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.
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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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