WorkshopAmz

Boring Amazon Hack #15 - Prime Exclusive Discounts for BF/CM In my experience, PEDs are the best performing discount type for holidays outside of Lightning Deals (on best sellers) or Best Deals (on top sellers). PEDs get additional merchandising (and I think additional SEO because Amazon wants to convert people to Prime customers). The trick with BF/CM, though, is that the BF PED window is 11/21-11/30, a full 10 days! If you want the PED to run on Black Friday it also includes the full lead up and run out. One strategy you could consider is running a PED starting 11/21 then cancel the PED after x number of days that you want to be discounting. Unfortunately, there is no way to strictly target Black Friday or BF+weekend. Cyber Monday PEDs can run Black Saturday(?) through Cyber Monday, though, a much shorter time frame. This may be a better strategy to still capture sales without sacrificing too much margin. Historically, Cyber Monday revenue is 80-100% of Black Friday revenue, so you can still see significant volume. This year we have T12 (Turkey 12) instead of T5. Next year will probably be T30. And the year after that will be T365. Oh wait...

Boring Amazon Hack #9 - Amazon Attribution Did you know Amazon will give you a ~10% discount to your referral fee for any traffic you send to Amazon from external sources? You can enable this bonus through using Amazon Attribution. This is part of the Ads console and allows you to create trackable links for your products, Store, and Store sub-pages. This is great for tracking any off-Amazon to Amazon campaign you run and it helps offset the cost of that advertising/campaign. ✨ Pro tip: Utilize attribution links to your Store in your Social Media profiles and linktrees. You don't need to intentionally send the traffic to Amazon, but if customers want to purchase your product there, you might as well get 10% back and have them click the link in your Social profile.

🚫 🚫 I typically try to be pretty positive about Amazon, but this crosses the line. Amazon is now using your above-the-fold lifestyle images to send customers to competitor products and listings This is a new Mobile "feature" where Amazon will auto-generate clickable buttons on your lifestyle images to recommend other products to customers. And the recommendations appear to be AI driven since the brand in this example sells sweatproof undershirts, not suits and pants. As far as we can tell, there is no way to opt-out of this feature, or to make changes to what Amazon is recommending. To take a brand's image assets they have invested significantly to generate and optimize and then use them to send customers to competitor listings is plain wrong. Why should brands invest in images at all if Amazon is just going to use them to sell someone else's product? This "feature" provides no benefit to legitimate brands and needs to be removed immediately Dharmesh Mehta Have you seen this yet, Jed Rawson 🐐 Gwen McShea Joshua Rawe ⚡ Daniela Anavitarte Bolzmann ⚡Brandon Young Abe C. Chomali ?

Amazon is on 🔥 this week! Major updates to the SnS dashboard The updated SnS dashboard now has the following modules: Sales by Deliveries (Active subs with 1 delivery, Subs with 2+ deliveries, and my personal favorite Cancelled subs after 1 delivery)(This is trailing 12 months, so we can get granular around tentpole events yet, but this is still great data to know) Subscriber Retention at 30 Days and 90 Days Sales Penetration by Seller Funding, i.e. how many people are subscribing at which discount level Average Sales per Subscriber vs Non-Subscriber Average Reorders per Subscriber vs Non-Subscriber Share of Coupon Subscriptions, i.e. new subs who clipped an SnS coupon Planned Units and Planned Sales Plus a few others that were there before. Overall, way more data, though the granularity is still a bit lacking. Everything is also Trailing 12 Months, so it's not necessarily a complete picture of your LTV (for that, you'll still need something like Kapoq). Happy Friday! Enjoy more data!

Guys! And gals! This is the quality of life Amazon update I've been waiting for since day 1! It's not exactly what I want (folders to organize your Manage Inventory), but it's a huge step to making it easier to track key products in your catalog. You can now favorite a listing and filter by just your favorites! If you only sell 3 products, this won't help you much, but for those of us that manage catalogs with 100s or 1,000s of products, this can be a significant time saver by quickly finding your key listings! Anyone else excited for this?

