Take-off Thursday — 20 July 2017
Welcome back and hope you’ve been having a successful week! I’m still in Vancouver, working in our developer hub with part of the Jungle Scout team.
Being a fully remote team is amazing because it allows everyone to “live their best life” — that is work from wherever they want. For some people this means being with friends and family, for others it means travelling the world. Some people like to work from a co-working space and others from a home office. Everyone is different.
As a team, it’s all about communication and making the remote culture work for us. There’s definitely lots to be said about building a remote team and how to get the right balance with productivity and freedom, which maybe I will go into in more depth another week, if you’re interested? 😊
Move over Black Friday — Prime Day is coming through
I know I covered this last week but since then Amazon have published some (vague but exciting) reports on how successful Prime Day was this year. Spoiler: VERY SUCCESSFUL.
Amazon reported that sales increased by 60% when compared to last year. Not only that, sales surpassed that of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Hundreds of thousands of Prime users across 13 marketplaces were making the most of Prime Day and ordering stuff. It’s no coincidence that the Echo Dot being became one of the highest selling items in Amazon history. Amazon have said that they know an Echo user increased purchases by 10%, and it’s also no surprise that Prime members spend more than non-prime members. So in short, Amazon are being smart with their promotions.
From the comments posted in our Facebook group, it was also clear to see that many third party sellers chimed in on the success. Many sellers had some of their best sales days. One report suggested small independent businesses moved twice as much product, with more than 40 million units in total! Wow! That blows my mind!
Now that all of that is over, it’s time to review our inventory, and start preparing for the ever anticipated 4th Quarter and holiday season! (Yeah, I just mentioned the holidays in July, but at the rate this year keeps flying by it’s important to start planning ahead!)
Could Amazon enter the social media space?
I’m not sure if I am surprised by this rumor, or if I can just shrug it off as “Of course Amazon are going to try and create their own messaging-app”.
Rumor has it, they are developing “Anytime by Amazon”:
It seems like this is going to be a consumer instant messaging product for desktop and mobile, with potential features like @mentions, filters for photos and even tasks. Sounds pretty ambitious, like a mashup of Messenger, Twitter and Instagram.
The key element that could make this rumor entirely plausible is that it would allow users to shop. Makes sense!
Amazon have already launched messaging and calling features for Alexa devices to rival Skype, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. It will be interesting to see if the Anytime offering comes to fruition.
If it does, it will be equally interesting to see how Amazon delve into the social networking arena and monetize on this by giving people even more reasons to browse and shop on Amazon stores.
How Many Amazon Sellers Bring In More Than $100 Million?
This super interesting article got published just yesterday about the size of third party sellers on Amazon. Being a data geek my eyes lit up when I saw this headline — I had to read more.
Marketplace Pulse decided to do some research, make a few assumptions and run some calculations to get a rough estimate on the size of Amazon sellers by revenue and here’s what they found:
So what’s the skinny? The result was a hockey stick distribution, with fewer sellers at the heights of $50 — $100 million or more in sales. If you wanted to draw conclusion from this, it could mean that it’s much more difficult to scale a business to these dizzying heights.
But, on the positive side, there are still thousands of sellers taking upwards of$100k a year from their Amazon businesses alone. Considering how many of us go into this business to find financial freedom, or earn extra money as a side hustle, the opportunity is ripe for the taking.
→ Read more — Marketplace Pulse
Reporting Back From Amazon’s First Seller Summit
Just last month Amazon hosted their first seller summit: Boost with FBA. We certainly didn’t want to miss out on this one. Gen who heads up the marketing team at Jungle Scout was invited and got some killer footage and takeaways from the event. Check it out:
Amazon Brand Registry Updates
Back in April, Amazon closed it’s doors on the Brand Registry and made plans to re-open an improved version in May.
It’s now July and we’ve all been able to take stock of the changes that have taken place, and particularly, how it affects Amazon sellers.
I won’t go into too much detail here, as we recently published an in-depth post on the Jungle Scout blog, but effectively, private label sellers are now required to have a registered trademark to get in on the Brand Registry.
Naturally, this was greeted with mixed emotions across the community.
Here’s my hot take: This is something that is standard across ecommerce, and it was only a matter of time before Amazon caught up. If you want to protect branded products effectively, you will need to invest in a trademark at the appropriate time. It will help serious sellers in the long-term with protecting their brand and, hopefully, listing hijacking will become much less commonplace. Not only that, it looks like Amazon are adding some really neat features for Brand Registered sellers, so this only adds more reasons to work towards getting a trademark registered.
It’s still entirely possible to launch without a trademark and without Brand Registry, so this doesn’t mean that new sellers should be worried about getting started.
For more insights on this, be sure to check out our article below:
The Million Dollar Case Study Is Back!
We took a week hiatus during the July 4th celebrations, but last week and this week I was back on air on Wednesday to talk about something we have never before covered at Jungle Scout: Amazon Marketing Services (AMS).
This session has been split into two parts, the first of which has already been published with a full recap here.
AMS is a really exciting new addition to market your products as a seller within the Amazon platform. It allows you to do two types of ads that you can’t get with regular Amazon PPC: Banner ads and visual ads on your competitors product pages 😱!
If you set them up right, it can be super effective and provide a very healthy ROI.
→ Read more — Million Dollar Case Study
Our multitalented in-house designer, Maryna, recently did an awesome photoshoot for our case study product, Jungle Snugs. I want to share a behind-the-scenes view of an Amazon product lifestyle photoshoot in action…
Quote of the week
If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep you will work until you die — Warren Buffet
Podcast of the Week
Tropical MBA — Started by the host Ian and Dan Andrews , a kick butt show dedicated to those seeking personal and financial freedom through small business ownership.
Over and out!
