The Amazon Grind and Daily Drivers to Build Your FBA Empire – ALL14

Matt: And speaking of which today – I think it’s important. We’re all
building FBA businesses. We’re building empires. But how do you keep
track of an empire on a day to day basis to make sure that it’s
expanding and eating everything?

Rus: Knowledge. Knowledge is power. And you need to know what your
empire is doing and not just ignore it and hope it works. So I want to
know everything about my business. So we’re going to cover today…

Matt: You’re a big data nerd, right?

Rus: I am. I’ve actually got a tooth with “data nerd” written on it.
Basically, I’m a computer geek. I like data. I like big data. I like
doing analytics. I like seeing correlations between different data
sets. That is my thing. And that sounds all big and buzzworthy, but
it’s really easy. And Amazon gives you free tools to do that. Amazooka
of course, is another one. So we’ve got a few more coming.

So I just like to dive in and actually see what’s going on. So every
day, it goes without saying – Log into the seller dashboard and have a
look at my sales for the last 24 hour period and make sure they’re on
track. If you’re not doing that – Why not?

Matt: Exactly. I like to check because I’m out in Asia, I’ll check
twice. I like to check in the morning and I’ll check at night because
that gives you the full cycle.

But one thing that’s dangerous is a lot of FBA sales can be addictive
– seeing your sales go up. Don’t spend your entire day in the Seller
Central Dashboard. It’s like the same thing as spending your whole day
in front of the email. It’s just reacting and not really growing the
business. And it’s important when you’re growing the business to know
what to focus on.

Rus: Yeah.

Matt: But on those daily to-do’s, typically what I’m doing (something
I didn’t realize you needed to do ahead of time) was customer
questions.

Rus: Yup.

Matt: So that little Message Center, I had that setup to forward to my
Gmail. I no longer use that because when you reply via Gmail, just
occasionally, those messages don’t go.

So I was having tons of messages just not get replied to. I had
messages that’s over 24 hours, over a week. I had to idea. I thought I
was doing a great job.

Rus: Ha-ha!

Matt: Make sure you’re checking those, guys. Customers – whether
they’re saying good things, bad things. Typically, they like to say
bad things if they’re in there. But you need to be responding. That’s
how you stay on top of it. Avoid bad reviews and build some fans for
life. What are some other things you do?

Rus: I only check the dashboard once a day. When I first started on
internet marketing, I would be refreshing hourly to watch the
commissions rolling.

Matt: Oh yeah.

Rus: So I check once a day, but I’m thorough. So my favorite thing at
the moment is going in and it’s the “Orders Manage, Orders Tab.” So
not just obviously looking at the dashboard and going – “Oh, this is
how many units and how many dollars I’ve sold in the past seven days.”
Actually, going in and just having a quick look through the orders
themselves.

If you’re selling in mad volume, you’re getting a lot of orders, then
I’m not going to go through each one, one by one by hand. I’ll just go
through a sample set to see what people are buying and how people are
buying them.

And most of the time, (I’m going to be honest) I’m looking at the
orders and I’m seeing a single order for just one item which is very
basic. So that’s the majority. But I’m noticing other things like
certain of my products, people are buying two at a time so there’s an
opportunity there.

Matt: Oh, you smart bugger.

Rus: If they’re buying two at a time, then maybe you can bundle two
together, give it a little bit of a discount and try and promote
people who are just buying one, turn them into buyers of two and see
if you can make a bit more money on that conversion.

Another thing I’ve noticed is some of our products that people will
buy multiple times over their lifetime for whatever reason. Amazon
will actually tell you if a buyer is a repeat customer. So you can
then go in and see their sales history with you and see what else
they’ve bought which leaves you open to engaging the customer for –
“Hey. We’ve noticed over the past three months, you’ve made four
orders. We’re glad you like our product. What is it you like about it
so much? What are the benefits that it’s bringing to you?”

So you’re going to tap them up to find out why they really like your
product, why they’re coming back. It’s easier for you to ask them for
a review. They’ve bought it a lot. They must like it.

And maybe some of the benefits that the product is bringing to them
are things that you aren’t aware of – that you can then use in your
sales copy and offer as benefits to other people. Maybe they’ve bought
something from your competitor before which was lacking in some aspect
that your product covers that you weren’t entirely aware of.

So going through your orders and looking at how your customers were
actually buying your product will give you more of an insight into
their needs and an opportunity to help with your marketing and to sell
more. So I’ve been doing that once a day. Not too long. Only like 10
or 15 minutes. But that will help.