Boring Amazon Hack #8 - Don't neglect your Store Many people ask if the Amazon Store front is worth investing in. Most of these people haven't analyzed Stores since they launched 7 years ago, so they don't realize that Stores can drive significant revenue for your brand. It makes sense, too, when you consider Amazon's goals. If they can have you create a Store that replicates your website, but it's on Amazon's website, they can retain more customers for themselves, while giving those customers a better browsing/buying experience. Brands I've worked with typically see 10-25% of their total revenue coming from their Store. The 10% brands are the ones that have a decently built store, but aren't driving traffic to it. The 25% ones have a good store and drive ads to it. Fully 1/4 of your revenue can come from a Store. This is actually quite exciting! (you can tell because I used an !). I will provide more examples of the power of Stores in my newsletter this week, so subscribe there if you haven't yet. Check the comments section for some great examples of Stores - momofuku - credit Daniela Anavitarte Bolzmann ⚡ and Mindful Goods Thompson Tee - credit Julia K. and WorkshopAmz (oop!) Anker - credit some person from Anker

A very fascinating paper from Amazon's Science team was surfaced recently: "How do Advertisers React to Changes in Ad Auction Pricing?" (July 2017) In this paper, Amazon studies how advertisers, i.e. sellers and vendors, react to changes in the ad bid algorithm. This is further proof that Amazon puts a lot of effort and brains behind the changes they make to their platform. "We test the impact of a decrease in an ad auction’s soft reserve price which effectively reduces the cost paid by advertisers." (The "soft reserve price" is the minimum bid required to win an ad placement. If no one is bidding at that threshold, an ad won't show. We aren't told what the soft reserve price was or how much they changed it in the experiment.) "The experiment aims to test the hypothesis that advertisers would respond to the decrease in cost paid by advertisers by increasing bids and/or budget..." i.e. if Amazon makes ads cheaper, advertisers will bid higher and spend more (to try to increase their reach more) Conclusions of the Research: 1️⃣ The team developed a new experimental design for this study that improved upon standard experiments 2️⃣ Amazon's goal was to " identify optimal pricing schemes to jointly maximize benefits for both customers and advertisers." (Yes, Amazon makes a ton of money off ads, and it makes the platform pay-to-play, but they still want to test what provides the best customer experience and drives the best sales for advertisers.) 3️⃣ The results showed by reducing the "soft reserve price" advertisers paid 10.67% less for their ads. In turn, advertisers increased their bids and budgets 0.51%. This led to a net *savings* of 10.06%. Some notes: 1️⃣ This paper is from 2017, so it may have laid the foundation for some of what we experience in 2024 Amazon Advertising, but it's unlikely this is directly being implemented today (when we're all finding out about it) 2️⃣ Amazon is way smarter than me! I had ChatGPT summarize, which helped, then I read through the paper myself. I have a BS in Chemistry and took a fair amount of math (through Calc III), but I barely understood most of what they were talking about. (Shocker, I don't have a PhD in Econ!) 3️⃣ The research team included, from Amazon: two Sr. Economists, a PhD in Computer Science, a Sr. Data Scientist, and a PhD in Econ. All but one of them still work at Amazon, by the way (something unheard of on the retail side) 4️⃣ Changes like these could impact small advertisers more than large ones because it requires you to be constantly tracking your ads results and adjusting bids and budgets - if you're paying attention, you can win more 💥 My favorite line from the paper: "We may then compute the Hajek inverse propensity-weighted estimator" because it sounds so awesome and I have no idea what it means Jeffrey Cohen give this team a high-five for doing cool research! Spencer Millerberg will you be running some cMRD tests on keyword changes?

FYI Amazon check-in times have been very slow lately. If you need additional inventory for BF/CM, send it this week. It needs to arrive at Amazon by 10/19, but we're seeing shipments arrive and not be granted a delivery appointment until 2-3 weeks later. Don't risk it with Q4 and send inventory sooner rather than later!

Boring Amazon Hack #7 - Utilize Portfolios to organize your ads data Portfolios are an underutilized feature in the advertising console. If you aren't certain how to implement them, try grouping ASINs or product lines into a Portfolio to see performance at a glance. Some good Portfolio ideas are: All campaigns for a specific product Campaigns for a group of products, e.g. top sellers, product lines, accessories Brand vs. Nonbrand campaigns Pareto A, B, C products Stay tuned for our newsletter this week where we will dive deep on Portfolio use cases and how they can elevate your advertising game!

Favorite #AmazonAccelerate takeaways so far: More B2B advertising options coming soon, including better B2B ads reporting! A recent Seller App update makes it very easy to generate 3D models of your products using an iPhone - this enables View in Your Room, digital try on of eyeglasses and shoes, plus digital application of various cosmetics like foundation Seller Cafe is still the best part of the conference - if you have an account or product issue that has been stuck for weeks or months, Seller Cafe can probably help get it fixed! Least favorite takeaway: Ice cream line was too long for me to get one…