We are not doing any promotions on any of our products except for PPC campaigns. Anyone know why they are charging this “promo rebates” fee for shipping? We are already paying pick and pack and FBA fees. I have never seen this before. It’s on 2 orders and they are both standard shipping. At first I thought maybe it was expedited shipping, but those orders don’t have this fee charged.
Thanks,
-Ana
This isn’t an item you have subscribe and save offers on?
Nope, we don’t have enough inventory in yet to turn it on. I was planning to do that at some point but not now.
-Ana
Nope, as I said in the OP, no promotions are being run on this at all, that’s why I can’t figure out what they are charging for, and it’s only on some orders. I don’t see a pattern either.
-Ana
ETA: We aren’t even running PPC on this ASIN, yet it’s flying off the shelves. I’ll double check, but I’m sure I didn’t run any promos on this at all.
Nice. Don’t run PPC unless you have to. Once you start, and you stop, Amazon will punish your listing (organic ranking).
I’ve tested this tinfoil hat theory 3X. Results are always the same.
More unethical behavior. Not a surprise.
As for the topic. IDK what I was thinking… You’re just seeing what the buyer got as a discount for free shipping bc they spent enough.
$24.97 - $5.70 FBA Fee - $3.75 (Referral Fee) = $15.52 = your proceeds.
It’s the same as thinking about the Tax. Buyer paid it, amazon remitted it, has no impact.
Thanks. I see what you’re saying now and I thought it might be something like that.
Yeah we try not to run PPC unless we have to “get the snowball rolling” as I like to say. It’s weird because we haven’t stocked these 3 ASINs for a while and the 2 I am running PPC on haven’t sold $hit in the last few weeks, but THIS one I’m not promoting at all is almost out of stock and I’m scrambling to get more to the FC. This is exactly opposite of what I thought would happen as we significantly raised the price of 3-packs and sent in tons of single bars, but the 3-packs are selling like crazy and the singles are sitting in the warehouse even though they are running a PPC campaign. You just never can predict what will work on Amazon, that’s for sure.
Thank you so much for your help @ASV_Vites and @Lost_My_Marbles !
-Ana
The consumer loves this ■■■■. They feel like they are getting a great deal.
Selling multi packs is the way to go with commodity items for the following reasons:
If you are an FBA seller, and your multi-pack keeps you in the same fulfillment fee category as your single, you can offer a much better deal and put more $ in your pocket. We do this.
This is a big one - It keeps the consumer in your brand longer. They have A MUCH better chance of wanting to stay with you just because of that. This is a proven CPG theory by the big brains in retail.
Thanks for the validation on this. I just have one question. Currently our multipack is a separate ASIN and not a variation. I have been thinking about making it a variation so they both show on the parent page. Do you think this will help sales at all? We really do sell a commodity item, even though it’s technically “Handmade”. I can make 100s a day if necessary and they are all the same. Your story about shrink wrapping stuff in your garage when you started is us now. I fully intend to at some point not qualify for “Handmade” but instead emphasize “natural” instead once we are able to buy the equipment I want which is somewhere between $8,000 and $12,000 and would require more space, most likely a rented warehouse or commercial space. We know this stuff sells so that isn’t a problem but scaling up IS.
-Ana
Oh yes it will! We have done it both ways. The algorithm loves variations and will display both listings separately, even though it’s technically the same listing, in search, which means you have 2 shots to catch the consumers eye.
Just make sure you know how to set up that variation bc it can blow up in your face if you screw it up.
I pay for Amazon SAS Core. They took care of that for me bc we listed the single first and added the multipack 2 years later. I couldn’t tell you how to set up a proper variation if I tried.
I have a good idea of how to do it. I just have to create the parent and add the existing ASINs as children. I plan to try it on an inactive out of stock listing first before doing the live listings. I have a few varieties we haven’t stocked in a while that I can “practice” on.
Really appreciate your “mentoring” here, this type of experience is invaluable and you can’t get it on the NSFE for sure!
I’m actually doing a production run right now as I get advice from one of the “seasoned and savvy forum veterans” as @Dogtamer likes to say.
-Ana
When I started, I went a whole month without a single sale. It wasn’t until I started PPC that I got any sales at all. Only the ones with PPC got sales. I can’t afford to wait many months to get sales moving. If paying works to speed things up, I have to play.
What we do is use PPC to get the listing rolling and first as we talked about before, make SURE you have good stock in the warehouse. Once the snowball starts rolling your ASIN will rank higher and higher so keep the PPC on until it gets about as high as it can go. At that point you can shut off ads, and as @ASV_Vites Amazon will penalize you for doing that, but in our experience it’s temporary most of the time if you have good sales volume and some rank going for you. At that point if you keep enough stock and are selling through you should be able to keep going without having to keep paying PPC or if you do, you can run your campaigns during parts of the day when you know your item will sell. You can save a bit on advertising that way but the long and short of it is you pretty much have to advertise anything you sell today. Don’t forget off Amazon ads either, because generally they are cheaper and in our experience do better for the money.
-Ana
Where do you get a good price for off-Amazon ads?
On my first Black Friday, I let the PPC run away from me, but I have the costs under control now. I don’t really want to stop (if it ain’t broke…).
We have had pretty god success with facebook ads, but it really depends on your product. Our demographic is a bit older for most of our stuff so we don’t do TikTok (yet) but we also have done some Google stuff in the past with mixed results.
Look at it like if you open a gas station in the middle of the desert. No one knows where your gas station is unless you advertise it somewhere. The internet is a desert unless you tell people where you are. People think customers will just magically find you and that may have been true 20 years ago or more, but today, there is so much noise in ecommerce you have to promote yourself. It’s not as easy as it once was for sure.
-Ana
Sadly, if you aren’t getting any sales out of the gate organically, the product likely will not be a winner and isn’t priced right to get the algorithm to recognize it.
Believe me, not everything we launch is a winner. We’ve thrown out tons of inventory. Can’t win them all and I’m not willing to give Amazon more money just to break even or recoup some of the costs. Amazon has enough of our money. That’s what tax write offs are for.
We use PPC to grow our customer base, not get sales. I know that doesn’t sound like it makes much sense but our reorder rate is high and we sell commodities so PPC is our cost of acquisition. Once we get them, there’s a 65% chance we will get them again, hopefully without the cost of another click. Sadly, a lot of Amazon shoppers have no idea how to reorder from their past purchases so they search again and may find one of our ads to click on so get hit again.
After a lot of initial failure, we pretty much know now what will work and what won’t based on saturation and our selling price and how that will be positioned in Organic search for the first month out of the gate (the honeymoon period).
We didn’t spend a penny on PPC for our best seller for almost 2 years and sold 45K units. Now we do support it with some advertising to continue to grow it.
