rolling up a pair of jeans, if there’s a way to pack more efficiently, do it. You’ll have fewer fees and more revenue.
For many third-party Amazon sellers, reconciliation for inbound shipments, lost or damaged goods, and overcharges can be a headache. The team at GETIDA has some strategies to protect your costs.
Inbound Shipments
When a vendor packs items for shipment, it can be difficult to analyze where any issues took place. GETIDA suggests this solution: when logging into seller central, you can click the icon that says “manage FBA shipments.” From there, you can look at the FBA details, research missing units, and present proof of delivery and proof of purchase for reimbursement.
Lost or Damaged Units
Like inbound shipment issues, lost or damaged units can affect your bottom line. To reconcile lost or damaged products, you need two reports: your inventory ledger for the past 18 months and a reimbursement report. Amazon has its own reconciliation tool to help you in the process, or you can use an expert partner like GETIDA.
Whether your products were lost, damaged, overcharged, or not delivered to the correct location, the key is to take action as early as possible. Amazon has specific timeframes for reconciliation cases, and you want to ensure that you stick to the guidelines and meet those deadlines for maximum reimbursement.
“Selling on Amazon is like being on a battlefield in a warzone,” Yoni says. Bullets are flying at you constantly in the form of sourcing, launching, marketing, advertising, customer support, and logistics, to name a few. But Yoni goes on to say, “You don't want to stop everything [and say] ‘hey, let's look back [and] see what happened the past 18 months,’ because it’s very difficult over time as you scale.”
Yoni suggests developing a responsible team dedicated to FBA auditing, reconciling discrepancies on time, and replying to already-open cases instead of opening new ones. He also emphasizes the value of hiring a team of experts when needed and maintaining professionalism throughout the process. You don’t want to be pushy or dishonest with Amazon — in the end, upholding a professional and honest profile will help you reap the platform’s rewards.
Gautam Kanumuru is the Co-founder and CEO of Yogi, a product sentiment analysis platform that enables brands to gain deeper visibility into customer feedback and voice-of-customer. With a background in AI and natural language processing, he played a crucial role in developing Microsoft products, including Cortana and Xbox. Before co-founding Yogi, Gautam was the Vice President of Engineering at Clarke.ai and a Program Manager at Microsoft.
As the digital space becomes increasingly competitive, brands are harnessing customer-centric, data-driven growth strategies. Reviews and ratings have unexplored potential to implement rich feedback from shoppers, but this data source is underutilized as most brands emphasize insights from potential purchasers rather than existing customers. How are leading brands capitalizing on customer sentiment analysis to optimize products and drive sales?
According to product sentiment specialist Gautam Kanumuru, reviews and ratings are more than a measurement of volume. Rather, these data sets provide insight into your products, enabling you to develop and improve PDPs, reframe product messaging based on majority feedback, and create ad campaigns for new product launches. A robust customer sentiment analysis approach involves utilizing automated platforms like Yogi to aggregate, prioritize, and disseminate data to meet customer expectations effectively.
Join Aaron Conant in this episode of The Digital Deep Dive as he hosts Gautam Kanumuru, Yogi’s Co-founder and CEO, to address the value of reviews and ratings for product innovations and brand growth. Gautam shares best practices for evaluating reviews and ratings, how to experiment with AI for review analytics, and how data aggregation facilitates business growth.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
Traditional Amazon advertising approaches involve assessing performance by measuring KPIs such as last-touch attributions, ACOS (advertising cost of sales), and ROAS. But as more brands leverage the platform’s advertising network, Amazon has increased costs, rendering these metrics inadequate for quantifying long-term growth in multiple business sectors.
Conversely, incremental advertising methods leverage precise data that you can use to drive cumulative sales and maximize growth on Amazon. How can you apply incrementality to your marketing strategy and use actionable insights to execute a targeted advertising approach?
