Refunds Manager Blog

With every new year, it’s time to rethink our strategies, forget our bad decisions, and prepare for a new year in business. In this post, we explore the best Amazon PPC strategies to use in 2021.

Amazon PPC lets you pay to play. If your products aren’t getting the organic traffic you’d hoped for, you can pay for exposure. When you do it right, and you can turn one dollar into three. Do it wrong and you’re out even more money than what you spent on inventory.

To stay sharp on your Amazon PPC skills, you need to keep up with changes to the platform and try the best, most current strategies.

Are you running Amazon PPC ads in 2021? Check out our list of tips and strategies for the coming year.
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Ever wanted a more in-depth break down of the FBA fees? In this article, we’re covering the ins and outs of FBA fees and giving you tips on how can pay less of them!

Read on for all of the details.

The value in the FBA fee structure

Before you complain too much about the FBA fees, remember that they are designed to foster entrepreneurship. Across America, there are thousands of people like yourself making a fantastic living on their Amazon sales.
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Your Amazon FBA profits are the lifeblood of your business. They’re the reason you’re in business in the first place. Without high profits, you can’t scale—whether that looks like adding in more profits, hiring help, or growing your private label brand. 

This post is a masterclass in how to grow your profits and protect them. We’ve rounded up the best resources and expert advice to guide you on your way. 

How to calculate Amazon FBA profits

When calculating your Amazon FBA profits, you’ll need to factor in both your ongoing costs and startup costs.

Examples of ongoing costs:

• Products
• Shipping 
• FBA fees
• PPC spend
• Other marketing costs

Examples of startup costs:

• Samples
• Product photography
• Giveaways
• Package design
• Launch marketing, like email list growth

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Greetings, fellow Amazonians. I’d like to share a few tips with you on how we prepare and run the PPC campaigns for holiday (or any short season) products on Amazon.com

The first thing to remember is that most holiday products are just a variation of an everyday product (and mostly in exterior).

For instance, if you’re selling hard plastic cups with golden imprint, switching to Halloween or X-Mas cups would effectively mean changing the print pattern.

On the marketing side, this means that (if you have already been selling a regular version of the product,) you probably have some idea of what kind of marketing strategy fits it on Amazon.com. If this is the case, all you need now is to give it a little boost and be ready to hit the ground running just before the holiday sales galore begins.
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We love serving up fresh, insightful content from the Amazon pros—experts who have been there done that, and seen it all. Today we’re sitting down with Chad Rubin to get his Amazon listing optimization tips for 2019 and beyond.

Chad is the CEO of ThinkCrucial, a brand that creates replaceable products in the home across a multitude of categories and is sold on over 15 channels (including Amazon).

Chad is also CEO of Skubana, a platform for multi-channel inventory management that was born out of Chad’s own frustrations.

Chad is frequently sought out as a consultant by other ecommerce entrepreneurs, particularly Amazon sellers who want help with optimizing their listings. His consulting fee might be hefty, but not to worry! We asked tons of questions on your behalf.

How did you get started selling on Amazon?

Walmart opened up right next door to my parents’ vacuum store when I was a kid. There were times we struggled to pay the bills and make ends meet, so I decided I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. For that reason, I was a first generation college grad. I went on to Wall Street to give advice and insights to hedge funds buying and selling various internet stocks, so think Netflix and Amazon and Bankrate and eBay. I saw a ton of growth happening on Amazon so I said to my parents, “You guys should be selling on Amazon.” They responded, “Who’s going to buy vacuum accessories online?”

Sure enough, I was laid off in 2009. I started helping them sell not just on Amazon but on eBay. We started manufacturing our own products. We started making vacuum bags, and then a whole host of other products such as vacuum filters, coffee filters, air filters, spa filters, you name it we make it…anything that’s replaceable in the home. Now we sell across 15 different channels, and we do a significant amount of business across Amazon. Anything you can think of that’s replaceable in the home and that is high velocity, we manufacture.

Along the way, I started struggling to find software to help me run and automate my business. There was a separate shipping software and a separate inventory software and they didn’t talk to each other because ecommerce has changed so much since the early 2000s. We needed a software to help us sell across 15 different channels and we didn’t find one, so we started Skubana. We’re very Amazon centric but we also support every other marketplace or channel that you sell on.

What’s your overall philosophy for ecommerce success?

A lot of times you can double down on Amazon or you can start growing SKUs across many different channels. I believe in playing Monopoly. In order to win, you need to spread out a bit and diversify. I don’t just want to double down on Park Ave. I want to be paid when someone lands on the Railroad.

So for me, I try to focus on being multichannel and being everywhere I can. Anywhere that people have dwell time, I want to be there.

What factors matter for ranking a product?

