Maximizing Profits & Scalability on Amazon: Seller Tips To Grow Your Business in 2023

Are you tired of feeling like your Amazon business is stuck in the mud, barely making a profit? It’s time to kick things into high gear and start maximizing profits on the world’s largest e-commerce platform. Amazon is like a high-speed train, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get left behind on the platform. But fear not, savvy sellers! We’ve got the tips and tricks you need to rev up your sales and take your business to the next level. So sit back, buckle up, and get ready to speed up your profits with these Amazon seller tips for maximizing profitability. Trust us, you won’t want to miss this ride!

Seller Hacks For Maximizing Profits & Scalability on Amazon

Selling on Amazon is a great way to start an online business and reach millions of customers worldwide. However, as the competition grows, it becomes increasingly challenging to increase profits and scale the business. Therefore, it’s essential to optimize your product listings, set competitive prices, take advantage of Amazon’s advertising opportunities, utilize Amazon’s FBA program, expand your reach, and monitor your performance metrics.

In today’s Amazon Seller Hacks video, Amy is joined by Amazon experts, Lee Loree, Andrew Maff, and Chelsea Cohen. Together, they dissect the most commonly asked questions on maximizing profits and increasing scalability on Amazon. Here’s a breakdown of their insights.

What are the most common mistakes private label brand owners make when it comes to maximizing profits?

Lee Loree, Co-Founder of Seller Investigators, opens up the discussion by highlighting issues that most beginner Amazon sellers have in shipping and packaging. Having handled a lot of shipping discrepancies as the co-founder of Seller Investigators, an Amazon recovery service, he can attest to it being one major area that many Amazon sellers struggle with.

According to Lee, one common mistake that many sellers make is underestimating shipping costs. Some sellers even resort to dishonest practices like misrepresenting product sizes and weights to save money. This not only creates discrepancies in shipping costs but can also lead to dissatisfied customers who receive products that do not match their expectations.

Many sellers also cut corners on packaging quality, which can also negatively impact the customer’s experience. Poorly packaged products can arrive damaged or broken, leading to returns, negative reviews, and loss of customer trust. In contrast, well-packaged products can enhance the customer’s unboxing experience, creating positive associations with the brand and increasing the likelihood of repeat business.

Chelsea Cohen, Co-Founder of SoStocked, an inventory management platform for Amazon sellers, echoed Loree’s sentiments. Drawing on her years of experience working with thousands of sellers, Chelsea agrees that shipping, storage, and handling are common weak spots for many Amazon-based businesses. In particular, she notes that many sellers make the mistake of relying too heavily on third-party suppliers to handle palette optimization, which can result in lost profits. By taking a more hands-on approach to optimizing palettes, sellers can ensure that they are maximizing profitability and minimizing shipping costs.

In addition to optimizing palettes, Chelsea stresses the importance of tracking and monitoring inventory. One key strategy is to regularly remove slow-selling products from inventory and focus on stocking up on best-sellers. This approach ensures that sellers are using their warehouse space and resources most efficiently, leading to higher profits and better cash flow.

How can you effectively market your products to drive sales and increase profits?

Andrew Maff, Founder & CEO of BlueTuskr, a full-service digital marketing company for e-commerce sellers, encourages Amazon sellers to diversify advertising away from Amazon. He shares several methods to do so, including social ads, search engine optimization (SEO), email, and influencer marketing, among others.

For on-Amazon advertising efforts, it can be tempting to throw cash on paid ads and campaigns. But he points out that proper listing optimization can be very powerful when done right. So, be sure to utilize as many opportunities as you can.

Diversifying advertising strategies is crucial for Amazon sellers to reach new audiences, build brand awareness, and increase sales. By leveraging a combination of on-Amazon advertising and alternative marketing methods, sellers can maximize their profits further and boost scalability for the long term.

More Tips On Maximizing Profits & Scalability On Amazon

Keep your friends close, and competitors closer.

Amazon sellers already have a lot on their plates. But it is crucial to stay ahead of the game. To do that, remember to keep a close eye on your competitors’ pricing, product offerings, and marketing strategies. What are they doing right? And how can you do it better? This can help you stay competitive and make informed business decisions.

