TAS 196 Ask Scott Session #57 – Your Amazon FBA Questions

It’s time once again for the Friday edition of the Amazing Seller podcast. Why is that special? Because these Friday editions are the “Ask Scott” version of the show where Scott Voelker answers your questions questions from real life Amazon sellers who have run into a snag, hurdle, or issue of confusion in their Amazon Private Label business. Scott’s got over a year of experience doing his own private label business and has also had the opportunity to learn from numbers of experienced guests as he’s interviewed them on his podcast. You’ll find Scott’s answers revealing, helpful, and timely, so be sure you take the time to listen.

Is there a way to dominate ALL the PPC ad spots for a product?

A listener to the podcast wants to know if there is a way he can structure his PPC campaigns so that his ads show up in all of the ad boxes available for his product keywords. Why would he want to do that? If he could do so, he would have his product shown on the page more than any other products. That translates into a higher percentage chance that he will get the purchase rather than some of his competition. Although Scott is not entirely sure if this can be done, he does give some good advice on how to go about trying on this episode of the podcast.

How should I go about determining the colors for my product?

When you sell a product that can come in a variety of colors, how should you go about determining which colors are the best ones to offer? Today a listener asked that very question and Scott has some very practical advice on how to go about choosing the colors that you were going to sell. You shouldn't guess, and you shouldn't do what feels right to you. You should do what the facts tell you. On this episode Scott is going to tell you how to find out the facts and how to apply them to your own color choices when it comes to variations on your products.

I have closely related products. Should I create variations or individual listings for them?

It's a great idea to have products on the Amazon selling platform that are closely related to each other. This enables you to get cross sales from one product to another, which increases your profitability. But at some point you're going to need to decide if those products are so closely related that they are actually variations of each other, or if each one is unique enough that it deserves and should have its own listing. On this episode of the podcast Scott answers a question about that issue and gives some very practical advice.

You can get a free private label course in your inbox for the next 10 days.

If you are new to the world of private label sales on Amazon you can get a free 10-day course from Scott that walks you through all the steps you need to take to find your product, research whether it is worth investing in, get it established on the Amazon platform, start to drive sales through promotions, and follow up with your customers, as well as much, much more. You can get that free 10 day course about private label sales by listening to this episode of the podcast.

OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER

[0:03] Scott’s introduction to this Ask Scott episode of the podcast!
[0:55] How you can ask your own questions.
[1:15] Scott’s daughter is now engaged!
[3:40] 2 victories posted inside the TAS community on Facebook.
[5:30] QUESTION ONE: All of my products are closely related, how can I use PPC effectively to dominate ALL of the advertising squares available?
[14:10] QUESTION TWO: My product can be in a variety of colors… how should I go about deciding on what colors to offer?
[19:15] QUESTION THREE: Should I create listings as variations or as individual products?
[28:10] Want to get a free Private Label Course in your email for the next 10 days?

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TRANSCRIPT TAS 196

TAS 196 : Ask Scott Session #57 – Your Amazon FBA Questions

[00:00:04] SV: Hey, hey what’s up everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Amazing Seller podcast, this is episode number 196 and session number 57 of Ask Scott. This is where I answer your questions that you submit via voice mail and I answer them here on this podcast. I’m really, really excited to jump into these…

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[INTRODUCTION]

…questions today. You guys all know at least all of you long time listeners that is, you guys know I look forward to these Ask Scott sessions because it’s you submitting questions. It’s like us sitting around the coffee table or the coffee shop or wherever we are just hanging out talking about business so I’m really, really glad you are here and I’m really pumped up. I’ve got a couple of things I want to share with you, personal things actually which I’m really, really pumped up about.

Depending on when you are listening to this it’s fairly new because it just happened and before I jump into that though let me just say this, thank you so much for hanging out with me again today. If you want to ask one of your own questions, I should have said this before, just head over to theamazingseller.com/ask and you can do that. You can record a voice mail, leave your first name and a brief question and I’ll go ahead and try to get it here on the show. I can answer it for you the best that I can. All right. Let me just dive right in and give you guys a little bit of a personal cool thing that just happened to me and it's really exciting. For those of you that know I am a father of three children and they are spread out all over the map.

I have an eight year old daughter, I have an eighteen year old son which is crazy he just turned eighteen and then I have a twenty year old daughter who’s also going to be twenty one and my wife and I have been married for twenty two years. I got married young, I was twenty one and guess what, I went to a Yankee game the other day and my daughter’s boyfriend proposed to her. Now, we knew this was going to happen, we were helping him along as far as how to set it up and my wife helped him pick out a ring and all that stuff so it was really cool. It was really exciting and a beautiful sunny day and the Yankees won so all of you Boston fans out there or anyone that’s a non-Yankee fan please don’t send me the hate mail. We had a great day, they won four to three and it was just a beautiful day and I’m really excited for my daughter and I was about her age when I got engaged so it’s weird in a sense because I don’t feel as though I should have a daughter that’s twenty years old going to be twenty one and an eighteen year old son, I just don’t.

