Are You About To Lose Your Amazon AMS Account?


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Taylor Benterud joins us to talk about Amazon AMS and Vendor Express shutting down starting May 21st.

Vendor Express is closing down

  • They will stop issuing orders on May 21st
  • Entirely shutdown Vendor Express 2nd January 2019 and lose access to AMS, it’s all shutdown
  • Taylor is trying to get their clients onto Vendor Central so that they can keep their AMS stuff
  • If you’ve been reached out to to join Vendor Central in the past then you can go back to that rep and now ask to get in
  • If you don’t have that access you’ll need to move to Seller Central and although product display ads aren’t there YET, they should be by Q2 this year then you can shift over all your campaigns into Seller Central

Changes?

  • Headline ads in Seller Central had a little less reporting so almost the same
  • Expect some glitches with Product Display ads too

Transfer Campaigns

  • Taylor has software that bulk downloads what every single bid is at in their account and the campaigns names and everything in the whole account
  • You need to:
    • Download the campaign performance part
    • Download AMS reports, Sales reports weekly
    • When you transition into AMS you give these reports to your VA and tell them the campaign names, keywords in there , bids and match types and get them to go in and a launch these
    • When Product Display ads are released then you want to be switching
  • Contact the reps and find out what’s going on right now
  • Talk to the Manager of Vendor Central and start moving over
  • Very beneficial to keep the lifetime history of your data rather than transitioning into a new platform

Amazon have your listing

  • Ask for “catalogue contributions” to be removed by the catalogue team
  • What happens if you can’t sell these products anymore
  • You have to try and get the listing back from Amazon
  • Contact the catalogue team to remove catalogue contributions which is their way of releasing the listing back to you
  • If you have a rep then keep hold of them
  • Anyone doing over $250k revenue per month Amazon will have you a dedicated rep
  • It’s not clear so you should get in touch and find out who your rep is

Manage your Timeline

  • As soon as product display ads appear in seller central they will start pushing people off of Vendor Express

Product Display Ads – Related Categories campaign strategy

  • ACoS compared to last year is lower than last year for Jan and Feb, it’s working well and making success
  • Target by related categories on Product Display Ads as a campaign strategy works really well

Will my PPC work?

  • New client with product and will PPC perform well?
  • Margin is 30% so $50 price make $15 profit per unit
  • Decent unit / session % is 10%
  • Pretty good is 15%-20% and really good conversions at 25% to 45%
  • Conversion of 10% one in 10 clicks on relevant keywords should convert
  • Your margin is $15 so you can’t spend more than $1.50/click on certain keywords
  • Just as a starting bid….
  • Working out your PPC costs is super important and should be the start of your product discovery

Suggested strategy

  • Headline ads in a competitive strategy?
  • Main keywords we can’t win but do about $100k / month at 18% ACoS
  • 16% of sales come from product display ads
  • 90% of the keywords have 3-5 words in them – go for the long tail
  • Take the most relevant seed keywords and break them down into the individual words and bid on the individual words
  • If you’re selling a tennis racket then bid on the keyword Tennis which is cheaper and less competitive
  • Brian Johnson calls this strategy ‘panning for gold’
  • Taylor calls is GP campaigns
  • Big companies don’t use Product Display Ads so as a competitor you can do well
  • Lower price products with product display ads are very hard to achieve lower ACoS and profitable ACoS for you

Contact Taylor

taylor@betterams.com

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