Matt: That’s awesome. I’m going to definitely need to start doing
that. Another thing that I like to do personally: I feel like tools
occasionally can make things where you start to lose touch.

So one thing I like to do: I like to go into the seller dashboard, get
into the sales history and look at the more detailed breakdown. So
seeing the total revenue for the day – How many units were purchased,
conversion rates, this kind of stuff, and entering that into an excel
spreadsheet.

It takes like a minute. But just that fact of looking at it, looking
at each individual day, typing it out and then starting to see how
things go, I feel like it gives you a better grasp of the business
over the long term versus just looking in a graph.

Rus: Yeah. There’s a lot to be said for writing things down. As my mom
would say – “If you’re ever revising something, write things down. If
you ever want to remember something, write things down.”

So doing that will definitely help set in your mind how your business
is doing rather than just quickly looking at a – hopefully, an upwards
growing graph that you then forget. I’m a sucker for that. I look at
the graph, I see the tremendous upwards. So that’s good.

But what does that mean? Am I increasing slowly? Am I doubling every
day? Or is it flat lining just with an upward trend? It’s easy just to
get lost and forget about why you’re looking at the graph in the first
place.

Matt: But at the same time, don’t put too much emphasis on a single
day because Amazon can be up, Amazon can be down. That’s how
E-Commerce works. You might sell five units one day and 50 the next.

So don’t have a freak out. Look into a couple of things and see if
anything has changed. Check your PPC. Also, be always monitoring the
feedbacks if you’ve got your feedback sequences in place like we
talked about before. You’re going to want to be shooting some review
request to people leaving awesome feedback.

So the more the merrier on those. Tracking how frequently you’re
getting those feedbacks is also another positive way to measure the
effectiveness of your auto-responders.

Rus: Oh, definitely. Another important aspect to the seller dashboard
which I probably don’t check daily, (I’ll be honest) but I definitely
keep tabs on it. The “Manage Inventory” section.

Lots of things can happen to your product in the course of its sales
life cycle. So for the first one, it’s obviously – “Are you about to
run out of inventory?”

Amazon will pop up a nice little box warning you (if that’s the case.)
But it’s reassuring in both a good way and a bad way to look through
the “Manage Inventory” option. And if you’ve got like 500 or 600 units
left, you’re not running out any time soon. But hopefully, you’re
still selling.

Matt: Says the guy with the short lead time. That’s a terrifying thing for me.

Rus: Yup, definitely. Exactly. You might have a much lower threshold
than Amazon assumes if your lead times are over a month or more.

And another thing that you definitely got to keep track on: Your
product images. We’ve had it in the past and I definitely know that a
few of you are doing this.

Amazon do have image guidelines. You’ve got to have a completely white
background so it looks with their website. They want photos of the
product. They don’t want cartoon drawings or anything like that. They
don’t want logos on the images. And they will just delete your images.

Matt: They did it to my main image. So I had a headline with no
freaking image. It had a question mark.

Rus: Yup. So if they delete your image, you’re not going to get an
update. They’re not going to tell you that they did delete it. They’re
not going to tell you why they deleted it. It’s up to you to find out
for yourself.

So I always make sure that all my images are there. And have a quick
flick through the product listings as well to make sure none of the
other images have been deleted because that will kill conversions. If
you’re on page one, you’re doing really well, then boom! Yours is a
product with no main image, you’re screwed.

Matt: I was freaking out, man!

Rus: Yup. You’re just going to look terrible in the listings. I think
this is right from memory. So then when you do pure listing with no
main product image, they will just choose the next one. And that could
be anything.

So your main listing – If it loses its product image, we’ll just have
the second one down in the list that’s there. And if they do manage to
click through despite your lack of product image and make it to your
page, you could be displaying just something completely random that
you’re not intending. And that will again, destroy your page
conversions and you will slip down the rankings if you’re not on top
of that.

Matt: So you brought up inventory and damaged inventory before. And I
just want to share a little personal story.

So I was in my inventory and I was looking around and a couple of
people hopped on my listing. I was very upset. I sent a very angry
message. “Hopefully, that will be working.” But the second seller, I
couldn’t really do anything about.

So it turns out Amazon Warehouse Deals is selling my product at a
lower price than me because apparently, they damaged it or got a
return. Either way, something I had to pay for. And now they’re
selling it under my listing as a used product.