I still feel like I’m in high school and you guys may also feel like that around my age around your forties or even in your fifties but I just wanted to share that with you guys. I’m really excited for them and I’m excited for the next chapter of our lives and again this is why I do what I do because I want to be able to share with my family. I want to be able to be at these events, I want to be present, I want to be with them and depending on what your Y is in business or in life pushes you for business I guess is what I should have said it really does depend on the individual. For me my Y is my family and the freedom that the money from a business provides and then also being able to help people within a business that you are creating. Right. If you are creating an Amazon business you can still do that, you don’t have to be a podcaster or this person that’s a public figure.

[00:03:19] SV: You can do it by creating great products that serve a market and I think that’s really important to understand because if you can do that it feels really, really good that you are doing something that you believe in and that you are also making money at. Then from there money can also help you live the life that you want to live. Alright so I’m going to stop rumbling on that, you guys can tell I’m a little excited today and I haven’t had that much coffee but I did want to share with you two little victories. I say little because they start out little and they grow from here but these are two victories that were posted inside of the TAS Facebook group. I want to share them with you real quick, real, real quick just to give a couple of shout outs because I think that it's really cool that they shared this in the Facebook group.

This one here goes out to Christopher Pratt Hale, Christopher congratulations. He posted this here. He says, “Posted earlier that my product went live today and already an organic sale, 35.99 so thirty $35.99 is his price point and he sold one.” Congratulations on that Christopher really happy for you. Then the other one that I want to share with you is Ed Davidson. Ed congratulations this is what he wrote, “My private label item in FBA is starting to take off thank you Scott Voelker,” and some people went in there and commented and said, “Way to go” and all that so Ed congratulations I’m really happy for you. Again I want everyone to understand that we have to start small and then we have to grow and as you are growing you are going to have bumps and you are going to have things that come up, different obstacles that you are going to have to face but you have to get started.

These right here are representing people that have just got started. All right. Now they started at this phase but they had to work up to get to this point. Right. In the beginning we’ve got to start just by finding a product or finding a market but then from there that next victory if you want to call it that is getting a sale, just one sale and then it proves that the model works and then you can scale from there. Just wanted to throw that out there. Congratulations to you two and anyone else that has posted in the Facebook group congratulations it does mean a lot for you to post it in there and then share it with people because a lot of people see that you know what, you’ve got to take action in order to get results, period. You’ve heard me say that time and time again. Alright guys so I’m done now I’m ready to start answering some questions so what do you say? Let’s go ahead and dive in to this week’s first question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:05:41] John: Hey Scott this is John from St Augustine Florida the oldest city in United States and I have a question about PPC. I sell many products that all are related. They could use the same keywords basically you could think of them as different SKUs not necessarily different variations because they are different products but they are the same. They are the same object but different variations but they would be in theory like different companies like sort of a variety of garlic presses but from different places. That sort of thing. What I’m trying to do at PPC is dominate all the slots for a given keyword search so right now when I search for it, if I search for garlic press for example I have the top two and I’ve also got the right side top square so that’s really good. But what I really want is all of them so I want the top two I want the right top square and then I want the two below that as well.

What I’m trying to figure out is how do I do that? Do I need more campaigns or more ad groups within campaigns? For example if I want all five slots if I had let’s say eight campaigns using the same search terms and the bids set very high, would I then be able to dominate and get all five of these slots or is there another way that I need to structure it? My main concern surrounds in how to structure this in terms of campaigns versus ad groups. Do I do a campaign for each? Then also within the campaigns you can have multiple ads which then can feature those products which I assume are being rotated within its given slot. For example if rather than having on a campaign multiple ads if instead I just had one ad but multiple campaigns would I then be able to take up more slots assuming that I’ve bid plenty high such that I can take off the competition?

That’s my question, it’s a little bit different than the standard private label where people have one or two products. I’ve got many and so what I want to do is get the most exposure for all my products with generic search terms and hopefully that helps you. Again I know you like the name in there my name is John from St Augustine Florida. Thank you and by the way your information is excellent you are so generous thank you for everything you do.

[00:08:18] SV: Hey John thank you so much for the question man I really do appreciate it and this is a question I have not been asked and it’s something that I really haven’t even used myself but I do like this idea. Really what John is talking about, anyone that’s brand new or may not be here yet, but he’s really trying to dominate that page with all of the ads that are displayed on that page. You want position top and then you want the position on the side and you want the position in the middle and maybe on the bottom. Now Amazon is always rotating these anyway so one day you may see that your page for your keyword that is, is starting to show up on the top and they have top ads. For some days they may not have top ads because they are always split testing as well so I don’t think there’s a real clear way to say that you are going to be able to dominate all those positions.

