Why Does Amazon Novice Sellers Open Their Stores to Death?

• Date: 17 March 2021
• reading time: 8 Minutes
• Blogger: Jakeson Christopher

What Amazon sellers are most afraid of receiving? That must be a notice to close the store. In what ways did the Amazon store die? Common reasons include poor selection, supply chain failure to keep up, too few orders, selling fake products, and poor service. Today, I will share with you a few points that novice sellers should pay attention to.

1. Lack of market analysis

The core of e-commerce success lies in product research.

Product research is to choose market segments. Now when you enter Amazon, the products on the top-selling list have a lot of search volume, but the difficulty is also very obvious. Keyword searches are concentrated on a few words. Every word is occupied by big sellers and has high barriers.

Therefore, regardless of CPC or DEAL, a lot of money was invested, with little effect. Under the sub-categories and subdivided keywords, look for market growth points and eat growth dividends.

It's better to change your mind and spend some time every day to sort out product transaction keywords, hot search keywords, and soaring keywords, and look for subdivided keywords under sub-categories. Find the segmented keywords and make your product the number one in this keyword. Relatively speaking, the competition is not so fierce, and there is a lot of gain. Or directly use AmzChart to analyze the product research market, and find the most suitable product in the database by analyzing BSR changes and product monitoring.

Recently, many sellers recommend using social media to select products. Now that social media advertising is becoming more and more important, selecting products in social media has indeed become more reasonable and effective. SocialNiche may be a good choice.

2. No pricing awareness at all, free pricing

Amazon is a very serious price comparison platform, similar products are put together, plus a follow-up mechanism, therefore, many traditional pricing ideas will fail on this platform.

For example, there is a concept in traditional pricing: our pricing must be based on the value of the product. However, online, because the homogeneous products are put together, it means that you have to refer to your peers for pricing.

For offline stores, his purchase cost maybe $30, so these products that can be sold for $100 offline are sold at such a low price online. If you want to sell for $59, it will be difficult to sell. Therefore, the pricing on Amazon must first refer to your opponents. Instead of looking at the value of your product.

3. Rely entirely on CPC to obtain traffic

I have seen some merchants and found that there is no traffic in the store, so I think it’s a good idea to do Amazon advertising? So when there is no free traffic, you start to spend your budget. The result was also very miserable. After spending so much money, I didn't even earn back the cost of the product. And even so, the free traffic has not improved at all.

What's the matter?

These businesses obviously didn't understand how Amazon ads should be invested.

Let me remember a word: Amazon advertising can only be icing on the cake, not carbon in the snow.

Explanation: When we operate a store, we must first obtain free traffic through free traffic operation. When optimizing free traffic is done very well, then we should operate advertising to amplify traffic.

What is the reason for this? Amazon has the same thinking as Google, hoping that customers can find their favorite products in the shortest possible time and place orders to leave. The transaction conversion rate is a relatively important factor in the A9 algorithm. If you don’t even optimize your listing, you rashly open advertising to guide traffic and compete with sellers with better similar goals. If you are not a good product, customers will click in. Is the deal done? Advertising expenses are wasted. Can you earn back advertising expenses without a deal? Over time, your listing will be judged by the A9 algorithm as a junk product, and you won’t even be able to spend it on advertising.

Don’t forget, it’s not that you become good at advertising, but you start advertising when you’re good.

4. Don't analyze peer data

Amazon is very mature and needs to be able to clarify the relationship from a lot of data and grasp the key points. At present, the ability of data analysis is relatively lacking for most small and medium-sized sellers, and it needs to be made up as soon as possible.

Why look at relevant data promoted by peers?

In Amazon selling goods, there are ultimately two problems to be solved: the problem of traffic acquisition and the problem of increasing the conversion rate. The ability to obtain traffic continuously and steadily determines the future business development of the store. How to promote more effectively is an issue that all sellers attach great importance to.

The key to spending money on promotion lies in whether the money is spent on the cutting edge. If the output meets your expectations, even if the promotion cost is high, it is worth the investment. On the contrary, spending less money is a waste.

After clarifying the key logic, let's look at more specific ones.

Selling things online has one of the biggest characteristics: the promotion channels of peers are almost transparent. As long as you master the basic methods, you can figure it out clearly, and after you figure out the promotion channels of your peers, you can easily know two things:

The promotion channel composition data of top sellers in the industry is used to evaluate the promotion cost and difficulty of the current category.