Make your clients a priority.

It’s no secret that your customer base is the lifeblood of your business. Providing excellent customer service can help sellers build a positive reputation and increase customer loyalty. Respond quickly to customer inquiries, and resolve any issues or complaints as soon as they come up.

The internet is your oyster and help is everywhere.

Leverage external tools and services you find online, and some even offline! There are many third-party tools and services available to help Amazon sellers manage their business more efficiently. Consider using inventory management software, repricing tools, and Amazon listing optimization services to streamline your operations and boost sales.

We hope you enjoyed today’s Amazon Seller Hacks! Integrate these tips in your operational flow and see your eCommerce journey flourish. As always, we will be here to help and support you if you ever hit any road bumps. Remember to get in touch with us and unlock your Amazon selling potential today.

 

Transcription

Amy Wees: Hey guys, I’m so excited about this month’s content series. Why? Because it’s the answer to your most pressing questions. So I reached out in February and I pulled the seller community and I said, What is the biggest thing you’re struggling with right now in your E-commerce business? And the answer was maximizing profits and scalability. It turns out, advertising is getting expensive. It’s the supply chain breaking down in certain instances. And it’s really tough to get profitability and scalability in our businesses. So I really wanted to answer the questions that are most related to these topics. And I reached out to the best experts in the field. And over the next month, each week, we’re going to be releasing live content, where these experts are answering very specific questions that will help you make sure that your business is both profitable and scalable in today’s e-commerce environment. So without further ado, this week, we’re going to be talking about the most common mistakes private label brand owners make when it comes to maximizing their profits, and how to effectively market your products to drive sales and increase profits. Enjoy what we have for you this week. And we’ll see you next week with even more great content on this subject.

Lee Loree: Hello, my name is Lee Loree. I’m one of the founders at cellar investigators. We’re an Amazon refund recovery service. And what that means is that when you have inventory that goes into the Amazon warehouse, if you have discrepancies in that inventory, ie Amazon didn’t didn’t give you credit for everything you shipped in or things have gotten lost or damaged. We step in on your behalf and advocate for you to get those dollars back that you’re owed. I’m going to answer today what are the most common mistakes private label sellers make when it comes to maximizing profits. And for that I want to talk about shipping as well as packaging. And they kind of go together but they’re a little bit different. So I’m going to start with packaging. When you are designing packaging as a private label seller, you are almost always thinking about what is the experience like for the consumer, when they open it, they open the corrugated box from Amazon, they see your packaging, that’s the first impression they get from your product, you want it to be slick, you want it to be nice. But here’s the thing, if you haven’t, if you have outside of that packaging, one dimension, length, width or height, that is over 18 inches, Amazon will automatically trigger your product into an oversize category, which means they’re going to charge you more for your your warehouse storage fees, because that’s done on dimensional wait for your your cubic, the amount of cubic space you take up at the warehouse, as well as they’re going to charge you more because it’s oversized when it goes out the door. So you’re gonna get charged more to ship it as well as to have it sitting in the warehouse. Another problem that you have with with packaging is going to be is going to be weighed. So let’s just say for example, you didn’t consider how much a package was going to weigh. And let’s say that it weighs 1.1 pounds. If it does Amazon as of January of 2023, now uses half pound increments to put your weight into categories. So let’s just say the package weighs 1.1 pounds, Amazon is going to automatically make that package go out the door at 1.5 pounds, because that’s the next threshold after one pound. So if you could get that weight down below a pound, you would be in a completely different category for cost to ship as well as to store because the storage hits you the same way the 18 inches does. So it’s really important to be thinking about your packaging, nothing over 18 inches if you can avoid it and nothing over small thresholds of weight. There are other thresholds than just one pound, but you can find that list on Amazon. The next thing I want to talk about is shipping. And let’s just say in this case, we’re talking about UPS UPS is going to you’re going to go into their website you’re going to plug in your length, width and height and the weight of your packaging. We see this multiple times a week with companies that have tried to skate and save a few pennies on UPS by fibbing the dimensions of the box or lessening the weight of the box even though they know it to weigh 15 pounds or only saying it weighs 12 or 13 because they’re trying to save money on the cost of the label. Well number one, assuming you have a UPS account am there going to catch that UPS is going to catch that when it goes to their sorting facility, they’re going to weigh and measure it the same way that you know, Amazon is going to, and I’ll get to that in a second. But they’re going to weigh and measure it. And ultimately, they’re going to charge your account for the appropriate amount for shipping. So you’re not going to get any kind of a deal from UPS. When that package arrives at the warehouse at Amazon, that’s where the problem can really arise. Because Amazon does not physically count your inventory. That’s kind of a trick that a lot of people don’t know that or even, you know, private label sellers. There are millions of products, individual products that are in every single Amazon warehouse, it would introduce a significant amount of human error. If Amazon physically counted every piece of inventory that comes in the warehouse. So they weigh and measure and they have in their system, what your asin weight and dimensions are, they plug that into an algorithm, they look at the box, or the label or whatever they’re using, and they always find the least the least amount that they can, and then they estimate what’s in the box. Now, if you employ a company like us seller investigators, we’re gonna find that discrepancy, we’re going to advocate for you and more likely than not, we’re going to get those units back for you, either in the way of them being found in the warehouse or in the way of compensation to you if Amazon shortage you. However, my services and free there is a cost associated with me doing it. If you can be more efficient with the way you made the label, you don’t need me in the loop and I won’t have to be involved and therefore you can become more profitable. So in short, or to, or in conclusion, 18 inches or smaller, trying to stay inside of the threshold of where the weights are, and trying to make sure that the labels are properly affixed to the box and are accurate to what’s actually in the box are relatively small things you can do in order to try and maximize profits as a private label seller. You can email me at Lee at seller investigators.com If you have any other questions, but I hope that was helpful. And I hope you have a great day. Thanks for listening. Bye.

