Tom Wang says it’s mandatory to use a spreadsheet that tracks key metrics for every product you sell on Amazon. You’ll want to go in daily and record rankings; units sold; how many sales came from organic versus giveaway versus PPC; total sessions; conversion rate; reviews; and so on. This is the only way you’ll be able to determine why your product isn’t selling as many units as you’d like, and what to do about it. Business, he says, is all about making data-driven decisions.
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For example, Tom had this seagrass woven basket for plants listed in his Amazon store. It wasn’t selling at all. A quick glance at his spreadsheet showed he was only ranking on page one for one garbage keyword that got very few monthly searches. And even then, he was at the bottom of page one, in spot nine. What he decided to do to boost sales velocity (and hopefully, higher rankings to follow) was drop the price from thirty one dollars and ninety-seven cents to nineteen dollars and ninety-seven cents.
His listing, by the way, was very nicely done. Professional photos, high quality graphics, bullet points to show how it’s superior to competing products, even a video. So anyways, they lower the price to a little bit below their break-even point. With that, they started doing some giveaways. Around ten to fifteen units a day. And whaddya know, their sessions (meaning, the number of people visiting that particular listing per day) began going up. Forty to fifty people a day were now clicking on Tom’s plant basket thingy.
Naturally, organic sales (which is ultimately what you want) followed suit. They went from zero to moving five, six, even eight units a day. What happens is, Amazon takes notice and rewards you with more rankings, right? So now Tom’s showing up on page one for better buyer keywords. Seagrass plant basket, baskets for plants, wicker decor, and so on and so forth. With more organic momentum, they were able to turn off the giveaway. Soon they were doing fifteen to twenty sales a day.
“Everything’s correlated,” Tom says, “everything’s intertwined. The more keywords you rank in the top ten for, the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the more sales you get. The more sales you get, the more reviews you get. It’s all just a flywheel effect.” Next, they bumped the price of the basket back up a bit. Twenty-one dollars and ninety-seven cents. This was on the same day they got ranked for a huge keyword (boho decor) that generates almost two hundred thousand searches per month.
They peaked at about forty sales a day, with eighty to ninety percent of those coming from organic. Tom stresses that PPC and rank and bank (aka giveaways) are just tools to boost your organic performance. You don’t want to be too reliant on them for the long-term or else it’ll be tough to profit much, if anything. Tom’s team eventually inched the price up to twenty-three dollars and ninety-seven cents and sold out their entire inventory. Doesn’t sound like they’ll continue selling that product, but a nice “troubleshooting” case study.
To recap, it starts with a good product and a great listing. Then meticulous tracking. Then data-driven decisions based off what those spreadsheets are telling you. And yeah, you might have to take a step back and lose a little money before you can take two big steps forward. That’s business, isn’t it? For more on starting and scaling an Amazon FBA store, Tom Wang has a course called FBA Masterclass. Cost is seven to nine grand, depending on when and where you buy it. Or, click below for a smart alternative.
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