You need to make sure that you’re building proper product detail listing pages on Amazon. If you’re going to send traffic there, whether its organic or paid, you want to make sure that the traffic converts because that’s really what Amazon cares about. The number one thing they care about is making sure it converts. You also want to want to have a high click through rate, from the search results page to your listing.

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The world’s most successful entrepreneurs are all avid readers, and so are the top Amazon FBA sellers.

Doesn’t matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, reading is essential. Picking up a book is the easiest way to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, which is something you as a business person know you must do.

Here are the best books for Amazon FBA sellers, books that will give you insider tips, help you operate your business more strategically, and even inspire you to set bigger, better goals.

1. Amazon Selling Blueprint – How to Find and Launch Your First Private-Label Product on Amazon in 90 Days or Less by Scott Voelker

There are lots of Kindle books about selling on Amazon, most of them too bland and too basic. Amazon Selling Blueprint is a top pick for learning the ins and outs of private labelling, whether you’re looking to move away from arbitrage or haven’t had the success you hoped for with your first product launch.

Scott Voelker covers a lot of the info (choosing a product, getting it made, optimizing your listing, launching, advertising) in various segments on his podcast but this book gives a great overview and breaks the process down step-by-step.

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Amazon is THE place for a good deal, so why not excite your buyers with something a little more special than just a sale price?

Amazon promotions are a great way to increase sales on an entire line of complimentary products or on just one item. To learn how to succeed with a temporary promotion on Amazon, read on.

Amazon has three different types of promotions:

• Money Off: This promotion works by incentivizing customers to buy more products from your brand in order to receive money off of their total (either a percentage or a specific dollar amount)
• Buy One Get One: Customers can receive a free item if they meet the qualifications–note that customers will have to add that item to their cart to receive it, as it won’t automatically be added if they qualify
• External Benefit: You can offer customers some other type of benefit to be received after the order, such as membership to a private online community or an instructional video

Tips for creating promotions within Amazon

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When you’re coming up with new Amazon product ideas while exploring items you’re less-than-satisfied with in your own home, or when you’re using an Amazon product research tool, you might have come across a great new idea only to find that it is in a restricted category. 

There are over a dozen different restricted categories that Amazon only permits certain sellers to offer products in, and there are even more restricted products outside of these categories. 

In this post, we detail the categories that are restricted, how you can increase your chances of selling in them, and what products are restricted as well. 

Why does Amazon restrict some categories?

Amazon restricts certain categories to only experienced sellers. Likely, the strategy behind this is to ensure the quality of those products and make sure that there are no fakes, bad ingredients, or other undesirable items being sold on their site. 

It all comes down to Amazon needing to protect their brand in the eyes of consumers. Any Amazon shopper has seen reviews stating that a personal care product wasn’t “the real thing.” Just imagine how much worse the level of fraud would be if Amazon didn’t restrict certain categories like collectibles, fine art, and DVDs. 

Amazon gated categories list

The following categories require approval from Amazon to sell in.

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Maybe you’ve launched a couple products on Amazon before, and you want to stay current with the best strategies for your next launch. Or maybe you’re launching a product for the first time and you want to avoid newbie mistakes. Either way, you’ll learn something in this post, which helps you learn how to market your private label or branded product on Amazon.

What your Amazon product launch should include

Developing the right timeline for your Amazon product launch will be determined by your experience and how much time you can devote to this new product. However, the main features of your product launch remain the same. You need to include:

• PPC traffic
• Organic traffic
• Listing optimization for conversions
• Listing optimization for SEO traffic
• Quality photographs that contextualize and sell the product
• Review request campaign (product insert or email request)

The basics of launching a product on Amazon

This is a quick overview for the newbies (skip this part if you’re experienced). The benefit of launching your ecommerce product on Amazon, instead of a Shopify or BigCommerce website to start, is that you gain access to customers of Amazon.com, estimated to be 300 million.

There are an estimated 2 million sellers on Amazon. For any product, there are thousands of search results.

The search term “ice cream scoop” yields 4,000 results.

At the most basic level, you have two core strategies when launching your product:

1. Try to show up on page 1 of Amazon search results
2. Try to get external traffic to come to your Amazon product listing directly and buy your product (without searching for it first)

Within those two main strategies, there are of course other strategies.

Try to show up on page 1 of Amazon search results:

• Organic ranking (optimize your listings for search terms)
• PPC traffic (spend on Amazon ads for relevant keyphrases)

Try to get external traffic to come to your Amazon product listing directly and buy your product:

• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Content marketing, including blogs, videos and webinars

And yes, within each of those strategies, things get complicated.

Your task list for a successful Amazon product launch

So which core strategy should you choose? Try to rank in Amazon search or build up external traffic?
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