Study and judge the composition of the opponent's promotion channels, and formulate targeted strategies in terms of promotion strategies.

Studying the composition of the promotion channels of top sellers in the same industry can let us know very clearly which promotion channels can make products sell better, and which channels you have to choose as the focus of promotion. The promotion channel that top sellers generally choose must be the effective channel at the moment, otherwise they will not spend money to invest. 

5. just start to find a representative operation

Let's just say the conclusion. So far, I have learned that there are very few sellers who have done business on behalf of them.

What's the reason? Let me analyze it.

The traditional and simplest way is for the seller to pay the monthly cost of the agent, and then divide it according to the sales amount. The problem that arises is that if the profit rate is low in the later stage, the seller will have no money to make. However, what the agent operation does is "no-cost trading", which is very profitable, and it is easy to conflict with interests here.

And after 2013, e-commerce is too popular, and agency operations are very popular, and more agency operations companies have appeared. This begins to pit sellers. Especially those small and medium sellers who don't know how to do it.

Such an agency operation company has greatly affected the credibility of the agency operation industry. After the difficulty of e-commerce operations has escalated, there are more and more such agents operating companies.

6. Still relying on black technology

First of all, what is Amazon black technology? When Amazon makes product recommendations, it often makes product recommendations by judging the data performance of a product. The normal operation is to capture the market, promote good products that are recognized by customers, and obtain the performance of these data in a natural state.

Black technology means that by interfering with these data, it can make a big change in the flow of the product. Common data interference is mainly in the click-through rate, collection rate, shopping cart rate, conversion rate, customer reviews, and so on.

Let's talk about a black technology that has the most extensive impact on order processing. For example, your current product conversion rate is 2%, and 100 buyers have 2 transactions. For example, in your industry, it belongs to the middle reaches, so the traffic allocated by Amazon to you will not be too high. And ordering is to let more "hand-scratching buyers" buy your products through you. For example, for every 100 visitors, you find 2 more people to buy. Then the conversion rate is 4%. In this case, your traffic may double several times. And if people help to buy in front, you have to pay a certain cost. But the subsequent increase in traffic will earn these costs back.

In the early days when the order was crazy, even if it was a junk product, as long as you dare to do it, the data performance was good enough. You will earn it back several times later. Because at that time, the cost of ordering was very low. In addition to brushing orders, optimizing the conversion rate is effective. And by optimizing the click-through rate, collection rate, and shopping cart rate, these will be very effective. Generally speaking, if you let more buyers collect your products, it will basically help you improve your ranking.

Of course, Amazon also has a strong technical team. Every time black technology comes out, Amazon spends a lot of energy to improve the technology and fight against it.

For example, Amazon's method is to judge from the perspective of the account. If an account has too many purchases in a month and all products are purchased, then this account is classified as a dangerous account. If a product is purchased by multiple dangerous accounts, Amazon will judge it as a scalping.

At the same time, Amazon holds an attitude that it would rather kill a thousand by mistake. As long as a buyer is judged to be a buyer, the merchants he bought will require self-certification. Those who want to get Amazon to let it go will explode the list of buyers. The merchants will also implicate a bunch of buyers who are buying orders. It is better not to do it in the first place.

This method has formed a certain degree of restraint on the brushing. Because even if you can still make money, if it is found that Amazon deletes the product link, all previous efforts will be lost. After all, the original dedicated hand-checking is very risky.

Therefore, sellers still have to focus on their traffic output ability, make their products more competitive, and make their conversion rate higher, otherwise the black technology will have nothing to do with you.

Many small sellers know to be Amazon, what they catch and do, they don't know anything about the product, and they have no control over the quality, so they can basically be sentenced to death. The era of cross-border e-commerce earning money has long passed, and the product is the first. Always remember that the product is the first. At the beginning of the business, the most important experience is to find a good product. What is a good product? High market demand, less competition from peers, and good product quality can probably be considered as a good basic description of the product. You have to consider these basic elements. Always compare data and pay attention to data changes to succeed.

• Blogger: Jakeson Christopher
• Professional SaaS marketer at AmzChart
• Jakeson Christopher is a professional SaaS marketer who has been in the e-commerce and advertising industry for 15 years. He has excellent Facebook/Google advertising experience and has helped many Shopify and Amazon sellers to successfully conduct product research. You can find him on Quora(https://www.quora.com/profile/Christopher-Jakeson).
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