Looking for an Amazon Consultant?
If so, here are 17 questions to ask them.
Whether you are new to Amazon selling or an existing seller with live products, you are here now probably looking to gain knowledge and learn ways to grow your revenue from Amazon.
To best understand how to find more prosperity on Amazon though you’ll first need to know what to look for and which variables are more important than others. A great way to start is to know what specific questions to ask others who have more expertise that you.
Once completed with this guide, you’ll have a better understanding of what it takes to find an Amazon consultant with extensive expertise to maximize your chance of success, brainstorm with, delegate to, and ultimately grow your sales and profitability from Amazon.
Here are 17 questions to ask an Amazon consultant.
If you are just getting started on Amazon, this video from one of our Amazon consultants may be helpful.
1. What is your plan to increase my Amazon sales?
If you are all-in on growing your revenue from Amazon, you’ll ideally want to find someone who specializes solely in Amazon consulting. Many Amazon experts purport to have extensive knowledge in many aspects of online marketing from E-commerce, SEO, Adwords, social media marketing, conversion rate optimization (CRO), marketing automation etc etc etc AND Amazon consulting.
Toucan Advisors consultants have past experience in many of these disciplines (and others) yet we deliberately choose to focus exclusively on Amazon consulting because of both the opportunity size that Amazon affords (especially around Q4) and the complexity with which it takes to achieve success. We often say it is the most competitive product marketplace ever created, with an estimated 3,000 new sellers signing up each day.
A good Amazon consultant that exceeds your goals will take time to find and typically can demand a premium price.
We recommend that you interview different kinds, sizes and types of agencies, freelancers, and consultants to get a better feel for what you are looking for. Ask for references. Analyze their case studies. You’ll be investing a lot in a top-quality Amazon consulting agency, so make sure you feel confident in your choice as the reward can be far greater than your expectation. Likewise, the penalty can be harsh for making a poor choice.
Good Amazon consultants are always pondering about their plans to increase sales for their clients, asking questions such as:
- What happens if I try more aggressive coupons?
- What happens if I pull back on brand ads?
- What if we stocked more deeply on discount items?
- What happens when we break apart these children from their parent listing?
- How can I increase the effectiveness of my advertising?
- How can I embed more SEO keywords into my product listing?
Understanding what, when, and how much effort it will take to achieve success on Amazon is a skill that is refined over time after successfully running thousands of campaigns.
So, what is your Amazon consultant’s plan, how much does it cost, how are we going to get there, and how do we know when success has been achieved?
2. How will you use Amazon advertising?
Toucan believes that Amazon ppc management is the single most important success factor when it comes to growing Amazon sales.
Assuming such, your Amazon consultant should know at an in-depth level all about the different elements of Amazon ads such as:
- Impressions, CPC, ROAS, ACoS etc
- How to effectively set up your campaigns and ad groups
- How to automate bids throughout the hours of the day and the days of the week
- how to flex spending according to your available inventory
- how to effectively leverage ads to positively influence your organic rank
- and offer candid advice about how much Amazon ad budget will best support your current business goals
If you are new to Amazon marketing, Amazon advertising is a system that allows you to advertise your products on Amazon (similar to Adwords on Google) so that they appear in ideal locations, like on targeted search results or product listings. It’s a great and effective way to increase your visibility.
We often say Amazon ads are a way of buying time. So if you are short on the clock yet have the cash to invest, Amazon ads are a great way to make up ground and to better position your products and brands for future success on Amazon.
3. How Important is Amazon SEO?
A top attribute of any successful Amazon consultant is one that can effectively rank your Amazon products well, known as Amazon SEO (search engine optimization).
Now you might be confused and left asking this question: Is Amazon a “Search Engine”? The merits of this answer can certainly be debated yet Amazon is built on algorithms created by data scientists in which 63% of people start their product search.
Amazon isn’t traditionally known as a search engine yet functions as one for buying products.
When your customers are searching for products in your category on Amazon, you’ll want to show up as high as possible in the search results. Playing this game and knowing which factors influence where products land for targeted searches is known as Amazon SEO.
