The not-so-obvious things costing you money or sales on Amazon

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:18

Welcome to the Bring your product idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses.

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:37

Let's get started. Hello and welcome to another episode of BRING your product idea to life.

So today I want to talk about the not so obvious things that might be costing you money or sales on Amazon. Because sometimes the things that are affecting your sales aren't the obvious ones. Consider this as the hidden pitfalls episode.

I'm going to talk about some of the things that I've seen recently, a few examples that maybe aren't on your radar. They're certainly not on many people's that can cause some issues with Amazon. And then I'm also going to tell you how you can fix them.

So this, this will be a fairly short episode, so you won't be here for long.

You might want to take some notes of these or maybe this is one you want to come back to, but let's get stuck in so one of the most common things I see is backend search terms missing from the listing, and this results in your products not coming up as high in search as they could do.

So what the back end search terms are is on the back of your product listing you will see a field that says search terms or sometimes it says generic keywords. And this is where you can put relevant keywords to your product in there.

It's great if you can put in terms and phrases that aren't duplicating what's in your actual listing text. But think of these are things to aid Amazon with search.

So think of this as a way of telling Amazon what your product is, what it's about, what the features are.

So that when someone's searching for product like yours, it helps give Amazon a bit more information that tells them, okay, this is what the customer's looking for. And then they show them your listing. Very, very often I find these are blank.

And this isn't ideal because this is a great space for SEO, so make the most of it. Other things I see when it comes back in search terms are commas being used. There's absolutely no need to use commas.

You only get a limited amount of characters. So if you're putting a comma between every word, you're using characters unnecessarily.

And then the final thing that I see when people have got search terms that could be done better is repetition of words. So for example, if I was selling a baby blanket, I might see that someone's put baby blanket, baby blanket for boys, boys, baby blanket.

Whereas you wouldn't use all of those words that many times. You would use the word boys, words, baby, the word blanket, and then you'd have lots and lots of space for other keywords.

So think of your search terms as not words, not phrases or sentences, but strings of words. If you put them together, would make phrases and sentences relevant to your product. So there's no need for any repetition of words as well.

So the second thing that I see causing issues on Amazon are old advertising campaigns that are still running that are eating into budgets and people are just not aware of them. So I spoke last week about finding brands that have large numbers of campaigns running and some of them being unchecked.

This can obviously cost a lot of money and bring your overall roas way down. So this one luckily has a really easy solution.

If you know that you have an Amazon advertising account, particularly if you're not on top of it, maybe you haven't been in and checked for a while. First of all, check to see if you do have any campaigns running.

I'm sometimes people are surprised because, you know, they remembered that they turned their ads off, but perhaps didn't for some reason. It's so easily done, isn't it, when we've got so much to think about. I definitely did that with the ads from my book.

I turned them on last Christmas and then in January I was like, oh, I'll turn the ad, I'll turn the ads to my book off, because I'm not going to be sort of promoting my book via ads anymore. And then it got to like midway through the month and I got an advertising bill from Amazon was like, oh, maybe I didn't turn these off.

And yet I hadn't. I completely, I completely forgot because it just slipped my mind. But it is something that only takes seconds. That's definitely something to do.

If you have a large number of campaigns, and I've definitely spoken about this before, but keep on top of them, have a look, see which ones are working for you, see which ones aren't.

And if you have some campaigns that are not providing a good return, you either want to optimize them or you want to close them, whatever makes the most sense for you.

But what you don't want to do is just leave campaigns running that are costing you money, that aren't generating sales or Regenerating sales at poor return and doing nothing with them. So this is another key one to take a look at.

Some of the other things that could be costing you sales without you realizing are unresolved compliance notifications and your products being suppressed as a result of these. So you might be notified if you have a compliance notification, but you might not.

So I worked for a brand recently where one of their product listings wasn't active, the stock was stranded, and because they had such a large inventory, this was something that's completely passed them by. Absolutely not their fault. Let's be honest, it's easy for things to be missed when you're really busy.

Amazon probably isn't your full time job, but of course the consequences of that are having a product that wasn't selling, having, you know, having stock that you're paying for that you can't sell. It's, it's not great.

I also worked with a brand recently who didn't, who thought that their sales were down and they were saying to me, oh, I haven't had many sales in the last week, I don't know why that is. And then when they logged in they realized it was because their third party fulfillment partner had been sending out all of the orders late.

