Analyzing the data from your Amazon MWS account will help you not only to understand how to better serve your customers, but also to successfully boost the performance of your online sales.
Selling products on a large eCommerce platform such as Amazon Marketplace can seem like an overwhelming project for the uninitiated. So, in the latest Adverity Bitesize webinar, Sam Madden, our VP of Sales, goes through the basics and explains how you can harness data to boost online sales performance at one of the world’s largest online sales platforms.
Difference Between First and Third Party Sellers
Let’s take a look at some staggering numbers: Amazon has 310 million active users, 2.5 million sellers, and 4,000 items are sold each minute. Indeed, research has found 89% of buyers are more likely to buy from Amazon than any other seller, Sam comments.
There are two types of sellers on Amazon. First Party sellers deal directly with Amazon, with the retailer controlling inventory, logistics, pricing and margin, but they also provide the seller access to Amazon Prime customers. The second type are the Third Party sellers, and this segment of the platform is open to anyone. Whilst they have complete control over their inventory and pricing, they bear more logistics responsibility, and see much lower conversion rates. In addition, certain ad types and marketing features are not available to Third Party sellers, whereas they are to First Party sellers.
How to Broaden Your Reach
The good news for Third Party sellers is they get to take advantage of the ‘Fulfilment by Amazon’ feature, where they send products to Amazon in bulk. In return, Amazon stores and sends out products - for a larger cut of the sales. It backs this up with round-the-clock customer service and offers sellers its European Fulfilment Network. This makes it easier for sellers to sell goods across Europe and massively reduces the cost of logistics.
When it comes to selling on Amazon visibility is key, as 90% of purchases begin with search, explains Sam. Also, the majority of clicks go to the top three search results. So, it pays to understand Amazon’s algorithm. This entails using keyword-rich product titles, comprehensive bullet-lists, multiple images and videos, and effective product reviews, among other things.
Key Advertising Challenges
One of the main challenges sellers face when advertising on Amazon is how to win the Amazon ‘buy box’, which allows customers to buy the product immediately. Also, it is not so easy to maintain profitability, as you need to set your price just right - not too high; not too low. Having access to the right Amazon tools and using them well is also a challenge, and important to get right, advises Sam.
With Amazon Marketplace sellers in mind, Adverity has developed the Amazon Marketplace data connector to help sellers and marketers get and analyze the data from their store. This connector offers 60 different report types across 13 categories, says Sam. It enables businesses to retrieve vital commerce-related information - from orders, price and quantity to tax and performance, so they can see what’s working and what isn’t.
Amazon Marketplace connector makes it easy to extract information for visualization and analysis, giving sellers a centralized view of sales performance across multiple MWS accounts or even different selling platforms, such as Shopify or Magento. Finally, you can combine data from Amazon Marketplace and Amazon Advertising, which means you can evaluate the full performance of all your ad campaigns on the Amazon platform with Adverity.