Amazon SEO consultants will know the more important ranking factors for your brand that will ultimately deliver more ‘free’ clicks to your product listings.
Another good question to ask your Amazon consultant: “What are the more important Amazon SEO ranking factors?” If they can’t deliver a confident answer in 0.4 seconds, then you probably aren’t talking someone who lives and breathes Amazon.
4. How will you build and optimize effective product listings?
Selling is one of those things that is gained over time through hard work, dedication, and ultimately many failures along the way.
And just like many things in life, you can throw your products up on Amazon and sure you’ll get a couple of sales.
Yet if you want to best ensure success for your brand, you’ll want to work with someone who can follow these best practices of product listings:
- craft your best message in your brand voice and style
- stay on top of Amazon updates
- dial in your pricing to maximize your profit per unit
- show your product in the best light, emphasizing your stronger points
- and hone in on the persuasion needed to convince the Amazon customer to click the Add to Cart button
This is a great question to ask your Amazon consultant when you are in discussions with them. It’s an answer that is learned over years and one that changes with every product and category.
5. What assurances can you make to keep my Amazon account in good standing?
The last thing you’d want to find is your account banned or suspended. A good Amazon consultant will know where the line is and educate their clients on the pros/cons of crossing it. For the record, Toucan Advisors would not intentionally do anything that would cause harm to their client’s Amazon account. We only recommend white-hat Amazon tactics and work within Amazon’s TOS.
We sometimes get questions though about the “gray” area that isn’t specifically referenced within Amazon selling as well as the possible repercussions if a seller is caught doing something against TOS.
We discuss with our clients on how much risk they are willing to take on relative to the expected benefit of the choice that they’ll make. If they make an educated and informed choice for their brand, we feel we’ve done our job well.
Additionally, it’s your Amazon consultant’s duty to stay on top of Amazon’s TOS and understand what is “by the book”. Amazon is constantly changing the rules of the game, so in order to play fairly and not receive any negative repercussions, you’ll need to work with a top-quality Amazon consultant.
6. How important are product reviews?
So many people start their product research and buying on Amazon these days. Many of them seek out candid reviews from other like-minded customers.
Your Amazon consulting experts will know how important Amazon reviews are to your future success. They’ll likely be able to weigh out the pros/cons of going overly aggressive with your initial sales velocity up front to build up momentum to get those coveted reviews earlier vs playing it safe with a more conservative approach to growing sales/gaining reviews.
Things one could count on was Amazon Early Reviewer program wherein for a $60 investment you can get up to 5 reviews yet that has recently been retired. Amazon Vine typically allows for more reviews albeit higher up front costs.
Products will change behavior as review counts increase and quality changes. Ideally you’ll want as many 5 star reviews as possible to get the highest rank and conversion rate. With said, you’ll have to best balance your product benefits, the competitor nature of your category, available inventory, and your prevailing price…along with whatever product reviews you are able to garner.
7. How will you leverage Amazon FBA (Prime)?
On Amazon, the importance of utilizing Amazon’s fulfillment program (FBA) is paramount to success.
Toucan has helped many clients achieve substantial overnight results simply by switching a product over to FBA from FBM (fulfillment by merchant).
Your Amazon consultant will know the details about FBA and to be able to guide you through the process as well as steer you clear of FBA if it’s not right for your brand or certain products. Typically only those products that are heavy or large in size will be recommended for FBM.
Another benefit of FBA is that Amazon handles the shipping and customer service for their orders which creates efficiencies for your business.
FBA typically does come at an additional cost relative to FBM so make sure you understand the pros/cons before moving forward with it.
8. Do you make choices on data or go with your gut?
Certainly there is something to say about having a trained eye that can catch things quickly and expertise gained over years of successfully running campaigns on Amazon. To make the best choices for your Amazon business, you’ll want to work with someone who knows how to read the immense amount of data coming back from Amazon AND at the same time has enough experience to know when to push and when to pull back.
You are not always going to be on top so working with an Amazon consultant who is forward thinking will ensure the most success for you brand.