Many brands limit their growth potential by analyzing exclusively attributed sales and structuring their ad spend around advertising methods with low incrementality rates. For instance, while investing in branded searches and keywords boosts attributed sales, this action is too granular and inhibits organic sales growth. Conversely, focusing on genetic keywords and your brand’s organic ranking elevates overall sales continually.
The most reliable way to analyze sales growth is to experiment with both ads and organic rankings. You can conduct systematic, controlled testing by launching various ad campaigns during specific events like holidays or through promotional deals and evaluate organic rankings separately. By dissecting your insights, you can structure your ad spend budget accordingly.
One of Amazon’s most beneficial ad types is top-of-search placements, which position organically ranked and sponsored products on the first page of search results. Ellie Edwards, Perpetua’s Product Designer, reveals that “Top-of-search ad placements generate around 49% of conversions…from only 2% of impressions on sponsored products overall.” This visibility makes top-of-search the leading driver of sales, so it’s crucial to employ incrementality. However, since both sponsored and organic products exist on the first page, top-of-search mirroring can occur, compromising incremental sales and making it difficult for shoppers to distinguish between two identical products.
How can you reduce top-of-search mirroring to augment incremental sales growth?
Identifying mirroring involves pinpointing instances where your product ranks within the top six organic placements. This allows you to take calculated measures to optimize product position. For instance, you can mitigate sales cannibalization on mirrored products by limiting your keyword bidding to reduce sponsored ad rankings, encouraging shoppers to purchase products by clicking on the top organic placement. Alternatively, exchanging sponsored items for higher-profiting products relevant to your target search terms enhances organic sales.
To promote your products to the top-of-search position, it’s imperative to analyze and select relevant keywords. Joe Rideout, the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Perpetua, lists and explains the three criteria for distinguishing search terms, “One would be search volume, so this is a search term that gets a lot of traffic on Amazon. Two is the top-of-search click share. So this is a signal of how much people tend to click on the top few search results versus scrolling around and exploring a lot. And finally, the click-through rate of your products, which is a proxy measure for the relevance of the search term to your products or brand.”
Once you’ve determined ideal keywords and search terms, you must strategically market your products to the top-of-search page. Assessing product incrementality for specific terms requires considering its relevance, competitiveness, and organic rankings. Each ad you test should target shoppers and their most frequently used keywords, and your product reviews, ratings, and prices should match or outperform the competition. Incremental sales increase with organic ratings, so optimizing this rank elevates your products to top-of-search status.
Incrementality plays a crucial role in your advertising approach and can improve product ratings and optimize your ad spend to drive sales growth consistently.
Hannah Blackburn is the Co-founder and Director of The Hawkers Club, a company that helps vendors and sellers solve their most pressing challenges and navigate eCommerce marketplaces, including Amazon and Target. In her role, Hannah advises online sellers and vendors on how to directly position their brands and value offerings as Amazon partners to increase profitability and revenue.
Before co-founding The Hawkers Club, she joined Amazon as a brand specialist with an initial focus on vendor excellence and marketing before transitioning to stock management and profitability. Since she’s written the business logic powering some of the algorithms that run Amazon, Hannah knows how you can systematically make profitable decisions that Amazon’s algorithms reward.
As brands seek to maximize profitability on Amazon, hidden fees, overcharges, and shortages remain a prevailing concern within the platform. How can you identify and address these chargebacks to structure your account spending?
Although you may have a plan in place to mitigate chargebacks and shortages, Amazon expert and accounting veteran Hannah Blackburn says you can leverage additional strategies to safeguard your vendor central account. Amazon places fines and claims on each of its services that brands must recover. These include cost price claims, shipping costs for returns, unjustified provisional rates, overcharges on trading terms, and high direct fulfillment freight costs. When disputing these oversights, it’s essential to prepare invoices and present precise account data to prove your claims. You can also leverage Amazon’s various incentives to facilitate the dispute process.
