Sellers and fellow businessmen, if you are thinking of upscaling your product availability through e-Commerce platforms but are boggled about the complexities of logistics, inventory management, and the sophistication associated with it, you should seek help from industry advisories.
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is one such service, popular if you haven’t heard, to set up your business online. FBA gives you the inventory space, packaging, shipping of your orders, and handling returns of your products, so you could concentrate more on marketing your business.
Before diving deep, we recommend some safety measures to meditate upon so that you could leverage the best out of FBA and services alike.
It’s competitive out there! And more businesses are using strong services like FBA to tackle logistics problems. If we must leverage the most out of FBA and find the niche, you must bring out the following principles to your business routine; engrave them and see for sure to meld them with your criterion.
1. Competitor Conundrum:
The World says, ‘Healthy Competition’, but it also underlines ‘Not So Easy’. Watching and observing your competitors should be your moral code. Monitoring and tracking competitors are a common paradigm and a major exercise to keep your business running without losing the edge.
The first step is to identify with whom you are competing. Narrow down the list of competitors who comes inside your circle of products. See how they are performing, observe their product features, their unique offerings, prices, reviews, ratings, and most importantly their engagement with the customers. Tracking competitors is tiring if the list is extensive. We have a lot of applications and extensions on the web, which can help research competitor lists. Evaluate the ‘data’, quantify, and convert them into action points.
The visibility of your products is an integral factor. Your product description should serve as performing keywords. If you have quirky products define them with long-tail keywords to channel traffic.
2. What Got right! What Got wrong!
Once we accumulate the necessary competitor data, we have the sandbox to play. The old thumb rule of dividing your research data into two – ‘what got right!’ and ‘what got wrong!’ still works; And is as potent as it was before.
a. How do they Get it Right?
‘We have the same product as the competitor, but less performing’ is a common scenario. Scrutinize how your competitor has placed the product. Did they use high-performing keywords? Is it priced lower or higher? Do they have broader options for their product variations? How is their customer engagement?
Watch for their high-performing products, their highest rated products, their lowest priced products, and their products which have large search volumes.
b. What is going Wrong?
Listing your products based on supply and demand is the key. But the process is complex; it takes time and industry knowledge. Sometimes it’s necessary to align with domain experts to prepare a proper listing for your products. If competitors have listed their products more strategically with lower price tags, we must consider revising our rates to meet the demand. Seek if they have more offerings for a particular product, like more color options, and if consumers are more appealed to them, we must rethink those aspects too.
3. Mastering Inventory Management & Listing
a. Inventing an Inventory Management
Remember, we are paying for the storage fees! Devise an effective Inventory management system for your business to keep the right stock in place. We must balance out the surplus count, the mothballing, and the overselling demand with the warehouse charges. Keep an eye on your Inventory Performance Index (IPI) score on your dashboard to slash revenue leakage. Inventory management will save you from out-of-stock events and will help you maintain stable sales rankings in the market.
b. What’s in the hoarding?
Our product detailing and listing is the primary source of our connection with the consumers. Description matters! It should be precise and enriched with clarity to give the audience all the information about the product and the ‘pull’ necessary to convert to a sale. Quality Imagery with product photography will give more professional attire to your brands. Making content keywords optimized is crucial to upscale visibility.
4. Embracing Reviews and Criticisms
Customer reviews are not mere feedback or criticisms; they are direct market insights. Customer Review is the rudimentary analytic data that is unequivocally the greatest source of wisdom revealing what we are now in the business. Use consumers feedback to – optimize inventory and cement public loyalty. This step will impart credible ratings and recommendations and will earn more loyal customers for your products. Responding to consumer feedback is like shopping with them. We are actively participating in consumers’ shopping process and contributing deciding factors to their purchasing psyche.
5. Metrics Matter! Patterns Matter!
Amazon’s FBA seller platform has a lot of tools for monitoring your business. Look for numbers from these reports – Order Defect Rate, Late Shipment Rate, Conversion Rate, Inventory Performance Index, Perfect Order Percentage, Best Seller Ranking, and Payments Report. Earning reports give you a report on how much your revenue coming in. Best Seller Ranking ranks your performing products and their categoric competitive edge. Perfect Order Percentage reflects on orders fulfilled as it is supposed to be. Accepting an order to processing, shipping and finally delivering -the ‘normal selling criteria’ that is. They are lot of analytical data that we can use to maximize productivity. Performance metrics are the cornerstones of improving functionality and growth.
6. Weighing the right way!
Amazon FBA charges you for the storage and fulfillment services. This is where inventory management comes crucial. If you are stockpiling without analyzing market conditions, you are going to lose on storage charges. More Products equals more storage costs and if a particular product stays in the warehouse for more than 180 days, charges to keep them will go up.
Amazon charges for the weight and size of the item rather than the cost. Revising your product listing will help you chuck out the ‘going to be stale’ or ‘low-cost high size’ – items from your inventory. ‘Out of Stock’ board tends to give the frown treatment from consumers, especially for high demand items. Also, we don’t want to pay Amazon for the storage charges if our selling anticipation for a product land in a wrong judgment. Festive and Holiday seasons get storage charges to go up.
