Our recent webinar on Applying 6Ps eCommerce Intelligence to Drive Amazon Sales and Share generated much interest from attendees. Understanding how to apply the 6Ps eCommerce intelligence framework to your business is key, but applying it specifically to Amazon in order to drive sales is even more important. Below are some of the top issues which were raised by attendees:
Regarding Amazon’s innovations, Alexa and other voice ordering devices, how can brands optimize their presence to make sure they’re not losing out on those opportunities?
"So in the U.S., Amazon rolled out – it’s a year and a half now – Amazon Choice. What that means is, if you say “Alexa, order diapers” one of three things is going to happen: If I’ve ordered diapers in my recent history, Alexa’s going to read off and say, “Do you want 105-count, size 3 diapers?” of whatever brand it might have been. And you say, yes, and she’ll order it for you.
The second thing that can happen if you don’t have any order history is she’ll say Amazon’s Choice is whatever brand, 105-count, size 3 – do you want me to buy this for you? Do you want to buy this?
Now if there isn’t an Amazon Choice – most categories have them now – but if you confuse Alexa or she doesn’t know what category it is, she’s going to go based on search rank; she might put in the highest ranked diaper based on that search term. So what’s the number one ranked diaper product?
So if you want to stay ahead in voice search, first of all you definitely want to know who is Amazon’s Choice in the category. It does change; it’s a bit volatile; it can change from month to month. There are a number of articles out there now with hypotheses on what drives Amazon’s designation as Amazon’s Choice. We know ratings and reviews have a lot to do with it. We know stable supply chain has a lot to do with it. And then of course the overall rank in sales in the category is another key factor. And then beyond that, experiment with Alexa, ask different questions. The other thing that they’re doing a lot more of now is you can promote on Alexa. So they might have Echo-only or Alexa-only deals for certain days. And you can ask Alexa what’s on deal today and it might be exclusive to that channel. So ask your vendor manager about those opportunities as well."
Going back to the search topic: Do you know if the Amazon algorithm searches factors A+ content at all?
"That is a little bit tougher to tease out because there’s no question that in some way it must. Amazon’s search algorithm probably has somewhere between 20 to 30 different factors that can be tuned in different ways depending on the category. And that page completeness or page health definitely factors in. From what we’ve seen, from what we understand the key words within A+ content doesn’t fuel search, but the presence of A+ on the page does give the page a boost. Generally the statistics are anywhere from 8%-12% increase in sales over time from adding A+ content. It can be a little tricky to manage but those are numbers that Amazon has put out as well. I would say in general, yeah, absolutely you want A+ pages at least on your top 20% of items, if not across all of them. It definitely appears to help boost search but not necessarily in terms of key words."
You touched upon this a tad earlier, but if you’re new to eCommerce or selling on Amazon in general, what do you think that first lever is that we should concentrate on?
"That first P of Product is the first place to start. At the end of the day if you’re product isn’t in stock, nothing else really matters. You can have the best product detail page in the world -- if you’re out of stock; if you lose the buy box; you might not come up in search; or if you do, you’re not going to get the sale. So the first thing to do is to really take a look at where your products are vulnerable, where you’re having out of stock issues on a regular basis, and work with supply chain and with Amazon to boost that. Not only is it the best place for sales overall, it’s the easiest one to measure and see the impact from."
Here’s an Omnichannel question concerning Amazon. Amazon is recently moving to add brick and mortar best selling items online. Do you have a point of view as to why they’re doing this?
"Yes. Amazon’s got a lot of different things going on, a lot of different things that they’re testing. If you are following the news, yesterday was the first day that Amazon officially owned Whole Foods. And at a probably unprecedented level than we’ve ever seen in a retailer acquisition, you walked into Whole Foods and there was an Echo display. It was kind of funny because some of the displays were like, natural foods/good for you; and then it was like a big Amazon Echo display. But I think part of that is making sure that they have the most competitive offerings. If there is a product in brick and mortar that’s doing very well, that Amazon can offer in addition because they do want to capture the entire wallet; they do want to capture the entire basket. If they see something that’s doing well offline then they’re probably going to look and ask, well – how can I get that product? And how can we feature it on Amazon as well."
This one is somewhere on the promotion side: What percent breakout of a marketing budget would you recommend for AMS versus AMG?
To find out the answer to this question and to listen to the entire webinar, please click here! Or fill out the form below to set up time to talk with someone at Clavis Insight.
