Amazon Business Tools: The Wide World of Amazon
Reach millions of business customers with Amazon Business
The words, reach millions of customers *cue the chorus of angels, singing*, is every entrepreneur’s dream. Now, how is this dream being realized you ask? By the wonderful invention referred to as The Internet *cue cash register sound effect*.
Just a short 20 years ago, it was nearly impossible to reach millions of customers unless you were able to get your product in big box stores, such as Walmart. Vying for that coveted, yet very limited, shelf space in these large retailers was one of the biggest hurtles we as entrepreneurs faced when getting our products to market. If our product was, or was not chosen to be featured in Walmart’s prime real-estate, we could still have the opportunity to sell through channels such as teleshopping, direct sales (such as home-to-home sales reps and in home shopping parties), and catalog sales, most noteworthy the Sears and Eaton’s catalog [may they rest in peace :( ]. While these different types of shopping channels and infomercials both offered the opportunity to get a business’ products to its customers, if your product was not inherently intriguing or glamorous, the odds are it is not going to be successful with this form of selling.
Nowadays, with the invention of the internet, it provides us entrepreneurs a means to get your product out to customers with less lead-time from production to sales, and without having to jump through excessive bureaucratic hoops that comes with dealing with big box stores. The driving force of the profitability for entrepreneurs in this online retailing space is Amazon, the place where you can order live crickets for your pet chameleon, while simultaneously buying a casket for your dead Nan.
Amazon is a thriving space for all sorts of retailing, and this is a perfect channel for entrepreneurs to connect their businesses to their customers. Time and time again, we have seen numerous success stories where small scale entrepreneurs were able to take their businesses to a whole new level because of using supportive technologies.
Now, I am pretty certain that most of us under the age of 40 have heard of, or played, Cards Against Humanity, “a party game for horrible people”. For those that are not familiar with the game, it is a funny card game that can be played with a large group of people. You can learn more about it herehttps://cardsagainsthumanity.com/. Cards Against Humanity’s creator, Max Tempkin, came up with the idea for this game while in university, hoping it would help entertain and get his friends socializing. The product was getting the validation it needed, and with funding support from potential customers on Kickstarter, and some creative marketing tactics, the card game is the most successful private label product ever will forever be a huge amazon success story. With its sales on Amazon alone, the game and its subsequent expansion packs sell about 90,000–120,000 units in a single month, amounting to over $1.5 million in sales. If you want to read more on this story check out https://www.junglescout.com/blog/amazon-success-story/.
While Amazon alone wasn’t the only technology behind Max’s success, but Amazon’s program Fulfilled-by-Amazon (FBA) was a tool that helped support the businesses needs in terms of handling all the customer service difficulties that come with shipping. FBA is a service offered by Amazon Business which entails that you store your products at Amazon’s fulfillment centers, and from there amazon will “pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products” . Amazon has claimed that “FBA can help you scale your business and reach more customers”, which was definitely a contributing factor to the success of Cards Against Humanity. The products placed in this channel are eligible for Amazon Prime, a service that offers customers free two-day shipping, and are well supported by Amazon’s highly regarded customer service. https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.html
“Amazon’s fulfillment service also handles a lot of our customer service, which alleviates a lot of the customer e-mails that we got previously.”
Ren Wu
Owner of Bundle Monster
While Fulfillment-by-Amazon is a highly valuable piece to the whole suite of tools amazon offers businesses, but in addition, Amazon offers Advertise on Amazon. This service provides you with the means to advertise your product directly on the website to help influence potential customers. There is a bid process that is used by Amazon to have companies place value on key search terms, and the highest bid will be prioritized when a customer searches those terms. There are 3 advertising solutions Amazon offers: Sponsored Products is where ads for specific products appear on search pages to increase visibility, Sponsored Brands are a way to attract attention customer attention to your businesses Amazon page, and Stores creates “multipage shopping destinations for individual brands that let you showcase your brand story and product offerings”. These offerings are a cost-by-click, meaning you only pay for the ads that result in a visit to your product, businesses, or Amazon Store. If you want to read more about this tool, go to this link https://services.amazon.com/advertising/overview.htm/ref=asus_sp_hnav.
Amazon also offers a Selling Services tool that helps professionals provide their services to Amazon customers. This product is supported by 4 core ideas: there are no start-up fees to advertise your services on the platform, real customers and less time chasing leads, the services that are offered on this platform are carefully selected to ensure only the best are represented, and the reputation and trust associated with Amazon ensures customer attraction and business growth. You can find more information, here’s the website https://services.amazon.com/selling-services/home.htm/ref=asus_vas_hnav.