If you are undecided of which choice or direction to make with your account, your Amazon consultant can set up split-tests on your product pages wherein A/B tests will be run on your product titles, ad campaigns and keyword targeting, bullet points, images, or A+ content to determine what is the best mix of content that encourages the customer to buy.
9. How do you remove negative reviews?
One of the many metrics that Amazon looks at in terms of your product’s placement is your seller feedback rating for the last 12 months.
You certainly aren’t going to be able to please everyone, yet there is a simple way to remove negative seller feedback which is product-focused.
Here’s a short video from one of our experts walking you through the steps to remove seller feedback as well as explaining what type of feedback Amazon will consider removing:
Working with a knowledgeable consultant that sets up a system of alerts and a comprehensive process to get negative seller feedbacks removed will keep your seller account as healthy as possible.
10. How will you effectively manage my Amazon inventory?
Knowing how much inventory to send into Amazon FBA is a skill learned over time. For instance, this past Q4 2020 inbound shipments to Amazon were taking much longer than average to be received. Q4 is historically slow yet C-19 increased demand so much which stressed the available resources for receiving shipments. Those sellers that shipped in earlier than normal were able to have a better chance of staying in stock. Amazon can return the unsold product back to you (for a small fee) thus Toucan typically recommends more aggressive posturing when it comes to inventory recommendations especially with an anticipated increase in demand for your products.
Also, it’s a good rule of thumb to have your FBM products as backup to FBA, should your FBA stock go out you’ll have back up at your warehouse assuming you have available inventory there. Either way (assuming you have fast FBM shipment) your Amazon customer may not even recognize the difference.
We generally recommend to keep 2-4 weeks on hand at Amazon at all times. You can work backwards from there based on lead times, shipping estimates, and production schedules to find out when and how much should be sent in. Your amazon consultant to can set up alerts and schedules for new shipments as well as guide you with recommendations about when and how to send more inventory based on anticipated demand or decreases to save on LTSF (long term storage fees).
11. Will you support my brand off of Amazom?
Toucan is an Amazon focused agency (see point #1 above) although we have plenty of experience off of Amazon.
We are comfortable for example with accepting exports from like your Google Adwords accounts to research top performing words.
Bigger picture, if you want to maximize your Amazon success we find that brands which choose to invest more in their brand find bigger results on Amazon. Some places to look would be building out your e-commerce website, social media campaigns and influencer marketing, online product reviews like on YouTube, distribution channels off of Amazon like on Walmart and Target, affiliate programs driving revenue from traffic off of your site, email marketing campaigns plus tons of other options.
Point is the more defense you have of your brand on Amazon (like off of Amazon) the more success you’ll find.
12. Will my brand find more Amazon success with a trademark?
Brand with active registered trademarks are eligible to be set up for Brand Registry. Once set up (which is something that Amazon consultants can help you with) you’ll have the ability to unlock:
- A+ Content
- Amazon Stores
- Sponsored Brand Ads
- Amazon Brand Analytics
Note that these are not requirements for success on Amazon yet consider them best practices. There is a strong correlation between brands who have Brand Registry and top Amazon sellers so if you don’t have this set up yet we typically recommend it.
If you don’t have a trademark set up for your brand and you are interested in increasing your Amazon sales, take a look at Amazon’s IP Accelerator which typically gives our clients trademarks and ultimately set up on Brand Registry quicker than going through their conventional channels.
13. How will you optimize the buy box for my products?
Toucan typically works with direct manufacturers being that Amazon provides these types of sellers the most value as it allows them to direct connect with their end customer.
As the direct manufacturer of your product, you have the ability to restrict who is allowed to sell your products on Amazon and the lowest minimum advertised price (MAP) as well.
We find that some new sellers to Amazon have existing sellers already on the market selling their product. This is when the Buy Box comes into play, when more than one seller is competing to sell the same product. Some of the top factors Amazon considers for who wins buy box are price, seller feedback history, and fulfillment option (FBA vs FBM).
If have low buy box rates, your Amazon consultant will look at which of these factors (or potentially others) are most beneficial to focus their efforts on.