Andrew Maff: Hello, my name is Andrew Maff. I’m the founder and CEO of Blue tusker. We’re a full service digital marketing company for E commerce sellers. And we actually work with mostly sellers that sell on Amazon and help them diversify away from Amazon. So today, I’m here to talk to you about how you can effectively increase your revenue as well as your profitability on Amazon. Now, I only have about 10 minutes here. So I’m gonna try and fly through this. So if we have any questions, at any point, feel free to email me. And we can deal with that at another time. But I’m gonna run through this right, so let’s go ahead and get into this, you’re on Amazon options for marketing, basically run ads, and that’s kind of it right. So your paid ads, you’ve all your different types of ads, you can run, you have your listing optimization. So obviously making sure that the listing you’re sending them to so kind of an Amazon SEO approach slash like CRO side of things. It’s really all you got, yeah, we could say like coupons, and Lightning Deals and all that fun stuff. But at the end of the day, the stuff that you can do on an ongoing basis without giving some of your margin away is these two things. And that’s it. So obviously building the brand on Amazon, scaling your revenue, and starting to look at more profitable side of things can get very expensive, because the only thing you can do to scale your revenue is run different types of tests with your ads, in which case, you’re running a lot of tests, that’s going to cost you a lot of money to learn, which is going to reduce your profitability. So you can’t really have the best of both worlds on Amazon, which is why it’s so difficult to grow on Amazon. So that’s why we look at talking about off Amazon stuff. Now. I’m gonna fly through this. So I’m not taking up too much of your time. I’m gonna tell you right now, I’m not even gonna bother talking about your website or your landing page. In a perfect world, you’d have one of these, but I’m going to show you how you can actually leverage traditional nor I say traditional but digital marketing efforts off Amazon to improve your Amazon business without needing any of that for the most part. So first obvious the first one here is search ads. So Google bing, bing might pick up soon with chat GPT getting it so you might want to look into that. But search ads, think of this as I have a need. I know I have a need. I’m going to search I have a I have a problem. I know there’s a solution. I’m going to search for it Right place, right time search ads every time. You can’t do shopping ads unless you have your own website and you have a catalog. So that’s going to be out of the way. Your option there is to use Amazon attribution or to use the custom source code in the backend of your website, in which case you can track how many people actually purchased on through your ads. If you do it through the Amazon attribution, you can actually get a credit for that. I think it’s also kind of like an Amazon Associates thing now. And then you have the custom source code in the back end, which you can’t get a commission from for sending traffic there but You can send them to your storefront. And depending on how you’re looking to build your brand, your storefront probably going to be one of the best places to send them. So pros and cons to both social is going to be very similar. So your social ads are going to be a little bit more. Either they know that they have a problem, but they’re unaware of a solution. Or they don’t even know they have a problem. And you’re telling them about a solution to a problem they didn’t know they had. So social can really help with basically, educating the market more. So if you think your product requires more education, social ads are the best way to go. Or if it’s really visual, it’s just like a sexy product that obviously works really well on social ads, too. Or if you think that, hey, just a handful lines a copy can get people to convert on my website, sir, on Amazon, I should say, search ads work great. Also. Next thing you have is SEO. So a lot of people sleep on SEO, and it bothers the hell out of me. Because you think like on Amazon, you’re gonna do all this keyword research, making your listing perfect. But then you’re going to completely ignore the fact that your listing is showing up on Google or on Bing, and you’re doing nothing about it. And to me, real low hanging fruit. You could have a website or a blog, where you create a bunch of content and you link to your products, you can have ads on your products, you can do all this kind of stuff. But let’s assume that maybe you don’t, your other option there is to just do a backlinking strategy, start doing outreach to anyone who’s doing listicles, or just mentioning products that you think your product is great for, do what you can to get a backlink to them. And then that will actually improve the page authority of your Amazon listing, in which case, the organic ranking from a Google and Bing side will actually go up on Amazon. Now keep in mind, the average cost per click on Amazon is a little bit more I’m sorry, it’s a little bit less expensive than doing search ads. However, when you’re doing search ads, you can only do maximize clicks, because you’re not gonna be able to optimize for conversions because Amazon doesn’t talk to Google, they hide all their data. So here, your cost per click is actually probably going to be comparable. Now, it may not convert as well, but it’s going to be comparable. And if you send it all your storefront, no