You
have been selling on Amazon for a while now and you might be thinking about
scaling your business in the upcoming quarter of the year. You started off with
your Amazon FBA business with the hope that it will grow sustainably, provide
you with a solid income, and gives you the freedom to make certain lifestyle
choices you’d like. Well, you have got grand ambitions and probably your business
is doing okay, but you are hesitant on exactly how to take your business to the
next level. Lots and lots of Amazon FBA business owners find themselves in this
position. They have had their fair share of success and they are geared up to
double down and scale their business further. But the biggest question they all
want answered is how it can be accomplished without escalating their workload.
In fact, this might be the case with you as well; you probably want to develop
your business while phasing yourself out of the grunt work.
When
is the right time to scale up your business?
You
can think of scaling up
your Amazon FBA business if you are getting a steady stream of
organic sales. If you ask why, we would say that because by that time you will
have learned a lot about the art of selling productively on Amazon. It will be
the best time to add more products and scale up your business as it will be
much easier.
#1.
Add/Launch More Products
You
are already selling in a specific niche and category, so you will have most
likely gained a fair understanding of your consumers. Why hesitate to continue
building your brand to cater for your consumers?
Selling
multiple products aside from the obvious ones will result in increased
earnings.
It
works in a way that if your supply is suddenly delayed or cut off for whatever
reason, then you are left with no Amazon income until you stock up and launch
another product. Whereas if you have, say, four or five products and something
goes wrong with any one or two of them, you still have three or four products
left.
However,
you should select additional products with much care. It should be something
related to your existing products that your customers are interested in. You
can start your research on Amazon by looking at the Amazon Store of your
competitors and also the product listings such as:
- Customers who bought this item also bought (this)
- Sponsored products related to (this) item
Moreover,
you can also check the Subcategories within your current main category.
Once
you have figured out what additional products you are going to sell, the next
step would be to evaluate the supply and demand. Select the products that you
think have a great potential for boosting your revenue. Consider low margin
high volume products, higher margin products, or higher value products.
- Launch the products in existing categories:
The
biggest advantage of adding new products to the existing category (your
particular niche that you are already successful in) is that you will require
doing less product research to create your listing. On the other hand, if you
are in the brand registry and have a trademark, then you can frequently use the
same trademark as it is of the same niche.
- Finding new categories:
Launching
new products in a completely different and new category is also considered a
solid approach. That is, you will act less prescriptive thereby finding best
opportunities with low competition and high demand.
#2.
Add Product Variants using Child ASINs
Most
of the sellers may not have considered this one, but it can prove to be an easy
way to boost revenue. Instead of adding similar items under a completely
diverse listing, why not piggyback off your existing ones? It is a known fact
that launching or adding a new item under a new listing takes time and you will
have to start everything from the scratch, that is; you will need to congregate
reviews and compel sales to scale up the ranking.
On
the other hand, adding a child ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) to
high-performance listing will help you get the exposure from the very
beginning.
Here
are some ways/ideas using which you can leverage child ASINs to increase your
revenue:
- Cross-sell similar products and variants
- Multipacks
- Different designs or colors
- Smaller or larger sizes
Nevertheless,
if you aspire to rank for different keywords or want to take up further
real-estate space on search results, then you should consider a separate
listing. But just ensure that you have an excellent launch strategy in place to
gain momentum.
#3.
Build a Brand
Once
your products are consistently selling well, it might be the time to brand them
properly. The most successful Amazon sellers have a premeditated marketing plan
both on and off Amazon. If you want to scale up your Amazon FBA business, then
you need to promote your business. Unless you have an extremely unique product
that everybody wants, your business requires proper marketing. However, there
is no way you can extensively market your business on Amazon except through
Enhanced Brand Content Listings and Brand Registry.
It
means that you are required to get off Amazon and create a separate online
presence of your business and products. This can help you in building a loyal
customer following that you own, rather than an Amazon-owned customer base.
This way you can promote and sell your business both on and off the platform,
resulting in wider reach for scale and flexibility.
The
biggest problem with leveraging Amazon as a business platform is that you don’t
own Amazon. It simply means that you can’t access the customer data. Customer
data is crucial if you want to develop and scale your business over a long
term. Developing and establishing your own website is a wise thing to do if you
want to capture customer data. This way you can interact and better understand
your customers than you can on Amazon. Doing few things like redesigning the
packaging, having your own logo printed on your products, a separate storefront
along with a website is a great way to build sales funnels.
But
it doesn’t mean that you should stop selling on Amazon. The ultimatum is to
build an online presence that will push your targeted audience to recognize
your brand name both on and off the platform. Brand awareness can definitely
help you in increasing your Amazon sales exponentially.