So Amazon had closed their account down. Basically put a warning on the account and said you can't sell anything until you resolve this.

And of course like most of us, if you're not in Amazon every day, this is something that you wouldn't know. Amazon doesn't always tell you when it does things like this.

So if you have a product that maybe isn't selling as much as it used to, or if your overall sales are doubt, it's definitely, definitely worth looking your account health and seeing if there's something that Amazon are waiting for you for that you're just not aware of. Another thing that comes up a lot here is verifying your account details. So it might be that Amazon needs some more information from you.

Maybe they've told you, maybe they, maybe they haven't. What they probably haven't told you is they're not showing your listings due to this. And the other one is credit card details.

Maybe your credit cards expired or is close to expiry or even if it's not every couple of, I'm not even sure how often it is, but every so often Amazon want you to re enter your credit card details. Just verify those are still your details and if you don't, they don't show your listings. And again, this is something you might not be aware of.

I can't tell you the amount of times I log into a client's account and then send them an email going, your account's actually restricted where you're aware of this. And it often is for something very small and something that can be easily resolved.

But if you're not in your account every day or even every week, you just might not be aware of these things. So definitely something to take a look at. The other thing that's tripping people up at the moment is the new title policy.

So I did a whole episode over the summer about Amazon changes earlier this year, and so just to give a little recap on that, the new title policy has led to listings not following this, not coming up in search anymore.

So just to give you a little recap, the policy is you have a hard cap of 200 characters, although many subcategories are limited to 150 or even 80 categories, depending which category you sell your product in. You can't have any promotional language in your title, no emojis, no special characters. You can't use all caps unless your brand name's in all caps.

And this is the one that's tripping a lot of people up is you can't repeat the same keyword more than twice. And I've seen this one a lot recently where, for good reason, it might be that a certain keyword is in your product title fairly often.

So I work with a brand who sells gloves, for example, and it makes sense to use the word gloves in the product title because that's what they're selling. They are gloves.

However, in the listings where the word gloves was used more than twice, we had to fix this pretty quickly because if not basically, since May, Amazon have been doing automated sweeps every week and effective listings vanished from search until corrected. However, Amazon are not letting people know this has happened.

So if you have a listing where you think, oh, this used to get quite a lot of sales and now it doesn't seem to, or maybe it's not as visible, maybe it was coming up in search, now it isn't, have a look at the title and see if there's anything you can do there. And then the third one I see is too much FBA stock leading to unexpected storage fees.

I know of brands recently you've had to pay Amazon to send stock back to them, and my recommendation is always to drip stock in and only send what you need. However, you might be listening to this and thinking, well, that's great advice, Vicky, but I've already sent in hundreds of units. Bit too late.

If that is the case, I would recommend maybe running some ads, maybe discounting, maybe using your email list, maybe using your social media, basically doing anything you can to sell through all or even some of the excess stock and avoid or reduce charges that you pay because obviously that can have a real impact on your margins.

None of the information shared in this episode, I should say is intended to shame you or make you feel bad, or make you feel like you're not managing your Amazon account well enough. Because as I've said, the whole point of this is showing things that they're hidden pitfalls, they're things that people just aren't aware of.

Because unless you are a full time Amazon manager and managing your Amazon account is all you do, you're not going to be aware of a lot of these things. The purpose of this episode is just to give you some ideas if you've seen a dip in sales or something doesn't feel quite right.

They're just some things that you can go and have a little look at. So if any of this is useful for you, do go and take a quick look and these exactly the sorts of things that an audit will catch.

And I'll add a link to the audits I offer in the show notes for this episode.

And I'm also going to leave you a link to my free audit checklist, which is a list of things that you can go through and check for yourself to make sure that your account is working as well as it could and should be. And this is the last episode we're going to talk about audits.

Next week we're going to go right back to the beginning and talk about how to set up your first Amazon listing.

So if Amazon is brand new for you and you're not on there already, I guess the last few weeks ahead episodes may not have felt as relevant, but next week is definitely for you. So I really look forward to seeing you then.

Vicki Weinberg: 00:10:39

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode.

Do remember that you can get the Fullback catalog and lots of free resources on my website vickyweinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.

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