Outsourcing Amazon Listing Management:

The Client

The client is an old couple who invested their retirement money in an Amazon business with the goal of earning some passive income from home. To learn how to sell effectively on Amazon, the couple joined webinars, tried different tools, and joined groups. Nothing worked.

In desperation, the couple scoured the internet to look for an Amazon specialist who they can outsource for a couple of hours and who can help them improve their listings on the e-commerce platform.

For 18 months, the client worked with an American company only to find that their business needs were still not being met. Apparently, the company was “consistently slow to act upon [their] Skype discussions and emails” to the point that the client was left to deal with most of the work. It also didn’t understand that the client, being a new seller on Amazon, does not really have a background in e-commerce jargons and technicalities.

An excerpt from the client’s email

Seeing that the American company wasn’t delivering their end of the deal, the client decided to seek experience and expertise elsewhere. The client learned about ShoreMarketing and immediately got in touch with us. On that same day, a meeting was set up between ShoreMarketing’s Amazon specialist and the client.

The Challenge

The client was paying a monthly fee of $44 on top of advertising costs to Amazon. Still, both their product listings and paid ads were not driving enough conversions. One of their products was selling but had a low profit margin; the other had a higher profit margin but wasn’t selling much at all.

With their business in the red, the client knew that they needed the help of a virtual assistant in optimising, marketing, and advertising their products on Amazon.

Our Recommendation

Amazon’s A9 search engine algorithm was developed to rate the relevancy of every item in the Amazon product catalogue with a customer’s query. Neglecting the optimisation of the placement and presentation of your product detail pages or sponsored ads compromises your product visibility and sale probability.

The client clarified that they only required the short-term assistance of a specialist and will eventually manage their Amazon marketing themselves once they get the hang of it.

With that in mind, ShoreMarketing advised the client to outsource Joyce, our mid-level Amazon technician, for 16 hours. As soon as the number of hours was settled, Joyce began coordinating with the client to lay out the strategy and time frame for the short project. The strategies that were implemented are as follows:

• Keyword Research with Efficiency Index Computation

Keywords help Amazon’s search engine algorithm understand what your product page is about and serve it to the right audience. Considering user intent, Joyce researched keywords then calculated the efficiency or effectiveness of each one.

• Rewriting of Product Descriptions

The product description section is where you basically expound on and add more value to the features you mentioned in the bullet points section. Joyce rewrote the client’s product descriptions to improve readability and to convince customers to purchase without sounding too pushy.

• Optimisation of Product Titles

The product title is one of the relevance-related ranking factors on Amazon. It also impacts your click-through-rate. For these reasons, Joyce optimised the client’s product titles by including relevant keywords that we wanted to be associated with their brand name.

• Setup of Sponsored Ads

The client has run paid ads on Amazon before, albeit unsuccessfully. After doing keyword research, Joyce set up and optimised both automated and manual campaigns to generate better traffic and deliver more sales.

Once the 16 hours were consumed, ShoreMarketing scheduled another meeting with the client. After analysing the financial viability of the client’s business, we came up with recommendations for moving forward. We gave the client a walk-through of more optimisation strategies, as well as monitoring of their product detail pages and sponsored ads’ performance.

The Results

Through Joyce’s SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) ads efforts, the client’s product visibility improved and weekly sales surged. Page views and sessions were on an upward trend. Between June 02 and June 23, ordered product sales increased by almost 200%.

Sponsored ads started contributing to overall sales as well. For example, between June 16 and June 22, sponsored ads delivered 37% of the client’s total sales. Meanwhile, in the first week of July, 77% of overall sales came from paid ads.

On July 2, Joyce observed that organic listings are now delivering numbers so she recommended that the sponsored ads be paused.

Pleased with ShoreMarketing’s service, the client, without prompting, left some kind words for us:

Client’s feedback via email