#4.
Optimize the Best Seller Rank
The
Best Seller Rank of your primary products is an essential metric for your sales
and customers. While no one knows conclusively the math behind Best Seller
Rank, it is widely considered to be a predictive algorithm based on historical
sales and a function of most recent sales.
In
case you can’t keep up with the Best Seller Rank of the competition, it is an
indication that you should switch up your product offering and find something
that is less competitive. In other words, you should focus on outselling the
competition as it will become easier for you to enhance your Best Seller Rank.
In addition to that, ensure that you don’t give a reason to your customers to
write poor service reviews or rate your product down.
One
Best Seller Rank tip is to win the ‘Buy Box.’ It is located under the price on
an item page and displays 3-5 of the same items priced similarly. Hence, if you
cannot have the lowest priced product and prove profitable to your customers,
make it an objective to at least get into the Buy Box.
Three
factors that affect the status of the product in the Buy Box:
- Pricing:
Buy
Box is automatically filtered by Amazon on the basis of Price + Shipping costs.
You have to adjust your price accordingly and ensure that you are priced
competitively in a way that your products can at least appear in the Buy Box.
- Shipping Performance:
Hassle-free
and high-performance shipping is the key factor here. On the other hand, in
case of Buy Box, Amazon is also looking at Order Defect Rate (ODR) and Perfect
Order Percentage (POP).
Order
Defect Rate is how many orders get negative feedbacks, shipped, returned, or
canceled improperly for any reason. Perfect Order Percentage, on the other
hand, is how many orders are carried perfectly without any customer intrusion.
- Seller Rating:
As
a seller, your main goal should be not giving your consumers any reason or a
chance to rate your services poor. Having great prices, stellar shipping
performance, quick customer support is the key to keep your seller ratings
high.
#5.
Optimize Existing Amazon Product Listings
In
case you are expanding into new territory then it makes perfect sense to
maximize your existing assets. In addition, optimizing your existing Amazon
product listing will have a significant impact on exposure, ranking,
conversion, click-through rates, and resulting revenue.
On
the other hand, if you work on improving your Amazon SEO, there is a greater
chance of you increasing your exposure and in turn, attracting more customers.
There
are several key elements that can be tweaked for optimizing your Amazon
listing.
- Pricing
- Images
- Backend keywords
- Features
- Descriptions
- Title
However,
the biggest issue that every seller experience is how to track the changes and
strap them to increased productivity.
Above
all, optimizing
your listing and pricing is generally the most impactful thing
you can do to move further. Being a private label seller, you are forbidden from
using numerous ‘repricer’ tools that can help the wholesalers who are competing
for the Amazon Buy Box.
#6.
Go Multi-Channel
As
we discussed earlier the importance of website and branding, it makes it easier
getting your products in front of hundreds and thousands of hungry shoppers.
And this is one of the biggest pros of leveraging Amazon’s extraordinarily
popular marketplace. But why limit to only one channel when there are several
others? If you are looking to build a more secure, well-rounded business then
you need to take certain steps. It means that you need to grow outside Amazon
as well.
Here
are some key factors for getting started if you are interested in expanding by
growing outside of Amazon.
- Leverage influencers to enhance exposure and traffic of your products
- Promote and set up affiliate deals for other products alongside yours
- Work on creating your own organic traffic and SEO (not Amazon but for Google)
Scaling
in Wholesale
We
are all in this business to make profits. When you see successful sellers
(million dollar sellers) on Amazon, most probably they are following the
wholesale approach. The gist of it is simple; spend more to make more, what
else does this mean. If you want to advance further in this business realm,
then you will need lots of capital. However, selling products sourced via
wholesale has massive profit margins. The sellers, once they have a product
that’s ranking and selling well, are approached by the potential wholesalers
and distributors with a call to buy the item at wholesale. It can be a good
thing as it gives you more cash flow which helps in placing more orders for
stock.
But
the biggest cons of wholesale are that even though the products may be high
selling ones, you will in all probability be sharing the Buy Box with other
comprehensive wholesalers who could potentially be getting the same product at
a lower cost as compared to you. This could lead to a price war.
Conclusion
Running
an Amazon business as compared to a traditional e-commerce business can be done
with a minimum upfront capital plus a bit of hard work. It is all about
utilizing the available resources wisely and optimizing every process along the
way. In this article, we have provided you with numerous ways to scale your Amazon FBA business and we
suggest choosing a single strategy at a time to make the most out for your
business.
Product
Spy Pro provides Amazon listing analyzer to find good products to sell on Amazon.
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