Amazon EC Summit 2021
In October 2021, Amazon held the largest EC event, “Amazon EC Summit,” in Tokyo to recognize 22 “high quality” sellers and distributors from 6 categories as providing a better shopping experience through Amazon.co.jp’s marketplace.
Any Seller will tell you, selling on Amazon successfully is a challenge in any category. From competition that’s constantly raising the bar and reinventing products to inventory issues caused by an ever-changing global landscape. Amazon continually raises the bar, pushing sellers to provide a better shopping experience. However, in 2020 and 2021, with the introduction of COVID, selling on Amazon took on a whole new level of complexities. COVID not only caused issues for sellers and their supply chains. It also caused problems for Amazon at fulfillment centers that challenged everyone to keep inventory in place and get shipments to customers on time. In addition to these challenges, consumers stuck at home for months faced new challenges setting up home offices and adjusting to life in quarantine. These adjustments pushed sales on Amazon to new heights in many areas.
Amazon continues to recognize and award sellers who provide the best possible shopping experience to their customers. At Prime Guidance, we understand Amazon is constantly changing and innovating. To keep our clients on top in these markets, we continuously look at events like these to see where Amazon recognizes excellence.
This year, Amazon awarded sellers/distributors who excelled in several areas of the logistic chain, from branding to overseas sales, to name a few.
“We are delighted to introduce 22 distributors offering a better shopping experience to our customers through the Amazon.co.jp Seller Award 2021. High quality to distributors. To sell products effectively, Amazon provides various logistics operations, branding, overseas sales, etc. Amazon will continue to offer to small and medium-sized businesses and other distributors. We will endeavor to provide highly convenient services that can be utilized.” – Kazuho Rouk, Amazon JP Business Headquarters
Casualbox (Marsh Co., LTD.) specializes in trendy, practical, high-quality hats and headbands hand-made in Osaka, Japan. Satoshi Numa started 20 years ago, creating hats with a new cultural mix between East and Western design. With success, he realized the only way to get his designs to the world was to go online.
“I am surprised and very honored to receive such an award. Our company, which sells casual headwear such as hair bands and beanies, has focused on overseas business for several years. Cultures are different between Japan and the global market. For this reason, it was a trial-and-error process every day for sales, but I am glad that it bears fruit in this way. We will continue to deliver excellent products to customers around the world who enjoy shopping at Amazon.” – Satoshi Numa
Prime Guidance was excited to see Casualbox, a long-time client, receive the Overseas Sales Award. Any Amazon seller will tell you, selling in multiple markets is challenging. But selling in the US, Canada, Mexico, all of Europe, Australia, and Japan and receiving an award from Amazon for these efforts is quite an achievement. Casualbox has been expanding into new markets aggressively for the last 2-3 years with great success.
“Jeroen Verschoor and Katherine Oyakawa at Casualbox are truly exceptional at what they do. They work efficiently and know how to focus efforts to have the most impact on the Amazon Marketplaces.” – Wes Beckwith, Sr. Consultant at Prime Guidance
If you are a current seller on Amazon or looking to expand into the Amazon marketplace, Prime Guidance can also empower your company to succeed. Prime Guidance Advisors help sellers navigate the challenges of e-commerce on multiple marketplaces, including selecting the right strategy, optimizing content for faster growth, improving operations to meet your marketplace requirements, and leveraging technologies to improve visibility and profitability.
For more information about Amazon’s EC Summit, visit Amazon Newsroom (http://amazon-press.jp) and About Amazon (http://www.aboutamazon.jp). For more information on this release: https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000001368.000004612.html
- Published in Conferences
Amazon’s New Policing Mechanism: Are Your Images TOS Compliant?
What Is This About?
Recently Amazon has come out with a new policing mechanism to check your main images to make sure they are TOS compliant. If they don’t comply with the rules Amazon has set, your listing may face suspension or other punishments.
Listings Are Getting Suppressed
What I’ve been noticing is that Amazon is going after our images with a real Vengeance right now and I actually do have confirmation from within Amazon not through Prime Guidance, but through just a close friend of mine that they are proactively launching a new policing mechanism to make sure that all of the main images within Amazon are going to be Amazon TOS compliant. So when you’re looking at your listing and I’m guilty of it, I’ve certainly put additional things in my main image to try and increase click-through rate to try and increase, you know, can I differentiate my product from the rest of the results on the on the search results page but some of those listings that I have done that on are currently suspended and I have a number of clients who have had products that are very deeply impacted by this. One of those clients was is large enough that they have an Amazon representative internally that works, you know directly with them. She was able to confirm everything that I just said that they are doing a sweep. They do want to please says Main images. They do want to you know have a consistent experience for customers and they’re Also catching a lot of supplemental images in that sweep.