It’s a great idea, a great thought. What I would probably say would be your best chance of doing this is to create those separate campaigns, not necessarily ad groups in a sense. I would do separate campaigns personally and then I would designate a budget for those for that SKU and then I would start to bid on all of those keywords. Here is the thing though, you are going to be competing against yourself and you know what, in some cases it's okay because you are only going to really pay as if someone clicks on it. If your impression is there all the time your ad is there because that’s your impression, you may have two of those ad spots that come up and you are only going to get charged if someone clicks on one of them.

You have a better chance and I see what you are doing here, you have a better chance of someone clicking because if you take up the first spot and the side spot, or the top spot side spot and bottom spot even maybe middle spot well there is a pretty good chance that you are going to be able to dominate that keyword. But then again we want to make sure that our conversions are doing well because we can show up and that’s great but if we get clicks and we don’t get sales and that can hurt our listing as well. You’ve got to be careful that’s a little bit of a balancing act. I would play around with like your three top products and then I would go ahead and create those separate campaigns, use the same keyword list if that’s what you want.

If you want to go after those keywords that are your primary gold keywords in a sense or your really solid keywords and then you are going to want to bid on those. I’m not really sure that you are going to be able to say, “Okay well I’m going to bid higher on this one because I want this one to display higher,” that’s getting a little technical and I’m not really sure if that’s even possible. It’s worth testing but I think right now what you are saying is you just want your products to show up on that page and that’s what I think that you are doing. If that’s the case and if that is what you are doing then I would recommend exactly that.

[00:11:07] SV: Create three different campaigns let’s say its three products that you want to rank on that same page. Then you would create three different ads, three different campaigns with three lists of keywords that are identical inside of those and then you are going to start bidding against each other really and then what’s going to happen is you are going to start displaying on different parts of that page. I would want to test this, I would test… its going to take some time it’s not going to happen overnight. The other thing you have to consider here too is if you are not converting but you are willing to spend more sometimes the one that’s converting but isn’t spending will actually rank better. That’s another part of the equation that you might not have control over.

I would test it, I would take those three budgets, I would bid higher so this way here I can see if it’s even possible to get all three of them to show up on the same page and I’d give that a day and see what happens but that’s really what you are going after. That’s what I think I took away from your question, that’s what I would try. I have not personally tried that so I can’t really say personal experience here but I can say logically that’s what I would think. I would think that you are going to have to create three different ad units or ad groups and then you are going to have to bid on those keywords on each one okay? It’s the same thing as this guys, everyone that’s listening, is if you want to take up more real estate and you have three different products you want to rank those three products organically.

If you can take up three spots on page one organically, well then you’ve got three times the chance or two times, no three times the chance that is. You’d have three more chances right, you have got three chances. Actually if you had one listing you’d have two extra chances, I don’t know what I’m trying to say here you guys get what I’m saying. If you show up once you get one chance, if you show up three times you get three chances. That’s what I’m trying to say here. I got confused there for a second. What you want to do though and the same thing is what you are saying here John is you want to be able to take up three spots of the pay per click somewhere on that page if possible and that may be possible and it may not be possible.

I’m not sure but that’s what I would do in order to take up more real estate. All right. Hopefully that’s helped, I would say anyone that’s wanting to know more about pay per click I did an episode with Chris Sheiffer and that was episode 119 so if you go to theamazingseller.com/119 you can listen to that and that’s all of the new features that they’ve put into Amazon pay per click which is basically being able to do your broad match, you are able to do your phrase match, you are able to do your exact match and then also negative keywords. All of that will go in there and then also a basic plan to get started but what we are talking about here this is a little bit more advanced.

We are trying to then dominate the page by creating more ads for these other products so this way you can show up so that’s really what we are trying to do here. Hopefully that made some type of sense I hope it did and let me know how that works also John I’d really like some info back on that just to see what you did and what the results were. That would be cool to give a little bit of an update. Let’s go ahead and jump to another question and I’ll give you my answer.

[00:14:16] Ken: Hey Scott, this is Ken from Texas I wanted to thank you for all that you do on the podcast and everything so it’s so much great information. My question involves colors, if I have a product that can be in different colors like a coffee mug and I want to do a coffee mug in black and then I want to do a coffee mug in yellow, in green, in pink such and such how would you go about choosing what colors to offer? I can’t offer all the colors because that would be too much inventory at this point. I just want to offer like two or three colors so I’m trying to decide which ones to choose. Any advice on that? Thanks a lot.

