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
Our Ability to Comment on Product Ratings Will Soon Be a Thing of the Past
To comment or not to comment tis the question but Amazon has… or soon will… remove our ability to comment on Product Ratings (also known as Product Reviews). This past week many Prime Guidance clients received this notice from Amazon.
Dear seller,
You are receiving this email because you recently left a comment on a review.
While reviews and feedback are important to our customers and sellers, the comments feature on customer reviews was rarely used. As a result, we are retiring this feature on December 16, 2020.
We are committed to your continued success and will innovate and develop other opportunities for you to connect with customers.
Thank you.
– Amazon Services
As we all know, product ratings can make or break the success of the product. It is very often the first place a consumer looks when they click into a detail page and if they click deeper into the ratings, they most often look at the one and two star ratings. If they use filters like I do, they will never see an item with less than four stars.
We coach our clients to always read their product’s reviews, both the good and bad ones, but especially the bad ones. The small percentage of shoppers who give a product rating are taking time out of their busy day, knocking on your front door, and using a bullhorn to tell you their experience with your item. Most of us were brought up to say “thank you” when we are given a compliment and it may not be feasible for you to make this comment on every good review received, however, it is critical to do so when you receive a bad rating.
Often, a bad rating is given because of product confusion, a defective item (they happen to even the highest rated item), a delayed FBA shipment, or sometimes due to bad content on your detail page. If the rating is due to the first two reasons, sometimes you just need to simply say:
“We are very sorry to hear about the issue you are having with {product name} and your satisfaction is our highest priority. Please reach out to us through Amazon’s support system so we can make this right”.
It tells that customer and anyone else who reads it that they are important and that they matter. If the customer does reach out you can now fix the situation and if you do, just to their satisfaction there is a very good chance they will change the rating. If you go beyond their satisfaction, they will change the rating and tell 25 of their friends about the experience.
For anyone unaware of the ability comment it is here:
Or from your Brand Dashboard you can click on Manage Reviews in the Customer Review Section:
Thus far, the ability to comment still exists. According to the message, it was supposed to have been removed on December 16th, but I suspect it will happen soon after the holiday season.
We will continue to coach our clients to read their product ratings so they can learn about what people are saying. They may not be able to comment back, but if they can detect a pattern it may be able to be easily addressed. It could be through changes to the detail pages, fixes to the infographics, or additions or even deletion to the A+ Content. It could be through developing an insert that goes in every box or a edit to the instructions. If it was a delayed shipment by FBA Amazon, you may want to even remove the rating. There will always be learnings from the negative ratings, but there will be no way to reach out directly to the customer to fix the situation… or will there be?
Speculating to the reason why Amazon is removing this tool is just that… speculation and it does really matter. Amazon simply states that it is a tool not often used but I have also heard people say that less scrupulous sellers use it to hound consumers who have given their product a bad rating. Either may be true but Amazon goes on to say that will “innovate and develop other opportunities for you to connect with customers”.
2020 has seen more changes in Seller Central than I have seen over the last several years and maybe… just maybe… there will be a better way for us to communicate directly to the consumer to tell them that they are important to us and that we want to fix any negative experience they have with our product.
Those of you who have read my other blogs or have seen me on the Prime Guidance weekly webinar every Thursday know that I often cite the Amazon Leadership Principles, which I have learned during my time as an Amazon employee and these principles became even more important as a hiring Bar Raiser. The email sent by Amazon said they are taking this action because the tool is rarely used, but if there is more to it then they have addressed several of their Leadership Principles, first and foremost, Customer Obsession. After that, assuming they create a better tool for us, it is Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Think Big and Deliver Results. When I begin an engagement with a new client, I tell them three things:
- Read the Leadership Principles and when you speak or write to Amazon Seller Support learn to use the principles, especially the customer experience
- Take the emotion out of it
- Amazon is King of their hill, accept it, don’t fight it and then review number one and number two
- 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
How Your Customers Can Help With Advertising
Ambassador Programs
Something that I’ve seen a lot of success with indirect with consumer is really leveraging kind of Ambassador programs, getting some of your best customers your most loyal customers and honestly, if that could be an entire hour long call how that works so we’re not going to go into that long story short is having a program in place where you have an intimate relationship with some of your customers and then you can start soliciting them for high-value such as video content and I’ve seen some really really cool videos on Amazon where they are taking video testimonials from their customers and stringing them back to back to back and it’s just an amazing social proof piece. So and I’m looking at these products videos you have kind of like the infographic let’s talk about the product. You have the hey, let’s talk about the company itself. Cause some companies have some really cool names.
Embrace Who You Are
Are you made in America manufactured in America? Are you women owned? minority-owned? veteran-owned? Here’s a great place to share that story as long as it’s allowed. And then we also have kind of sharing some of these customer testimonial videos in a social proof aspect of it. So it’s not like everyone on the call, its not cut and dry. It’s not simple. It’s not like here is the one way to do it…
- Published in Uncategorized
Why You Need Videos On Your Amazon Product Page
See For Yourself
Videos are becoming more and more important, as you can see right here. I did an Amazon search for exercise equipment and right here. It shows videos related to your search so videos are constantly getting more and more– and these are just videos off the off the product pages. So it’s definitely worth having a video now that it’s even getting a whole entire row of real estate at this point.
The Payoff
Like they could put products here, but instead they put videos so these guys are getting double exposure now, so if they’re products here and here that these guys have two slots Now within Amazon, so it’s definitely worth having a video on your product page.
- Published in Uncategorized