Check All Of Your Images
So even though they’re targeting the main images the hero images if you have infographics, if you have kind of embellished images on your listing, you may get caught up in the sweep… So make sure you’re staying on top of it. This is a great use case for having a change tracking software something that we encourage all of our clients to have so that they’re actively watching their listing they’re seeing if images are going missing if the title is changing if the fulfillment methods changing so be on your toes, this is a big deal to Victor’s point the clients that are impacted right now were already into six figures in lost Revenue.
How To Fix The Problem
So it’s a very big deal and what the advice I got from Amazon, If you do run into the situation is that use your internal Amazon rep if you have one They’re going to have the best ability to remedy and fix the situation. And then if you do not have an internal Amazon rep, then you’re going to need to open cases in addition to Re-uploading the videos on the back end of your Seller Central and that you should anticipate it taking up to a couple of weeks before you get those images back live again. So for anybody who has main images that are embellished, this is Food For Thought there’s not a guarantee that you’re going to get caught there never is but I would put a 90% plus certainty that they’re doing a heavy sweep on Main images being just a picture of your product with a white background around it exactly according to Amazon TOS.
- Published in Uncategorized
When Should You Make A Keyword Negative On Amazon?
Intro
A lot of people will wonder when or if they should make one of their keywords a negative term. The best solution we’ve found is setting some sort of quota the term has to achieve in order for us to keep the keyword.
You Have To Test It
One thing that I like to always do is to look at how many customers have been exposed to an ad of a particular search query and then determine, did I have enough of a chance to see conversions and I didn’t so that might be 20 clicks or whatever it is based on your conversion rate. But if you said something to a minimum and say if I haven’t received any clicks or any purchases and I’ve had this many clicks then I should have by all their measures had at least one conversion.
Results
Look, it’s probably not a good term to continue with let’s stop spending money on those and if there’s something that, it’s just a no-brainer you don’t have to wait for any clicks I mean, it could be just one impression and you realize that’s oh my gosh Amazon automated bids are trying to to find this term or spending money on this term. That is not a fit. I need to add that in negatives right away. I didn’t think to have it ahead of time learn fast and save that money.
- Published in Uncategorized
Are You Taking Advantage Of Amazon Posts?
It Keeps getting Better
So, you know at the end of the day it’s one of those tools where Amazon is just updating it constantly and a few weeks ago, they updated it to include carousels and they updated it to include scheduling post. So I can’t tell you how highly I encourage every attendee every client, take advantage of it I mean its rare that Amazon gives us something for free and the visibility on those posts is phenomenal. So what I’m doing with all of our clients that I’m working with is we’re looking at, okay what is our post strategy for the rest of the year and then how quickly can we get it in there so that we don’t have to think about it anymore.
Easy To Use
Now that we can schedule it ahead of time. Let’s get those posts schedule to the end of the year and then it’s not going back and having to check on it and you know double check and I have 1 client I was speaking to actually earlier today who I think is super smart in what she’s doing and she is posting a few every day and she set it up in such a way. So their social media team is literally feeding their content into her Amazon, you know administrator and then the amazon administrator is just taking it and putting in a post. So as the social media team is creating their content calendar, they’re just sharing it into Amazon. No additional operational cost no extra content creation, it’s awesome.
- Published in Uncategorized
Getting A Video For Your Product Page Isn’t As Hard Or As Expensive As You Think. Here’s Why.
It’s Not As Hard As It Seems
It’s an area that I see neglected a lot of times is video because I think a lot of 3rd party sellers think, this video is way to costly. I don’t have the people that they can produce videos and I don’t have the money to pay someone to produce a high-quality video so they neglect it all together. The reality is you don’t need some high performance, you know videographer to shoot a video for your product at least not out of the gate. Initially, We find that just putting some images and photography together into a video and adding some text and some Transitions and stuff can actually look really strong and actually do a really good job of portraying key messages it varies distinctly especially in the the first few seconds to get someone interested in enough to to stay engaged and watch the rest of the video matters.
Increase Sales By Over 3x Your Usual Amount
So if you’re going to do something like that on Amazon because you know, we know Amazon quotes that increases conversion rate by 3.6 times the normal conversion rate when a customer watches one of those videos so its hugely successful.
- Published in Uncategorized