Klaidas Siuipys
Let’s talk Amazon Strategy | $50M+ in Amazon Sales Growth | Founder @ AMZ bees | Amazon Expert for 7+ Years
Our partner sells on www.amazon(dot)de (the German marketplace). The product we will talk about is fulfilled-by-merchant (FBM). Only a few minor additions are fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), so it’s a hybrid selling model.
The product is massive, and it consists of two main items. It has a couple of different sizes and colors, and the price per unit varies between 300 € to 400 €.
Since it is a significant, big, and relatively expensive product, the FBM model works best considering Amazon storage and fulfillment fees for large merchandise. Therefore, the most significant piece of cake, which in this case means revenue and profit, comes from FBM.
One of our main goals as an agency is to find the best KPI for our clients when possible. In this case, we did our best to keep the Total-Advertising-Cost-of-Sales (TACoS) under 10% and Top-of-search Impression Share (ToS IS) at maximum exposure. The ideal range for TACoS was 6-8%, and we kept it around 7%.
Our partnership with the client started in August 2021 when his team contacted us about growing their Amazon business. At that moment, the brand was Amazon-only situated. The team behind it spent over a year testing and developing the future best-seller product. They have created the best fit for the market at a reasonable price. It’s an incredible result for a few operating members and investors!
Since August 2021, we have been in touch. Our first move was to audit their account. This step is essential because we provided important details and advice to help them grow in Q4 of 2021. We had multiple consultations, which we believe helped the brand quadruple its sales from 102k € in August to 418k € in November, following 386k € in December.
By the end of the year, this brand was already doing better than most other brands in the niche, having generated 1.4 million € of total sales in 2021. November and December have accumulated 804k € of sales, which accounts for 56,3% of all the revenue made in 2021.
Our partner was extremely excited with these results, and it felt like there was still so much unused potential to grow. This is how they decided to give our agency complete control of the account. We took charge of this Amazon business in January 2022 and started growing their account to become the best-seller in its category.
As soon as we started managing the account, we saw opportunities to improve their conversion rates by optimizing their listings.
Merging main products into a super-listing significantly improves the Best Sellers Rank (BSR), which expands discoverability. This way, earning top organic positions in the most relevant keywords is more effortless. When you have a variation of two features, one is color – make sure to add swatch images, which provide an added premium look to your listings.
We should remember the social proof:
Customer reviews have the most significant influence over Amazon shoppers. They are a massive factor in higher conversion rates. Positive evaluations greatly increase your chances of convincing customers that you are selling quality items that serve their purpose. The merge of the main products into a super-listing provided a huge upgrade to the customer review count since all of these products had excellent ratings, varying between 4.5 and 5 stars. Combined, we got a glowing 5-star rating on the variation, which transformed into a listing with 200 reviews.
In comparison, previously separated variations had between 7 to 50 reviews. Since this merge, our hero product has been experiencing a stable growth of reviews, which is another crucial factor that helped us reach the best-seller spot.
Advertising on Amazon is the most effective paid tool to rank organically and scale sales. Ads sales on the most relevant search terms not only increase your BSR. It also grows your organic positions and provides you with more organic sales, which are the most profitable ones.
Since January 2022, this account has shown stable growth, with some downswings when they ran out of stock. This was one of the biggest difficulties while scaling this account, as periods without stock negatively affected our BSR and organic rankings.
Something important to share is the Summer period of 2022. In that quarter, our overall market traffic and search volume dropped by 30-40%. However, our sales have remained steady. The top-notch optimization structure and our approach to ToS placements were crucial for keeping the brand’s growth.
At the same time, our competitors’ sales dropped 30% during these months.
We did not have a hero product for advertising because we had problems with stock, so we had to allocate an advertising budget based on the situation in the warehouse. In 4th optimization level campaigns, we advertise a single ASIN, and since different products were running out of stock, we had hundreds of single target campaigns launched for almost every child of this new variation. Adding campaigns to ASIN portfolios in the advertising console is a huge timesaver when optimizing advertising spend for specific products and monitoring their overall performance in PPC.
There were times when all ASINs in this variation went out of stock. Unfortunately, manufacturing could not keep up with the amounts that we were selling.
Running out of stock causes damage to BSR and organic rankings as well. This is why we needed to work extra hard when we were back in stock. Adding some additional budget to advertising helps earn previously lost rankings. However, it causes a disbalance in TACoS%. Nonetheless, gaining back the sales velocity is more important, as we can optimize TACoS% in a week or two after we regain rankings.
Our long-term strategy for this brand was to claim top organic positions in the most relevant search terms. We had around 75 keywords that were perfectly suitable for our product, and we knew that to become the best-seller, we had to rank high in all of them.
Tracking keyword rankings manually would be time-consuming. Therefore we use the Helium10 keyword tracker tool for this purpose. We started tracking organic keyword rankings for our main variation, immediately realized our top priority targets, and began distributing advertising spending accordingly. We enhanced ad spending for keywords that we wanted to claim top positions, and with reasonable conversion rates, we started growing our rankings.
Helium10 keyword tracker also allows you to see which ASIN ranks best in each keyword from the variation. Therefore, it suggests which products to push on what keywords. We regularly monitored rankings and optimized advertising spending accordingly. This helped us claim the top organic position for our super-listing.
October was unlucky for our partner and us. Due to the client’s VAT provider mistake, the VAT documentation wasn’t filed on time. This cost us a suspended account for 13 days of the month. It was a substantial financial hit for the brand. However, we managed to recover the losses.
Since this was a time-limited project of 10 months, we ended this beautiful and fruitful partnership with no issues to the account after October. It was up and running; the organic positions gained back, and the advertising campaigns ran full steam ahead. Also, since our client was working on new products to be launched soon, we made sure all the listings were uploaded and finished in advance. We have trained their team to handle any issues known to us with this account.
We have handed over all the advertising campaigns that have been prepared so that the client’s team can take them in-house with minimal loss in performance and proper training to continue to grow this fantastic brand further.
AMZ Bees is an e-commerce agency that grows and manages brands on Amazon with advanced PPC strategy, listing conversion optimisation and problem solving.
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