In today’s episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant sits down with Hannah Blackburn, the Co-founder and Director of The Hawkers Club, to discuss how to dispute Amazon fines. Hannah explains how to identify chargebacks, shortages, and fees on Amazon, considerations for fulfillment-related charges and shortages, and how to use automation to monitor purchase orders.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
Hannah Blackburn is the Co-founder and Director of The Hawkers Club, a company that helps vendors and sellers solve their most pressing challenges and navigate eCommerce marketplaces, including Amazon and Target. In her role, Hannah advises online sellers and vendors on how to directly position their brands and value offerings as Amazon partners to increase profitability and revenue.
Before co-founding The Hawkers Club, she joined Amazon as a brand specialist with an initial focus on vendor excellence and marketing before transitioning to stock management and profitability. Since she’s written the business logic powering some of the algorithms that run Amazon, Hannah knows how you can systematically make profitable decisions that Amazon’s algorithms reward.
As brands seek to maximize profitability on Amazon, hidden fees, overcharges, and shortages remain a prevailing concern within the platform. How can you identify and address these chargebacks to structure your account spending?
Although you may have a plan in place to mitigate chargebacks and shortages, Amazon expert and accounting veteran Hannah Blackburn says you can leverage additional strategies to safeguard your vendor central account. Amazon places fines and claims on each of its services that brands must recover. These include cost price claims, shipping costs for returns, unjustified provisional rates, overcharges on trading terms, and high direct fulfillment freight costs. When disputing these oversights, it’s essential to prepare invoices and present precise account data to prove your claims. You can also leverage Amazon’s various incentives to facilitate the dispute process.
In today’s episode of The Digital Deep Dive, Aaron Conant sits down with Hannah Blackburn, the Co-founder and Director of The Hawkers Club, to discuss how to dispute Amazon fines. Hannah explains how to identify chargebacks, shortages, and fees on Amazon, considerations for fulfillment-related charges and shortages, and how to use automation to monitor purchase orders.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
Online marketplaces, particularly Amazon, are becoming third-party sellers' primary retail sales mode. The retail industry has experienced significant growth in this sector, as marketplaces are projected to represent 60% of overall sales, with 70% emerging from third-party sellers.
This rapid expansion elicits channel disruption as unauthorized vendors monopolize the Amazon Buy Box. Consequently, merchants must analyze market dynamics to develop a brand protection and control strategy. So what tools can you leverage to optimize channel performance and minimize disruptions?
With multiple unauthorized sellers entering Amazon’s landscape, brands' platforms can become overburdened and difficult to regulate. Channel control generates growth opportunities for new investments, products, and innovation. You can implement this solution to optimize three main business areas: pricing, authorized sales, and marketing.
Price disruptions can occur within a marketplace, your seller network, or across multiple channels. Apart from unauthorized sellers impacting optimal pricing, these disruptions may arise from inconsistent customer experiences or low-quality products. Pricing is contingent upon market fluctuations and competition across various channels, so developing a dynamic control strategy is imperative to reduce erosion.
According to Precision eControl’s CEO Blake Burrus, “On average, a brand experiences over 60 unauthorized seller listings on their products. But not all sellers are created equal. There’s a very high degree of concentration in that…three or four [unauthorized] sellers account for almost 70% of revenue destruction.” Addressing and mitigating these resellers requires acute precision and control to determine the vendor's identity and location — and to estimate lost revenue by product. A marketplace control approach helps you focus on the sellers contributing to the majority of the destruction.
Unauthorized seller interference also impacts brands’ opportunities to secure the Buy Box, limiting advertising efforts and decreasing ROAS on Amazon and other platforms. With brand protection, you can create compelling and consistent content across collective channels to enhance the customer experience.
Data science techniques are crucial in quantifying profit loss and resolving channel disruption. These strategies address the inquiries that Jay Radley, Precision eControl’s Head of Sales, proposes, “How do we create actionable, targeted plans…that can drive towards business outcomes? How do we measure that? How can we have the systems in place and the tools to know that when you take an action, you can see the corresponding benefit to your business and your overall trends across online marketplaces.”