If none of these are open to positively influence and you are the end manufacturer, one option to look at start to slow down inventory to other distributors that you are competing against. This is easier said than done though as sometimes you will have been working with your distribution chain for years or perhaps decades so you’ll want to approach this discussion with respect and thoughtfulness. If you are going on Amazon and want to maximize your success, seriously looking at your distributors selling on Amazon is always going to be top of mind.
Removing other sellers of your products on Amazon is just one less hurdle towards incremental gains for your brand on Amazon.
14. How important are product images and videos?
A quick back of the napkin test to assess a product’s set up is to look at:
- the total number of images used (ideally more than 7)
- the resolution of the images (smaller side larger than 1000px)
- and that the featured image is on a white background
Also related to images is if the consultant offers photography/videography and kind of quality they are able to deliver. Presumably if you are looking to outsource your Amazon channel then potentially this could be an added benefit you are looking for too. Lastly, other considerations could be does the consultant offer graphic design and if so to what quality can they deliver at.
Regardless of how many, what size and color and everything, can your Amazon consultant deliver images that will encourage the customer to buy? If they can, typically many of these other considerations will fall in line. A product that positively encourages a click will convert better, have higher sales, more of the coveted momentum and presumably find more success.
On mobile especially, image and video optimization are one of the best assets to focus on when selling on Amazon.
15. How will you choose to price my product?
Pricing a product correctly on Amazon is tricky business.
There is never one best way to do so. Even if there was, correct today would potentially be incorrect tomorrow.
Here are some factors to consider when approaching how to price an Amazon product:
- Available inventory: If you are current over-stocked on inventory today presumably you might err on the lower side of pricing to lessen the available stock and come closer to your ideal stocking levels. On the other hand if you are at risk of running out of stock, some consultants will recommend increasing your price in order to slow down velocity.
- Growth strategy: A good Amazon consultant will coordinate your product pricing with the trajectory that best meshes with your overall goals. Some sellers want to dominate their market today. Some sellers need to be cash flow positive the entire time. Whatever constraints you have as a seller and within your business, know that pricing is one of the single biggest dials you have to affect your sales velocity.
- Product benefits: We often ask prospects this question, “How do you compete in your Amazon category, benefits or price?” If you offer premium benefits then you are probably going to price higher than average as a point of differentiation.
Here is a video of one of our Amazon consultants getting interviewed about pricing strategies:
When looking at a product’s price history and you see more pricing fluctuations (assuming this is a 3p product) this typically means a more nuanced approach to Amazon and often times more profitability for the seller. By no means does this ensure success, whether or not a seller is changing price, just one of the many factors to consider when doing research about existing products on Amazon.
16. Should I be on VendorCentral (1P) or SellerCentral (3P)?
If you aren’t on Vendor today in 2021 it’s an easy answer as Amazon isn’t actively pursuing new Vendors and one can only be invited to VendorCentral.
Typically, 1P works best with more traditionally oriented brands wherein POs come in from Amazon and shipments are made by truckloads with a focus on large volume relative to per unit profit. Customer service and some of the burdens of customer interaction are covered by Amazon in a 1P relationship.
Typically, 3P works best with . Amazon is trending towards supporting more 3P accounts as it’s more favorable for most sellers on Amazon today and ultimately it’s more profitable for Amazon. With SellerCentral you’ll be responsible for managing your inventory, setting your price, and customer interactions as needed with questions and returns.
Sometimes a blended approach works best for some sellers wherein they have 1P and 3P running concurrently for their brand(s) and products yet this is more complicated and tricky to execute well.
17. What Amazon SEO tools do you use?
We have covered the importance and time savings of software tools that good Amazon FBA consultants can use.
For any serious business on Amazon, here is a list of recommendations to look for in tools:
- Keyword ranking: A tool that shows where you show up for targeted searches, as well as the ability to track your progress over time
- Keyword research: Knowing which keywords you could focus on and the potential volume of the different words is important in understand the opportunity which exists for your different products
- BSR rank tracking: Typcially a lower Best Seller Rank (BSR) correlates with higher sales and is oftentimes used as to show predicted trends and patterns of products.
- Product reviews: Tools which facilitate the requesting of and managing of product and seller feedback reviews will save immense time