While we often look at Amazon from a consumer perspective, it undeniably offers valuable tools that can be utilized by entrepreneurs, even when your product is your professional services. Beyond just the retailing of products, Amazon has proven that there is a notable opportunity to utilize selling keywords and prime search result real estate (just like how Walmart’s shelves are also real estate to be sold). After taking a good look at what Amazon itself offers, we are going to explore some third-party tools that utilize these services.
Ad Badger is a software that is targeted to increase a business’s Amazon pay-per-click sales. It focuses on three major facets of its software: Increase profit by increasing conversion rate (this is done by blocking items from your store that are underperforming), estimates wasteful spending when it comes to costs to retail your product, and supports the automation of your Amazon business account so you have more time to focus on your business. Ad Badger offers Negative Keyword Optimization, which scans through associated search key terms and automatically adds those unbeneficial terms as negative keywords to the product. In addition to this tool, Badger has a Bid Optimization service, which calculates the appropriate bid for a search term, and ultimately reduces costs associated with this advertising service. These services are bundled in three levels of monthly subscription, based on ad campaign spending, summarized in the chart below.
Ad Badger includes all core functions in all of the levels of service, and there is a 30 day trial to make sure this product is the right fit for you and your business. Find more information at https://www.adbadger.com/.
Another tool that supports selling on Amazon is informed.co, a repricing tool that ensures your product is appropriately and competitively priced, providing “your business with actionable insights and powerful analytics so you can make informed decisions”. Here are some of the features that are a part of informed.co’s service: profit and revenue reporting to have a comprehensive understanding of how your business is doing, track how many of your products are listed in other retailers for a product (the Buy Box), track successful items, a in depth breakdown of sales (pending and completed), and automation of min and max product price to get your desired returns and to minimize fees. This service is based on an analysis of your business and its success with Selling on Amazon, which simultaneously working on the advertising side to ensure your products optimization to regularly land in that suggested products and the Big Box to optimize product visibility. In terms of pricing for informed.co’s product offering, here is the breakdown of the different product tiers.
Informed.co offers different levels of service and support based on your business’s needs. For an entrepreneur, the Starter package would probably be sufficient to support your starting business. There is also a free trial option to test out these features and to ensure you get the perfect product for you. Find out more information by following this link https://www.informed.co/product/.
Similar to informed.co’s software, Jungle Scout is a web app that helps you centralize the control of your Amazon business, while doing so based on data-driven decisions. This product helps find the correct fit for your product in the wide world of the Amazon marketplace, ensuring that optimization is at the core of your business. A unique offering from Jungle Scout is their product database tool that helps entrepreneurs, like yourself, realize “product opportunities by applying a wide variety of filters, including category, review counts, and average sales”. In addition, this software has a tool that accurately tracks consumer and competitor trends to help you make well informed decisions. One tool that is included in this service that is similar to the other two previous Amazon business support tools, is the keyword optimization. This tool offered by Jungle scout is used to “support better product listings, increase brand exposure, and drive extra sales”, similar to the other software previously discussed. See below for the breakdown of the pricing model.
The differing levels is mostly based off of how many of your products you want to track. For a smaller business, the start-up option would be your best bet. To have a deeper look into this product follow this link https://www.junglescout.com/the-web-app/.
In terms of a comparison of all the tools described in this post, it is hard to say which one is superior compared to the next, because they all have significantly different product offerings. If your business is more developed, and is looking for that extra advantage, Ad Badger might be of interest to you, because we all know marketing is one of the most important factors to a products success. On the other hand, both informed.co and Jungle Scout offer well rounded products, which would be great for products that are new to Selling on Amazon. In terms of both of these services, I would recommend Jungle Scout as it has a bit more variety in services, and has a more start-up friendly price tag. If I was making a recommendation for a well-established Amazon business, I would definitely recommend informed.co because of its more analytical focus, and wide product offering at its higher tiers that would be beneficial to already noteworthy products. All these tools, both created by Amazon and other third-party services, are incredibly valuable to starting an Amazon business. This kind of support provides us entrepreneurs with the means to be successful with our products on this type of channel.
We all agree that in this generation of entrepreneurs, we are leaving the traditional brick-and-mortar style businesses. With an increase in online retailing, specifically tied to services such as Amazon Prime, we are already seeing the struggle traditional shopping malls are having because they aren’t getting the amount of foot traffic they previously were receiving. We now want to do all our shopping from the inside of our own homes, and the new wave of entrepreneurs are capitalizing on this monumental retail shift.
