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.
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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.
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Why You Need A+ Content
People LOVE Visuals
As far as the importance of A+ content, you know in my opinion customers do not like to read anymore and I’ll say this too, if you only have a description please at least take the time to do an HTML description because doing this to block a paragraph text. I haven’t talked to anybody, family friends or otherwise that I pulled to ask a question of do you read that and what they’ll say is that if they see a sentence they feel like it’s a joke and if they see a blurb of text they just see it and go ugh and don’t read it but people are very visual. So, you know, give them what they want through the A+ content.
How Important Is A+ Content
I think it in order of importance on a on a product detail page. The first thing is going to be your your title and your main image because that’s what people are going to see what they do a search that’s going to have them clicking into your into your listing. then its going to be the reviews. So you know I think reviews or are, have to be just as important as title and main image. So once they get to your listing though, it’s the secondary images the video, It’s the bullet points, how you how you word the bullet points to draw their attention there, but after that, it’s got to be the A+ content is what’s important.
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Impressions And Clicks On Amazon: Correlation And Impact
Correlation
Anytime I see something that’s getting a lot of Impressions but very few clicks There’s two things that are going– that I’m immediately going to question. Is it a relevant term? So for example, if you’re advertising I’m just looking at my desk here, and someone searches for a mouse and you end up showing a picture of a calculator Yes, it’s somewhat correlated. It’s relevant same type of user but the reality is it’s not what they were looking for. You’re going to get impressions originally, but you’re not going to get clicks. So it’s because you’re targeting the wrong keywords in that case, you’re not narrow enough in your search. But in other cases it’s your product image may not be compelling.So I would really want to look at what is that main image looks like suggesting that our clients test with like a pick fu if it’s not already live and if it is live doing so A/B testing through a solution like split li2te to really compare which of 2 main images is actually producing better results and what I think that is often a failure on that front when you talk talk main images is How do you– a lot of people just follow what everybody else is doing. Well, everybody else is showing a bottle with a box behind it, I need to do the same.
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How To Obtain And Manage Reviews On Amazon
Break Down
For me, I feel like having a strategy in place to constantly be
filling in positive reviews. You’re always going to get negative reviews. It’s going to happen. No matter how good your product is. Honestly, if you’re product is the best of its type, you’re probably going to get the most negative reviews
because a lot of your competitors are going to be proactively trying to bring you down. So you need to have a strategy in place to constantly be bringing in positive reviews. Some of the ones that you know, we are big advocates of in Prime guidance is reaching out to feedback. So when people leave positive seller feedback, they often times will reference your product and they won’t understand that they’re leaving feedback for the seller versus the product. So having a system in place to follow up with people who have positive
feedback encourage them to leave a positive review, I found to be a very cost-effective an easy way to start getting reviews and then there are some platforms and we don’t need to go into detail on what they are, but there are some platforms that allow you to offer your product
at a promotional price and then you have the ability to interact with that person post purchase. These are platforms. Theses are not review platforms.
That is not their purpose they’re sales acceleration programs. But because you have that ability to contact the person remember they’ve already gotten their product.
They’ve already gotten the promotion, they’ve gotten the discount, in no way is it contingent on them leaving review. But just having the ability to follow up and begin a conversation with the person I’ve found to be very effective in getting reviews in that way as well. I’ll stop there.
I don’t know if Wes or Victor if you guys want to touch on some of the cool stuff we could do and Many-Chat as well to help Garner more reviews or any other ideas
you have Wes. I’ll let Victor hit Many Chat, but the one thing, the one tip that I will give that I have found to be extremely effective.
Build A Relationship
It doesn’t, at least the last time we were successful,
because as you know Amazon changes all the time.
It doesn’t change the star review. But I encourage my customers or my clients to always reach out to every
single review good bad neutral Otherwise, especially neutral and bad reviews and Sprigley you put the dollar amount on it seven hundred bucks was what one of another seller out there at the Prosper show put a value on a 5-star review and just to qualify that you guys, the person who put that
dollar value is actually $750, is a top-five seller on Amazon.
So I encourage all of my clients to do is Spend the time, reach out on those bad reviews and I don’t care what you
have to do. Get that customer, build a relationship, build up that trust, and then get that customer to alter and append their review and while the star Count may not
Change, I believe Amazon still does the update on that review and in my opinion.
