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Leo Limin explains the impact of fake buyer accounts on product launches and why one launch fails while another succeeds but inexplicable reasons for an Amazon launch failure
- Mexico hosting company
- Amazon in 2015 and 7 figure seller
- $1m seller group MDS
Artificial Intelligence
- Amazon is changing fast
- When you launch you need to look into the future
- Algorithms are changing all the time – see reviews display and ranking – constant test
- Personalising the algorithms for each buyer
- They know your interests and are testing things against those
- Not all buyers are the same or equal – fake buyer accounts exist
- Need to know this when launching products
Accounts Using Promos
- Testing with different accounts with same products but different promos on and ranking is very different
- Don’t know much about Amazon and your product might be in a different algorithm than one that succeeded
- Might be another buyer group that aren’t so well regarded by Amazon such as the fake buyer accounts
- True that Amazon treats buyers differently
- Launching a product is really hit or miss unless you can filter out the bad buyers
Filter out Buyers
- Zonjump
- Banning people and blacklisting them from their launch service to avoid fake buyer accounts
- Analysed buyer activity – encourage MWSconnect to see details
- Some buyers get kicked out of the system right away and others get kicked out later on
- Huge difference in success using these tactics
Zonjump
- Use a lot of Facebook
- Filter out buyers for your launch based on the buyer activity
- Lot of launches fail because bad actors suck up your promos and re-sell on eBay or even worse on your own listing
- Using fake accounts to take advantage of the launch promos
- If the launch fails but it’s not clear why…these bad actors might be the problem using fake buyer accounts
- Hard to know who’s picking up your codes and then which accounts are buying
- You want your product to go to good real customers
Bad Buyers
- Amazon penalises bad buyers
- Lot of sales to very new accounts you rank lower
- Many purchases that are discounted purchases (more than 50%) then it’s a bad signal and mark
- Buying only bad products or newly launched products
- A buyer has to have bought of a number of sellers before Amazon qualifies him/her as a buyer
- The buyers taking your launch products can be a key impact
- Take all this into consideration on the buyers taking your promos
Tips to Overcome
- New Sellers should research first
- Give lower discounts as it’s better and keeps away the bad actors
- Facebook launches and get good people into your manychat funnel
- Get real people and not bad buyers
Data Leaks from Amazon
- Data leaks from amazon seem to be getting into people’s hands
- Chinese seller events openly talk about black hat tactics
- Openly discuss what Amazon knows – coming from Amazon employees in China
- Amazon have fired employees and are trying to stop it
- A lot of info came out including how they treat buyers
- ASIN detailed reports on Sellers being sourced as well for competitive advantage
- More and more articles coming out on black hat techniques as well
Reviews
- 5% – 12% threshold and after that people can’t leave reviews
- Depends on the product and category nodes
- Some products get more reviews naturally
- Not natural for some products to get more reviews
- Review ban on products that get too many reviews
- Black hat people are getting these bans removed
- Don’t get too many reviews
Content-jacking of Listings
- People using Vendor Central accounts to do this
- One of the most common tactics
- Get an old ASIN and change something in Vendor Central and join another ASIN and get all the reviews
- Amazon for some reason merges the ASIN and lets it happen
- If a bad actor changes your listing then it’s very hard to change it back
2019 and Beyond Algorithm
- A lot of Amazon engineers come from Google
- Seeing Amazon morph into Google more and more
- Google’s algorithm got found out and then Google had to fix a lot
- Brands are winning on Google
- Amazon is going there
- Brands get easier ride in Amazon, more than 1 year, in Amazon Exclusives and get it easier to rank
- The long game now and planning is key
- Come with a strong brand, product and something you can control
PPC for Launches
- Complexities in the algorithm and tactics used for PPC
- Shift in PPC this year was more focus on relevance, less keywords and less impression share
- Brand new product in a brand new category in a new account – you got no impressions and had todo giveaways to drive impressions on the main keyword
- You drive traffic to your PPC to get sales and then get a level of trust from Amazon
- Go slowly and build the trust with Amazon
- Some people can launch just using PPC
- PPC for 300 units a day – forget it – but for 20-50/day then PPC can work especially on the longer tail
Quality Score
- Quality score associated with an account, campaign and ad group
- Some people rank quickly, others take longer
- Based on account and campaign level – don’t kill off old campaigns
- Some people get PPC results grandfathered to them – he sells well and has a solid back track record
Giveaways
- Will not phase out
- Amazon makes a lot of money out of it
- They love the idea of Sellers paying for the products that are given away to bring in Buyers
- Ranking fast is more difficult right now
- Do some giveaway and some rebates to mix it up
- Use google adwords and facebook ads to manychat sequences
- Launch many products not just a single product to spread your risk
- Big sellers launch again and again with new products
- Big Sellers get bigger and bigger
- Small sellers sometimes get discouraged and walk away
- Establish more and more relationships with Amazon
- Big Sellers have direct relationships and gatings setup