Rus: Wow!

Matt: So that just absolutely sucks. I didn’t even know that existed.
But just wanted to share that as a little side noted update.

Rus: Yeah. Was that Amazon selling it or was it the customer?

Matt: It was Amazon. Amazon Warehouse Deals directly through Amazon.

Rus: Oh, okay.

Matt: And I don’t even know quite what to do about that. Because who’s
going to buy it? So it’s going to stay there forever. I might have to
buy that.

Rus: Sneaky. Yeah. That would be cool. Ha-ha! I got another one – As
if you don’t have enough already. I haven’t seen that myself. But
that’s definitely interesting.

What I have seen though is one of my friends. The product he was
selling, a competitor came along and just listed their product under
the same SKU so it appeared on the same page. But theirs was just a
completely different product – not even the same product private
labeled differently. It was actually a completely different product.

And he had to spend two months fighting with that guy. Amazon didn’t
care at all. And then eventually, the guy saw, sensed, realized what
he was doing was wrong and voluntarily removed it. But that was a hard
battle for him to fight

Matt: That’s been happening to a guy in my Mastermind as well.

Rus: Yeah.

Matt: The product that is happening to – it’s a top 100 product in
electronics too. Not his listing – The listing that’s hopping on it.
So it’s a major player.

Rus: Oh! Yeah. That’s bad. You really wouldn’t do that because at the
end of the day, you’re just going to devalue your brand and the brand
that you’re hijacking. It’s really uncool.

What I have seen personally though is a few of my products have become
inactive, their status has changed. So if your products on Amazon are
being listed, it will be marked as active. But I’ve seen “inactive”
and I’ve even seen “inactive/blocked” where that just means they’re
not going to appear on the search listings, you’re not going to sell
any because no one is going to see them.

And that only means that you’ve got a serious problem with your
listing that violates Amazon’s Terms of Service. And again, they won’t
tell you about that. You’ll just have to go in and see for yourself
and work out for yourself what is wrong.

Sometimes, Seller Support can be quite insightful. But other times,
they won’t have a clue either. So make sure you don’t violate Amazon’s
Terms of Service with your sales copy and don’t get your products
blocked.

Matt: And this is also why we build off of Amazon. Like Shopify. We
were talking about that earlier.

Rus: That’s it. If your product isn’t active on Amazon or it’s
blocked, then you can still sell it off Amazon in your own E-Commerce
store. So they’re still happy to let you use FBA for shipping
warehouse and delivery. They just won’t display it on their own
website. So be careful there.

Matt: And then a couple of other things that you could do on a more
frequent basis: It’s not necessarily a daily thing. But some things
like split testing copy, testing images, image order and monitoring
PPC. How often are you doing that kind of stuff?

Rus: The split testing? All the time. We’ve got a few brands with
similar products in them. So we split test images.

Does a single product in the main image work best or maybe the same
product from different angles? Zooming in on the product and making it
bigger or smaller? Changing the lighting and stuff in the photos? We
do that all the time. And we’ll see how that converts.

I think it was Jason Fladlien (I’m probably pronouncing his name
incorrectly) – Amazing marketing guy. He brought my attention to
something called the iPath. So we’ve tried using iPath techniques in
order to get people to look at the image and move their eye to click
into the listing. And that’s been quite helpful.

So if you’ve got one product, A/B testing will be difficult because as
you sell more, your BSR is going to grow anyway. So just A/B testing
the titles and the images and the product description, etcetera can be
tricky. But if you’ve got many products in a similar niche, then you
can A/B test between the products quite easily and see what actually
converts.

Matt: Shoot me links to the iPath stuff and we’ll throw that in the
show notes as well, Rus – As long as I remember.

Rus: Will do. I think that was a video I watched a long time ago.

Matt: Yeah. It’s very powerful and it comes down to a lot of the
copywriting psychology and intention stuff. You got to get people’s
attention with the headline and with that main image. And then even on
the page. You want to get that “Add to cart” button happening.

Rus: Definitely. They are main things I check every day. I use
Amazooka to check my BSR graphs and keyword rankings as well to make
sure. Even I’ve gotten good sales – maybe my product is growing, but
maybe everyone else’s products are growing more.

So I want to make sure I’m on top of where I am in the food chain and
not slowly drifting down towards the bottom of page one. So using that
tool to keep abreast of how it’s actually going is quite important to
me.