problems, you should still be in a great spot. And it should be just as justifiable is running ads on Amazon social ads, way less expensive than search ads and paid ads, both Amazon ads, both of these, they have an intent. So their conversion rates going to be higher, but your social ads, you’re going to get more traffic. So if you can actually keep that cost per click down, golden, SEO completely organic. So you do all this, all this, this focus on getting your listing to look all nice and pretty. And then from these perspectives, you can actually get people to your site at a lower cost than paid ads and improve from there, which is going to increase your profitability and your sales at the same time. Email, grow your email list. Some of these different ads, you could develop doing, you know, running ads to a piece of gated content or a discount or something like that to develop an email list. But if you think about new product launches, new variations, if you have a consumable, anything like that, letting your audience know, an email is fantastic. Because you can basically do let’s think of a product launch. Hey, thanks for being a subscriber, here’s 20% off this new thing that we launched, all of a sudden that snowball effect on Amazon really starts to pick up, maybe you don’t have to do their vine program or anything like that. Because you can go straight into getting that initial move, right in that honeymoon phase. And you have social media, we all know social media, that one’s going to be very standard, that’s going to be that’s going to take a while. But if you start to develop that audience and you’re making some real nice content, you can start to really move some of this product at a significantly higher rate than you would Paying Ads and the cost for that is going to be lower, the work is a little bit more. And the timeframe is a little bit more. But it’s social. And SEO to me is one of those things that if you start it now, six to 12 months from now, you’ll be really happy that you did it. And then the last one here we have Amazon slash I’m sorry, influencer slash affiliate marketing, very straightforward. You can do something like seeding, which is sending influencers a product and just saying, hey, I really hope you like it. If you do like it, I’d love for you to post it on your page. That’s about it. Or you can obviously do the negotiations through that whole thing. You can work with them on an affiliate site and give them a commission for selling product or anything like that. I know I had to fly through this, I’m making sure that I’m gonna stay under 10 minutes for this because I’ve run through it a few times I went way over. So in this scenario, every single one of these is what I consider a traditional digital marketing approach. We get real crazy with some of this stuff. You could do partnerships with other companies. We could talk about chat bots, we could talk about outside affiliate programs. We talked about direct mail, or streaming channel services and running ads on there like so many other options. Not going to get into that right now. These are the basics. These are the easiest, lowest hanging fruit for me and I know a lot of us hate that term, low hanging fruit so I apologize. But these are the easiest ways in my eyes that we’ve done countless times with sellers that are on Amazon and helps them from an off Amazon approach to build their Amazon business. Now usually what we do is once we prove out one or more of these channels on Amazon, we then look at developing a website or a landing page and starting to build the brand off Amazon. Most of the time, not every time, but most of the time, you won’t make as much money on your website as you will on Amazon. But from a profit standpoint, it can often be very comparable. And in many cases, it’s actually even more on your site because you’re not paying Amazon fees. But if you look at the eventual exit one day, having a website with your own traffic, your own data, your own email, list your own social media, you will sell for a significantly higher multiple than if you were solely relying on Amazon. So if we’re talking about increasing sales, all of this stuff is great. from a cost standpoint, traditional paid ads stuff just like you’re doing on Amazon, SEO, email, social influencer marketing, almost all of that is free with the exclusion of time, right? So whatever that management cost is, and then influencer maybe a little bit more if you decide to negotiate with them. So that’s going to increase your sales. But if you think about all this stuff is going to drive traffic to your Amazon listing, hopefully, it’s going to convert well because you have a great listing, then from there, what you’re gonna end up doing is having all this organic traffic start to improve it, Amazon’s gonna see that you’ve got more traffic, you’ve got more engagement, you’ve got more sales, more reviews, more conversions, everything’s great, everyone’s lovely, which means they’re going to increase you from an organic perspective. And you’re not going to be so reliant on giving Amazon every dollar that you have, and being so hell bent on what your tacos are. So you can actually start to focus on building your brand off Amazon, while catering to your Amazon business to justify seeing if it’s necessary for you to start to build your brand off Amazon. I hope I went through it all. I know I’m just about time here. So if anyone’s got any questions, feel free to email me, Andrew blue tester.com. But thank you all for your time. And I hope this was helpful.