Since disturbances and the corresponding outcomes are multifaceted and vary across channels, you must prioritize approaches and decisions to suit your business goals. This involves examining marketplace revenue trends to view both micro and macro business impacts. For instance, you can utilize data analytics to view various sales on different storefronts or obtain a more detailed perspective of product sales. From there, you can determine the appropriate action for addressing specific unauthorized activities.
Although platform control and monitoring are often used interchangeably, these methods differ in their granularity. Typical channel monitoring tools detect superficial disruptions and categorize them together. Conversely, control methods address the interruptions’ sources and possible execution methods to manage them effectively. Case in point, when complying with MAP (minimum advertised price) policies during seller disputes, it’s mandatory to employ a brand-led approach to manage workflows, communication, and data. In contrast, addressing unauthorized resellers necessitates a market-focused process to measure KPIs and outline data.
Brand disruption is a prevailing issue with nuanced protection methods entailing data analytics and market awareness. Brands should employ available tools and develop a brand protection and control strategy to minimize these disturbances and maximize profitability.
Prospering on Amazon can be arduous, especially when programs, strategies, and platforms constantly change.
Fortunately, companies like ProductWind have been testing and learning to figure out the secret sauce to succeed on Amazon. Their findings? Influencer advertising might just be the way to go.
In sharpening its approach to influencer advertising, ProductWind has mastered its strategy to help other brands train Amazon’s algorithm and drive KPIs. So what’s the formula behind influencer advertising, and why is it so lucrative?
Influencer advertising has become an increasingly popular technique to drive consumers to specific brands or products. But influencers create more than just testimonials for your brand — they craft keyword-driven content and help drive traffic, sales, ratings, and reviews.
Influencer advertising benefits your brand on multiple platforms. For example, on Amazon, influencers subliminally send signals to the platform through external traffic generated by their efforts. Over time, influencer-based traffic helps train the Amazon algorithm to love your product.
For ProductWind, influencer success isn’t measured by likes or followers. “For most companies, when you say ‘influencers’ or ‘influencer marketing,’ their mind goes to some form of public relations and talking about likes and comments,” CRO Tim Wilson explains, “That’s not what we do…if we have a choice to optimize a campaign towards driving eCommerce metrics and KPIs…that’s the path we go down.”
Influencer advertising success isn’t dependent on how many “likes” your brand gets on socials. It’s about driving metrics that are connected to sales — you can see the whole journey from influencer to Amazon to brand revenue.
Another common concern brands have is how to vet influencers. To reiterate, you shouldn’t choose your influencer partnerships based on their following. You should look for people who cater to your audience’s demographics, develop beautiful content, and drive traffic, click-through rates, and sales.
“We're looking at to what degree this person [helps] drive each one of these KPIs that you need to be successful,” Tim says. “Then we assemble a team of people with the idea that there's no one influencer who can do all these things — it takes a village.”
Like many other brands, Bose was finding it difficult to win on Amazon due to program changes and expenses. However, their partnership with ProductWind helped them use influencer advertising to get back on track, launch products quickly, and take hold of Amazon’s algorithm.
Described as “an insurance policy for product launches,” ProductWind helped Bose find the right influencers and create campaigns that drove traffic to its products. Todd Weagant, Bose’s Global Head of Sales for Amazon, has high praise for his experience. “As soon as the campaign launched,” he says, “we could see traffic going up. We could see all of our standard metrics going up. And there was nothing else to attribute it to, except for the ProductWind activity.”
There are plenty of aspects on Amazon’s platform that are out of a brand’s control. But companies like ProductWind help you train the algorithm to your brand’s advantage. ProductWind offers transparency, influencer advertising insight, and strategies to help you succeed on Amazon — and beyond.
With Amazon as the leading digital marketplace, brands are looking to optimize sales on its platform. Historically, sellers have developed separate budgets, goals, and advertising strategies for Amazon and DTC, creating silos and cementing the reputed digital divide between channels.