Reality Check
Because here’s the thing how many of you guys have gone to buy something how many five-star reviews do you read verses how many one-star reviews do you read? That right there a one-star review of appended to good review is worth 10 to 25 Stars. If you can get those consistently and get a couple of those on your account, I mean you’re golden. We’ve done that on three different products and I’m telling you PPC went down sales with up by 25 30% over time. It’s and we actually started calling it out in our in our product
pages, but I’ll stop there. Victor you know– No, I want to add on to that because that is freaking genius and it’s something I’ve been doing but I’ve never actually sat around and thought about why I was doing it and the fact that people read these one star reviews I was on a call with a
client yesterday and they put it beautifully there like think about it this way if that person who leads the one-star review and it’s like a paragraph long right cause the 1 star reviews are never like 1 word, the 5 star reviews are like, “its awesome”. The 1 star reviews are like “1 star, here’s my book”. And what they were saying that really resonated with me is this, the squeaky wheel is always going to be the squeaky wheel. So if they’re that adamant about one-star review and being upset and angry, they’re most likely going to be that adamant about having the company reach out to them know making them a priority, spending time with them. It reminded me of one of the Brand’s I worked with and the gentlemen Edward, who’s one of our
Attendees who works there currently. Over the years we’ve run into some some customers in that brand who were really really aggressive and really really I don’t know just just problematic. I had other words, but about, you know ingredients or about you know– one customer when we first started selling on amazon misinterpreted the lot number for the date of expiration, and just went absolutely haywire on that topic. Some of those guys have ended up being our best brand ambassadors years later because we spent the time and energy so I think Tyler, I think that’s a really good call out for us.
The Payoff
If you know, if we can find some of those, you know customers who have had a less-than-ideal experience and just spend the time going out to him and massaging
Their ego, you know we oftentimes do see, you know a transition from a really “I rate 1 star” to a you know best case scenario super enthusiastic 5 star In my experience is normally ends up more it like a 3.5-4 because they’ll come back and they’ll say like “hey the product didn’t meet my expectations, but man that company was amazing, their customer service was awesome.” And that for me as a consumer gives me confidence that I’m looking at this product and I see two or three other from really large name brands that I know and should trust and pay the 30% premium because of that brand name and I see this other
guy he’s got less reviews and you know, he is a newer player.
I’m not familiar with the killer price, if you know– or even
a higher price in some cases. Absolutely, but than I see that every single time someone had a problem the company made it right. I’m going to buy that product. So I’m going to throw 2 things out there again to you is that, 1.) how many of us have cell phones and have some kind of a satellite or
cable service, huge companies that are just you know known for not really following through on customer service.
So it’s it’s a trend that larger brands are not taking care of their customers be that person that takes care of your customers and follow through and build that trust. I’m going to stop there and say go find the Amazon principles.
I don’t have the link on me go find it print it out, put it above your work desk and live by it as your as your company for services second I just want to throw out there,
there. So Apple, I worked at Apple engineering for about six years and apple had a system for their customers.
They would acknowledge the customers issue a line with that customer and then assure that customer they’re going to get that resolved. About 4 years ago, They pivoted it a little bit from that to that plus exactly what we’re talking
about take that bad situation and create a promoter because social media is key when that person writes that book as a review on Amazon and you flip that customer to a promoter of your business, they’re going to go write that same kind of stuff on Facebook. And yeah, and if you were younger like Victor, and not old like me they’ll be on Instagram and I’m kidding. I was told that Facebook’s for old people and I was like, oh okay. I’m kidding, I give him a hard time all the time for it because I think Victors like what– We’ll I think You’re making a good point there though. Every audience does have a totally different, you know, social media you know network of choice. Doug, I think you were going to say something. Oh that’s alright, But the, you know me coming in with my adjacent industry thing,
What It Looks Like
1 thing that I know gives me confidence when I’m shopping for hotels is when I see there’s bad reviews and then there’s engagement, you know, and My thought is Management’s engage they’re trying to respond to every negative review.
They’re not just ignoring or hiding the negative reviews,
and only responding to the ones that said “I had a great vacation” “oh we’ed love to have you back” and then the ones that say their negatives are like “good riddance
don’t ever come back.” No, hey man, I think I think it’s a really good point and and– None of this stuff that we’re talking about, lets be honest, none of this stuff is earth shattering, ground breaking, new, creative, original,
We’re Just taking standard best practices in the business world and saying, how do we apply them to an Amazon business?
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