Congratulations, you have successfully entered the year 2021! Holidays are over and so is 2020. The pandemic has accelerated online shopping by almost 30%. Amazon announced on seller central, “Independent businesses … nearly all of which are small- and medium-sized businesses, have surpassed $4.8 billion in worldwide sales so far this holiday season. That’s an increase of over 60% from last year”. Amongst the hustle and bustle of the holidays, you might have missed out on the important updates taking place in Amazon. Amazon marketing consultants at eStore Factory has made a comprehensive list of need-to-know updates going on within Amazon. Read on and stay updated.
#1: Measuring Organic vs. PPC Sales is now easy
What’s my organic vs. PPC sales ratio? This question has been asked for generations and sought for ages. The answer has eluded you until now, but now Amazon has made it easier to find the organic and PPC sales per product. The seller central dashboard shows a graphical representation of organic and PPC sales of the product or all products of your catalog.
Now that you know how to find organic vs. paid traffic, let us find the ideal ratio of organic and paid sales. From our experience, most successful sellers earn approximately 30-40% of their total sales from paid search. It would be a missed opportunity to neglect PPC, especially if your product is relatively new or you are selling in a crowded niche where organic spots on page #1 are limited. Organic and paid search belong together – you only need to find the sweet spot suitable for your business.
#2: New Search Terms Report feature available for Brand Analytics
Recently Amazon has introduced a new report showing how customers (in aggregate) find your competitors’ products in the Amazon stores. The metrics include the relative search popularity, click share, conversion share for each of the top three clicked products for a given search term and the ASINs that have dropped from the top three clicked products for a given search term. This data can help you better understand which of your products might be losing search relevancy, and you can adjust your product’s main image, title, and advertising campaigns to generate more traffic. Amazon brand analytics is available free to brand owners enrolled in the brand registry.
#3: Removal of commenting feature from product reviews
For years, Amazon sellers have used the comment section to respond to negative reviews left by angry shoppers. However, recently, Amazon has announced that they will be discontinuing this feature, saying, “it was rarely used.” Although Amazon thinks this feature wasn’t used enough, removing it will negatively impact the seller’s ability to engage with customers and correct misperceptions.
If you are one of those sellers who used the comments section of the reviews to make the product heard, don’t be disappointed. You can still click on the “helpful” or “not helpful” button to show your appreciation or disapproval. Sellers can also use the customer question and answer section to reply about the aspects of the product.
#4: Upload your product images faster
To make the image uploading process easier for the sellers, Amazon has introduced a bulk image uploading tool. Sellers can now upload up to 5 GB worth of product images at once with the bulk image upload tool and view the status of all your uploads in the image upload status report in Seller Central. Previously, you could upload images for only one product at a time, which was tedious and time-consuming if you had to upload images for a lot of products at once. But with the introduction of this tool, sellers can streamline the image uploading process. If you need any help in creating and uploading enticing image for Amazon, hire our Amazon photo editing services.
#5: Amazon posts get a new metrics
Released as a beta version in 2019, Amazon Posts allows brands to create Instagram-like looking posts of their products. Each post links to your product detail pages, making them instantly shoppable. Amazon Posts functions exactly like a social media feed. You post brand-curated content to help shoppers bring closer to your products. Recently Amazon has introduced a new metric called “reach” that shows the number of unique customers who saw your posts. Until now, the metrics available were only: viewable, impressions, engagement, engagement rates and now, reach. Although the introduction of new metrics will help sellers improve the performance of posts, we still have real sales KPIs.
Note: Posts is available only to the sellers in the US marketplace.
#6: Improvement for your Expiration Date ASIN creation
By filling out the attributes properly, you help create a seamless intake process and proper tracking of products at fulfillment centers, so products that are past their prime can be removed before reaching customers.
#7: New Subscribe & Save performance dashboard now available
Image reference: Amazon
Amazon has recently introduced the FBA Subscribe & Save dashboard that lets you better manage your Subscribe & Save business and ensure a positive customer experience. The dashboard shows the following information:
- The number of units and revenue for shipped subscription orders
- Projections of units and revenue for orders that are expected to ship
- The number of active subscriptions
- Average revenue per customer
- The percentage of units not delivered because the ASIN was out of stock
#8: Amazon Sponsored Ads and Stores launched in Brazil
Sponsored product ads, sponsored brand ads & Amazon seller storefront are now available to sellers in Brazil. This is a big change as now sellers can leverage these new advertising solutions to reach their goals easily. Amazon had strategically launched these new features right before the holiday season so sellers can increase visibility for their holiday discounts and deals, introduce products and brands to new shoppers in Brazil and scale a new product launch.
Sponsored product ads help sellers get instant visibility and drive discoverability of a product, sponsored brand ads help build a brand and generate awareness while stores help showcase your complete product catalog.
#9: Sponsored Display reports available
Sponsored display ads are a self-service display advertising solution that allows sellers to target shoppers who have previously viewed your products or similar products by using relevant search terms. It was launched back in 2019 to empower vendors and brands of all sizes to expand their reach and avail the benefits of retargeting. Until now, to improve the performance of Sponsored Display Ad campaigns, sellers had to analyze in the advertising console, going through each and every campaign but now, roughly after 2 years, Amazon has introduced reporting in sponsored display ads. Just filter and analyze the data using spreadsheets, just like we do in sponsored product ad campaigns.
#10: New Product Types and Attributes Available
In December 2020, Amazon introduced new Product Types and attributes to help improve your product detail pages. When creating a new listing, sellers can view these new product types when classifying your product in the Add a product tool in Seller Central. Sellers can also see the product types when you select the appropriate template to download on Add Products via Upload. These changes might not affect your existing selection, but you can provide these additional attributes by editing your products via Manage Inventory or by updating your listings in bulk.
Staying updated is as easy as reading our blogs
There are so many updates every day; it’s hard to keep up. But with our monthly updates blog, you can stay on top of all Amazon developments and changes. Every month we round up the most essential and need-to-know updates for and relating to Amazon sellers. Check-in here every month and catch up on what’s making news on Amazon lately.
There’s more. Our Amazon Consultants at eStore Factory collect all the need-to-know updates that affect you as a seller and we post them on our Amazon Seller Updates page. Bookmark this page and stay on top of everything.