However, “Over the last six months…36% of the Amazon users going to product detail pages actually come from offline sources,” says Blue Wheel’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Nicole Reich. This indicates that consumers are either directed to Amazon by influencers or start their searches on other websites.
So how can you integrate your Amazon and DTC efforts to develop an omnichannel strategy that enhances the customer journey?
Merging Amazon and DTC channels helps establish comprehensive marketing tactics that maximize visibility on both sites. Segregated advertising limits your efforts to one channel, hindering sales and compromising storage and revenue. Tayler Carpenter, Blue Wheel’s VP of Advertising, speaks to the significance of combining strategies: “By having one large macro marketing calendar and one large macro budget and marketing initiatives, we can start putting together the pieces that will make up the larger plan that allows you, as the brand, to have more control and an understanding of what’s going on in…your marketing, business, and omni-commerce.”
Customer lifecycle data is a valuable DTC marketing tool for cross-promoting Amazon products. For instance, when DTC customers sign up for your email list, and you capture their mobile numbers, you can send text messages to promote new product launches, deals, and inventory restocks on your Amazon site. One in three shoppers prefer receiving texts to emails, and 73% have made a purchase after obtaining one; leveraging DTC communication helps grow your Amazon brand.
TikTok is dominating the social media landscape, and many younger consumers begin their searches on this platform, making it a fundamental advertising tool. Maximizing product discovery requires regularly appearing on numerous “for you” pages — a user’s curated algorithm — by including the hashtag Amazon on each video. When you optimize videos with appropriate hashtags, TikTok categorizes them to display relevant content related to individual searches.
The ultimate goal when advertising on TikTok is to become viral, boosting conversions and sales on your Amazon site. Yet this can lead to inventory shortages, so it’s crucial to incorporate DTC with your Amazon store as an alternative for fulfilling product demands.
Amazon’s Buy with Prime option is evolving to accommodate omnichannel capabilities. When employing this program on your DTC website, consumers can purchase products using their Amazon information and receive two-day shipping, creating a familiar and seamless customer experience. Additionally, Buy with Prime enables brands to leverage Amazon fulfillment centers to fulfill both DTC and Amazon orders, thereby consolidating multiple channels. A Buy with Prime strategy may increase conversions by 25% and drive additional traffic to your website.
By recognizing and forming a correlation between DTC and Amazon operations, you can acquire additional customers and boost sales to expand your business.
As Amazon continues to dominate the digital landscape, advertising is becoming increasingly competitive, and strategies to influence customers are progressing across multiple channels. But many brands still develop ad objectives, measure performance, and make costly decisions through business-specific sales, customer, and profit data.
This finite approach lacks consideration for the larger market that includes competitors, industry trends, and consumer shopping habits.
So how can you develop a market-aware advertising method to optimize your strategies and improve brand performance?
When making industry-informed decisions, identifying your ideal market is fundamental to your strategy. Traditional methods of pinpointing an audience involve positioning products into categories. Yet this approach may be either too broad or too narrow since Amazon has over 16,000 dynamic subcategories, and brands often misclassify their products.
A more effective model is to determine a specific set of product ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Number) that generate sales volume and address shopper needs. Customers express their intentions through search terms; two similar products may rank with the same keyword if consumers purchase both products after their search. Your established ASINs must reflect Amazon’s overall competition and consumer trends, so referencing the Amazon Search Terms report is crucial to ensure a comprehensive collection. This report displays Amazon’s top-ranked keywords by frequency and popularity. You can also search for your ASINs to determine bestselling items and correlating terms and compare those against trending words and products.
By gathering and analogizing keywords and similar-ranking products, you can compile ASINs that help you create small, precise markets for tactical decision-making.
