So you sell on Amazon.
After countless hours of meticulous research, you’ve settled on the perfect products for you to sell. You’ve made your products flawless. You have the best offers, the best customer service, the best packaging, the best design.Yet you still struggle to sell enough units to consider the venture a success.
What gives?
After having worked so diligently on your business, it is perfectly normal and even warranted, to wonder why you’re not selling a large number of units. But as successful Amazon sellers will tell you, the days when successfully selling on Amazon was as simple as just putting out the best products are long gone.
Nowadays, there’s a huge competition for just about everything you can think of. All of your competitors are working just as diligently as you are on their products, which means all of you are in the same league. What can set you apart are the steps you take above and beyond the competition. Simply marketing and setting up advertisement campaigns is no longer enough. To beat your competitors, you also need to have a strong grasp of data and analytics.
How Analytics Helps You Sell More on Amazon
In a nutshell, analytics has to do with patterns.
Patterns are wherever data is. Once you start selling, you generate some data, and that data leads you towards seeing certain patterns. These patterns can help you make decisions that will impact your sales. This impact can either be minimal, or massive, as it rests completely on the decisions. When used properly, analytics will always work in your favor.
So how can a seller use analytics to increase sales? Chances are, you’re already doing some analytics on a daily basis without even thinking of it as “analytics”. Say you notice that your product sales go down in winter but increase during warmer months. From this data, you conclude that you have a product with high seasonality. You then decide that it isn’t worth it to keep the stock in winter. This is the kind of basic analysis that you’re always doing in your mind as an Amazon seller. So you see, the big benefit of analytics is that it helps you make smarter decisions for your business.
The Benefits of an Amazon Analytics Tool
Manually doing Amazon analytics for your business may work if you just have a couple of products and have lots of time to spend digging in Seller Central. But investing in a powerful analytics tool is a must if you’re intent on scaling and growing your Amazon business. For one, just using the reporting tools that Seller Central provides can be limiting. There are ways to manipulate all the data that Amazon has for your sales to do much more advanced analysis which can then lead to better decision making and therefore, profitability.
Let’s look at a few examples. Say you found a new manufacturer for your products. But ever since you received products from this manufacturer, the number of returns increased significantly, and you received more negative reviews. In order to get to this information inside Seller Central, you will need to do some digging.
But what if, on an Amazon analytics tool, the first page you open shows you a complete overview of your Amazon sales data instantly, in both chart and tabular form. You can see the sales trend in a selected time period after just a click or two. Or even see your sales performance with a heatmap. You can directly see each date and the sale data against it, and then correlate that to any recent changes you may have made (in this case, changing manufacturers). Using this data, you might decide to ask your manufacturer to improve product quality or whatever factor is causing the customer complaints. Or you might start looking for another manufacturer who can better meet your standards.
Below are more examples, where an Amazon analytics software like SellerLegend can help you grow your business:
- SellerLegend has a widget that shows you your Best Selling Products. How can this widget help you? First off, widgets like Best Selling Products provide convenience. You can see at a glance which products perform the best without having to create, download, and pore over numerous spreadsheets. So what can you do with this information? That is entirely up to you as an Amazon seller. For one, you can decide to focus all your effort and energy on the top-performing product because this may just be that one big product keeping you afloat. Or, you could focus all your efforts on the lowest-performing product in order to bring sales up and strike some balance in your product sales.
- Imagine you sell something that requires repeat buying, for instance, dietary supplements. The more repeat customers you have the better, as it’s a sign of customer trust and preference towards your brand. Now, assume that you have made some changes to the product. You would still like to see how many repeat customers you have to see whether or not your brand has lost that sense of trust. SellerLegend provides a Repeating vs. Non-repeating Customer widget which quickly lets you see the ratio of repeat to non-repeat customers in a selected time range. This can help you understand if any decisions you made recently were good or bad for your business. If you see anything wrong with it, then you can work on fixing that. For instance, you could talk to the customers who have stopped buying from you to understand why that is so.
- Another scenario: You have suddenly received an offer to sell your Amazon business. And you are interested. One of the first things you would probably want to do is figure out how much your business is worth. There is a widget in SellerLegend that lets you see exactly how much each of your marketplaces is worth. It shows you how much the total cost tied up in the inventory is, how much total revenue you can generate if you were to sell the whole inventory, and the best case profit you could make. Having this type of information at a glance can help you stay up to date with your accounts’ worth at all times.
These are just some of the cases and scenarios where having a powerful analytics software can make your life easier as an Amazon seller. The beauty of analytics is that it lets you find answers to questions that you formulate yourself. Analytics is all about your own creativity. A tool like SellerLegend can simplify your Amazon business by giving you a number of features that lets you easily visualize data, get answers to your questions and make decisions that lets you get closer to your goals as an Amazon seller.
If you’re interested in seeing the difference that having an Amazon analytics tool suite makes, you can sign up for a free trial of SellerLegend.