Strike the right balance between meeting the customer demand and choosing the right products. Settlement Fee statements in FBA dashboard will give a breakdown of the payment structure being charged from us.
7. Entering Amazon’s Buy Box League
Yes, the elusive white box with the ‘add-to-cart’ button on the right side of the product detail page is the Buy Box. Featuring your product in Amazon’s Buy Box is an algorithm-crunching exercise. Amazon has certain determinants to place your product on the Buy Box.
Why do we need to aim for the Buy Box? Why should we care about our variables?
More than 80% of Amazon sales are initiated through the Buy Box; so that’s the window we are looking for. When we earn Amazon’s recommended eligibility, we are pitted with our competitors for vital ranking variables. We need to remember – only a customer-centric seller gets the right metrics and the score to be on the Buy Box.
Buy Box will shuffle sellers if a popular item is featured by multiple sellers.
If you have a great product and have succeeded in accomplishing a strong relationship with customers, the Amazon Algorithm will work in your favor. Top-seller will get 70% of the day on Buy Box. If your business reflects healthy performance metrics, you have more chances to be on the Buy Box. If you are aspiring to be a top seller, but your metrics are yet to reflect good numbers, you might consider pricing your products in a competitive sphere.
8. Should we price higher or lower?
If your product or line of products is the most sought out and is priced within an appreciable profit margin, you don’t have to worry much about the Amazon performance metrics as its results are always customer-centric. If you have a unique product and have noticeable demand, then it’s not necessary to make it competitively priced. Adopting a flexible pricing strategy should be your core agenda. If you are offering similar competitor products, then it is vital to consider revising your pricing tactic. Amazon’s algorithm tends to favor lower prices to filter the ranking.
Product prices can be adjusted manually or with your Amazon Seller Central Account. There are some novel repricing methods in Amazon FBA that you can implement. Rule-based repricing runs pricing adjustments based on competitor data. The Algorithmic Repricing method calculates data by analyzing market conditions and fixes prices based on complex algorithms.
9. Do we need to endorse paid promotions?
Yes, absolutely. Once we have laid all the foundational stones for our business and when we start to get the initial recognition from the public, we can adopt advertisement campaigns and paid promotions.Marketing campaigns will act as catalysts for your product visibility. If you are planning to introduce your brand and seek attention from sizable audiences, you could opt for ‘Sponsored Brands’ Ads.If you are more focusing on scaling up the Amazon search result ladder, you could use ‘Sponsored Products ads’ to beef up the click-through rate. Partnering with marketing pioneers is critical since advertisements are no free affair. We must allocate a sum for ad exercises, but we can’t afford to lose on useless marketing.
10. Keywords Count!
Stale inventory is not something Amazon adores. If you have a product sitting in your inventory for more than 180 days Amazon will charge more for the storage costs. An organic way of getting your product to the consumers’ cart is to follow Amazon SEO practices. Once you hire the FBA services, you can concentrate more on marketing campaigns, and in that comes the unavoidable Search Engine Optimization techniques.
Product description, Title, and the contents associated with the product should be keyword optimized. There are tons of Keyword analytical tools for integrating SEO features. Collaborating with marketing and SEO strategists will alleviate many of your problems associated with content optimization.
11. Shaking hands with the Influencers
Social media influencers and bloggers can raise brand awareness to a significant level. Affiliation programs with influencers gives a direct impact on your products with the public. Since products are being endorsed by known personalities to their followers, it has a personal appeal and trust element to them. Promoters also get benefits from these mutual contracts. Influencer campaigns are a very potent form of advertising where they take care of all the promotional hassles. Unlike ordinary promotions, influencers come with a sizable – trustworthy audience and handle the ad creation and all the marketing processes associated with it.
Summarizing what we have discussed
Analyze your competitor’s actions and their sales figures. Analyze your product line and sales figures. Manage your inventory based on market conditions. Engage with your customers. Watch, comprehend and contemplate the metrics and data. Control the pricing. Present your product with Content Optimization, and SEO for visibility. Promote with paid advertisements and Influencer campaigns.
Why Amazon FBA?
Amazon FBA is favored by more than 2 million sellers and is ever-growing. It is a phenomenal platform to transform your selling, but it has its intricacies and nuances that might require assistance from an expert hand. Also remember, Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment is not an exclusive program for sellers only on Amazon marketplace. Sellers who are using other online marketplaces can use the service for their shipments and inventory management.
As Business grows, complexity grows. We have a slew of platforms to tackle every aspect of our selling business. Why Sellers recommend FBA is the alleviation associated with it. Shipping standardization, Shipping Subsidization, Packaging, 24×7 Customer support, and availability of Analytics and Metrics are the benefits of using FBA as a service. Imparting digital transformation in our selling business should be grounded in fostering customer morale. This approach will sprout organic conversions and stable sales figures. Good luck out there!
If you want to make your products online on best marketplaces then, visit our latest blogs which helps you to know about how to sell on Amazon, Flipkart, Limeroad, Pepperfry, Paytm, Voonik, Snapdeal
