Scaling To 8,000 SKU’s On Amazon

Richard Morgan
April 24, 2019

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Michael Hartman is back from Mexico and he shares his model for scaling to thousands of SKUs maintaining super high quality imagery and listings while automating EBC, Listing and Image content with SOPs and Renders.

Been working on a method for scaling for 12 months for scaling with thousands of SKUs without impinging on the quality
Approached a US manufacturer needed to make it work
Had a no.7 BSR in category and was constantly after attack
Went for low volume, high margin and lots of SKUs
Researched and found a manufacturer to work with
Approached them and they were on-board
Took the entire manufacturer catalogue and put it on Amazon
Tested as FBM and moved across to FBA for double the conversion rate

Upto 9,000 SKUs in 14 months

Now 14 months in and upto 9,000 SKUs
Ability to scale about 800-1,500 SKUs per week
Listing optimisation and images is key to the success of this
Really good imagery and copy
All images are 3D Renders and can bust out 1,000 listings in 3 days with a single 3D Artist
All his tasks for the 1st year were given to the programmers to automate it
An arduous process over a year to develop this capability and SOPs to be able to scale

Using Hot Words for Automation

Renders can be colour, size changes to the renders
Mainly these are colour changes
Scripts written with ‘hot words’ and the listings are created based of certain ‘hot words’
Based on the manufacturing catalogue the hot words are baked in and it creates the listings for you
The sizes and colours are hot words but all the features are the same on the product
The listings are pretty much automated for the listings and the bullets
Once you get the renders its then duplicating

EBC is the same for each listing

Minor tweaks to images for each listing
One tupperware that’s 14 inch and 100 colours
We render all of those and a graphic designer then creates an overlay for each one of those
Then its photoshop actions to run it through in a 2-step process
It’s the same EBC for each listing
The video is one video for all and paste it over
The EBC takes a manual process
But you can make a parent and have 100 children and roll it out across to around the 20 per day EBC limit for review

Backend Search Term

Backend search terms are updated but no stuffing it as there is no volume there
Best seller is BSR 5,000
Average is 50-200,000
Backend is one guy working for Michael and just does listing sets with hotwords to know where they go
Plug it into the system, creates the listing with EBC and everything
Squirt it into a flat file that’s checked by the flat file guy
Upload to Amazon and then have a VA upload the images just in case there’s an error in the script upload

FBA and FBM

Each listing is launched separately and then merged together if they perform well together
Products selling 1-2 per month not FBA, if 20 units per month then will go FBA
Have about 400 FBA products currently
Doing also micro-shipments into Amazon around 3 to 4 times a week so never become overstocked

Customer Service Headaches

The hardest thing with 500 SKUs was tracking negative reviews
The data is not accurate and doesn’t tell you all the negative reviews
Started using software but it only tracks 500 SKUs
Really try to follow all the customer service as it’s a great indicator on the listing or product being wrong
Taking care of customer service is maybe 1hr a day

PPC

Everything gets PPC and every variation is tested
Amazon has changed a lot of features in PPC and what worked last year has changed
Doing around 20 variations per item
And testing 20 SKUs per campaign
Will let us know when the results are in

Diversifying your products

Always believed in diversifying – if you get the chance to work with the manufacturer directly then go for it
Make sure the images are high quality along with the listings
Competitor has 50k ASINs and the other has 900,000 ASINs
Diversifying means you can lower your risk as if you get a listing suppression then not a problem