Matt: Absolutely. That’s one thing that we brought up. That’s why we
added AdTracker. And basically, I was going through and checking every
single keyword that I have because I was pushing very hard on this PPC
thing. I know I came late into Amazon so I was going come with a
freaking bang.

And I was looking for all the keywords that mattered to me and
individually searching those out in Amazon to make sure that I was
showing number one. Because if you’re number one, you’re going to sell
more on your PPC, you’re going to get more organic ranks, you’re going
to sell more organically and it’s a freaking flywheel of success.

So I was always up in the bids to get that. Now Amazooka checks that
for me so it’s pretty convenient. And if you guys want to try that
out, you can get a free trial. Amazooka.com. It’s 14 days of Amazon
domination.

Rus: Yup.

Matt: But anyways, back to what you’re doing on a daily basis, Rus.
What about emails and customer support? What kind of challenges? What
are you doing with that? Do you outsource?

Rus: At the moment, I do it myself. We don’t get too many customer
emails which is nice. The product selection that we went for was the
kind of thing where it’s straightforward how to use.

I know some people, some of my friends – Even with the manual they’ve
included in the product, their customers still don’t know actually how
to operate it.

So for my main products, I went with products which would require us a
little customer support as possible. It’s really obvious how these
things are going to work. You don’t need a document to learn how to
use it. It’s probably something you used before. So customer support
is very, very minimal for me at the moment. So I’m okay to keep on top
of that myself.

We’ve had a few people ask for refunds because they didn’t like it.
But again, I just deal with that. And that’s not even on a daily
basis. That’s maybe monthly. So I try and deal with it as quickly as
possible. I think Amazon takes your response rate into account for
things or seller rating and stuff. So I try and deal with that as
honestly and as amicably as I possibly can.

Matt: Same here. And I try to make it really friendly and personal
too. But that is one challenge I’ve had in terms of how people use the
product. So I assume that this was pretty darn straightforward.

There is one slight little caveat and it seems to throw everyone up.
I’ve got it on my feedback loop so it tells people right in the email.
I’ve got it in the questions for the product. I’ve got it everywhere I
can think to get it and I still get the same question so much.

But that’s one thing, guys – The manual and including questions in
your Amazon listings. So you could ask them yourself, you can get a
friend to ask them things that make you look good, things that explain
the product.

But that’s definitely one thing that I’m still struggling with – and
considering a package redesign just to hit that to avoid negative
reviews and negative feedback from something that should be
straightforward. But that’s on me to improve.

Rus: Yeah. That’s a great idea, right? I don’t just respond to people.
I take what they’re saying on board. So perfect example that you just
made.

If people are struggling with something, then see if you can nip that
in the bud with your packaging or your on-page description or
something.

If you’re getting loads of people with small hands buying your pen and
they can’t grip it properly, be honest. Put that in your description
and tell people.

Amazon don’t like giving refunds. They don’t like dealing with that
kind of thing. That would look badly on you. If you’re selling
millions of products a day and then you’re refunding half of them,
that won’t be good for anyone.

Matt: So just send fulfillment orders. Much, much better.

Rus: Yup. Take the criticism on board. Take all their feedback on
board and tweak your product appropriately to mitigate it and increase
customer satisfaction.

Matt: Another little trick you can do with that is – A lot of times,
if I ever have an issue with a product or a customer that’s unhappy or
they want to report some kind of problem, I will find a way to make it
almost a positive.

So you ask them – “I’m really, really sorry about this. I want to be
able to talk to my production manager right now and get this fixed.
Would you be willing to send me an image of the said problem?”

So most people actually send you a picture. It gets them a little
engaged and it feels like – “Wow! I’m receiving positive treatment
from a specific person in the company. They’re fixing the problem
because of me.” And it actually gets you the picture so you can see
that they’re not just bulshitting you. So it’s kind of like a win-win
for that. And a lot of times, people comment about that in their
feedback and reviews. But I think that’s pretty much how I handle it.

Rus: That sounds awesome. If it does ramp up customer service, I will
be looking to outsource it. But for the time being, no. I’m pretty
good with dealing with that all by myself.

Matt: Yeah. You learn a lot from your customers. Let’s keep customers
for life, guys. This is FBA 101 and I am signing out. Are you done,
Rus?

Rus: Yeah. Ciao, from Barcelona!

Matt: We’ll talk to you guys later. Thanks for tuning in and listen to
us rumble. Have a great day!

Rus: Adios! Bye, bye.

Matt: Okay.