Chelsea Cohen: Hi, my name is Chelsea Cohen, and I am the co founder and CEO of stock and inventory management software for Amazon sellers. I’m going to talk to you about some of the most common mistakes that sellers make when it comes to maximizing their profitability. So the first thing I wanted to talk about is your shipping and storage and handling. When it comes to your master cartons and your pallet optimization, a lot of sellers rely on their suppliers and their freight forwarders to figure all of that out for them. The problem with this is that they don’t necessarily optimize these things. For maximum profitability. You want to within the parameters set by Amazon and by your third party warehouse. You want to make sure that you have as many units per Carton and as many units per pallet as possible, so that you reduce the total number of cartons and the total number of units as you tend to be charged based on total units, total cartons and total pallets. So reducing the total number of those things is going to increase your profitability by reducing your total fees. A lot of sellers are not optimized for this. And they’ll have excess pallets, excess cartons, they will not be utilizing anywhere close to 100% of the space available on their pallets. I’ve even seen sellers who have only been utilizing, say 60% of that space. The second thing I wanted to talk about is tracking your storage liabilities. What I mean by this is that Amazon is really cracking down on having too much inventory in their warehouses. So you need to start paying attention to your slow sellers, your products that maybe are on the chopping block for liquidation, your overstock fees because your overstock products because Amazon is increasing those fees. They’re increasing those fees in a couple of different ways. They’re they’re increasing storage fees or increasing fees on how long your inventory is actually at Amazon, and they’re also making it more expensive to remove those products. So streamlining your inventory processes is extremely important. start tracking your slow sellers your overstock products your liquidation products and beyond that send reports to your Marketing teams that your marketing team can help to move those products. They need to become a more profit and cashflow focus when it comes to moving not just your best sellers, but also those slow sellers and those products that are clogging up your storage space and costing you access holding fees. Hope this was helpful, and I wish you the best in maximizing your profit in your business.

Amy Wees: Wow, that was some really great information this week coming from Chelsea Lee and Andrew. And I hope you got a lot out of it. I’m really looking forward to next week’s content as well as we continue this series on maximizing profitability and scalability for your E commerce business. See you next week. Bye everybody.