Once you’ve defined a profitable market for your ads, it’s essential to implement a strategy to extract value from your efforts. Competitive intelligence drives sales and consumers away from competitors to your Amazon storefront. The optimal way to expropriate sales from adversaries is to create targeted ad campaigns like sponsored displays that allow you to advertise on another brand’s product detail pages. It’s recommended to optimize this strategy by targeting the top-selling item in a brand’s category.
Another technique is to employ Amazon DSP to entice customers who viewed a competitor's product detail page without making a purchase. You should retarget shoppers after they’ve left the page to compare your ad or product with the rival. The third competitive approach involves leveraging your competition’s top-ranking keywords through an aggressive top-of-search campaign. After confirming these search terms, compare your organic rankings with a contender and place bids on the top-of-search placements to outrank them.
Quantifying your advertisements’ impacts on sales and revenue is crucial for business development. The conventional approach to measuring performance involves developing a target ROAS (return on ad spend) to structure your advertising methods. But to compare sales and profits with your competitors, you must consider your company’s market share.
Analyzing market trends and developments helps you determine the seasonal factors — namely Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday — impacting your sales volume. You can also utilize these measurements to assemble an ideal ad budget consistent with your target market. For instance, Franz Jordan, Perpetua’s VP and General Manager, says, “If your market is growing by 20% on average, then your budget should also grow by 20%.”
Ultimately, a competitive advertising landscape should implement intentional solutions that drive sales and maximize profit for long-term prosperity.
Martin Heubel is the Strategy and Amazon Consultant at Consulterce, a strategy consultancy helping B2C household and CPG brands increase their 1P vendor profits on Amazon. As the founder, he has over five years of experience assisting CPG and household brands to master their bottom line. Before Consulterce, Martin was a Senior Category Manager at Amazon, where he helped brands such as Nestle and Mars turn their digital retail operations into high-performing, eight-figure accounts.
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During Q4 in 2022, Amazon withdrew inventory to prevent overstocking, disrupting availability and trade relationships between brands, Amazon, and suppliers. With this risk aversion impacting supply and demand, how can brands remain savvy to sustain inventory and profits?
According to Amazon consultant Martin Heubel, Amazon Vendor Negotiations (AVN) are crucial in developing an operational strategy for the coming year. During these mediations, Amazon determines fair trade agreements, including product pricing and margins, that brands must observe to prevent listing removals, Buy Box suspension, and inventory shortages. Maintaining stock and profitability requires analyzing your portfolio structure to mitigate risk and engaging with Amazon throughout the year. It’s imperative to understand and manage your margins, orders, catalogs, and financials to communicate market value and stay relevant.
Martin Heubel, Strategy and Amazon Consultant at Consulterce, is Aaron Conant’s guest on today’s episode of The Digital Deep Dive. They discuss the current and future states of Amazon’s business model. Martin also shares how brands can maintain inventory in 2023, advice for winning AVNs, and how the platform’s risk aversion affects brands.
BWG Connect provides executive strategy and networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. We network and knowledge share together to better understand and adapt to the newest trends, strategies, and pain points shaping growth in the digital space. BWG Connect, in conjunction with BWG Strategy, has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
In addition, we have had 1x1 conversations with over 5,000 brands and have a real-time pulse on what digital strategies are successful and why. This in-depth knowledge allows our team to operate on the cutting-edge and provide our clients with best-in-class guidance on how to win in the digital world. We have provided free consultations and strategy sessions for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune-100, to enable growth, resolve issues and make curated service provider introductions that can impact your digital footprint.
We have held to the philosophy of providing high-level insights and actionable knowledge with no sales pitches in order to provide to our network the ability to listen, learn and act to improve themselves as well as their organizations. Our ultimate goal is to be the resource out there to help digital executives find the research they need to excel in the modern marketplace.
If you are interested in getting involved with any of our current or past events, you can find them here. If you are looking for help & would like to set up some time to chat with our team, you can schedule a time or reach out directly to Aaron@bwgconnect.com or Tiffany@bwgconnect.com.