[00:14:57] SV: Hey Ken. Thank you so much for the question and this is a good question too. I've answered it before but I'm going to answer it again right now because it does come up quite often. If it doesn't come up in your mind it should because a lot of people will say I think that I want to launch this product in five different colors. It would be just kind of cool to offer five different colors, I get five different SKUs, I have five different variations, that's really cool, right. The problem is as you may find and you will find that you are going to have dominant colors that people are buying within this product. One way that you can kind of look and see from other people that are already selling is to do a keyword search for that product. Let's just say the garlic press again, right. Let's say again that we type in stainless steel garlic press.

Let's say for example we see that the results that come up and the one that we're looking at that we're going to compete with or the three or whatever and we see that there's a red one that's coming up all the time. There's this red one that's coming up. Now, I click on that red one and inside they have five different colors that they offer. They offer yellow, blue, silver, black, whatever. If that red one is showing up that's usually the one that's selling the most because Amazon wants to put the one that's selling the most on the front end. They want you to see what people are already buying because it's already been proven to sell. All right. That's what you'd want to do. You could also in Jungle Scout, it will also show you the variations of the sales that how it's being broken down.

Now again, Jungle Scout is a tool it does some really cool stuff in the back end. It kind of does projections and it does history and it rolls all that all up into their little algorithm and their data points. It's pretty close but you can get an idea. You're going usually see one or two colors is going to dominate then the rest are just extras that could pick up some sales. I'm not saying that you would not want to pick up these sales because you would because you've already done all the hard work. You've done all the hard work of finding the supplier, getting the product made, manufactured, you have it shipped, you have your listing created, you have all that stuff. When you add a color to the variation or a variation into the mix it makes it a lot easier now because you are giving more choices which is great and now you can cast that web a little bit or that net a little bit wider because now you're offering more choices

Then someone that didn't want the black and they are like I really want a red one, well now they have the choice to get a red one. All right. Now you picked up that sale that you might have lost. Right. In the beginning we want to cut down the expense and we want also cut down on the risk. Right. I wouldn't guess, I would go and look and see what is already selling and then I would take one or two of those colors and start there. I know a lot of people that started with black because that was like the dominating variation or whatever. Then from there they seen that there's other colors and they would add the next most popular color and then the next most popular color and then just keep building it out that way.

[00:17:52] SV: That's how I would do it. The other thing that you can do is if you are going after a market in particular and you have access to a Facebook page or a fan page or maybe a group or any of that stuff, you might want ask people, “Hey, I'm getting ready to create this new garlic press. What is the best color that I should have this thing made?” You could survey them. You could survey that audience or maybe you already have an email list you started building this market, you could survey them. “Hey, I'm thinking about this. What are your favorite colors, what is the color that you'd want to see it in” and people will tell you and then that would be a good indicator. That's another way that you can do it, it's kind of survey that audience or that market and that really can give you a lot of insight on that

You can also do other things. What would you like to see in a garlic press? What type of handle? Then you'll get feedback and then you can make that product better but again I'm going off a little bit off course there. Really we're talking about how to know what product color to launch with and really it goes back to the data and you really have to go back to the data. Don't guess, know. And you can know by looking at the other people, the competition that are already selling and then from there basing your decision off that to get started. Hopefully that's been helpful, that's what I'd do and good luck to you as well. All right let's go ahead and listen to one more question and I'll give you my answer.

[00:19:20] John: Hi Scott, this is John in Virginia. I just wanted to say that I found your podcast on iTunes and I absolutely love it… I just subscribed to it so thank you very much and keep up the outstanding work. I really appreciate it and I'm sure others do too. My question is about Amazon listings. First I just want to say that I've not sold anything on Amazon under my current brand, I hadn't created my seller central account yet and I'm not selling on any other channels with this new brand at this time. But I do have one product that I sold on Amazon not related to the brand I'm getting ready to launch. I do have a little bit of experience selling on Amazon. I also do understand that Amazon's going to ask… I'm going to have to get permission from them in order to open up a second account.

The brand that I'm wanting to launch it is trademarked with the USPTO. It took about 9 months to get that through the process but it's complete now. I have about four products under that brand all with customized packaging and bundled accessories and each with it's own UPC code that I'm wanting to launch and three of the four products are very, very similar. They have very different functions but the appearance is similar so my question is should I create… When getting ready to launch this, should I create a listing page that has a variation of those three products or it's just one listing with all three products on the page or should I create product pages or product listings for each individual product that I own. The keywords for each of those three very similar products are going to be relatively similar. There's going to be some variation on the keywords but as far as traffic is concerned going to these individual listings would be better to create one page with the variation of the three products or three individual product listings.

I appreciate your time and answering the questions again great work, very professional, I'm very impressed and jealous that others are getting the same benefit that I am and keep up the work. Good work. Thanks again. Talk to you soon. Bye.

[00:21:36] SV: Hey John down in Virginia. Thank you so much for the question and congratulations too by the way. By going out there and creating your own trademark and doing all of the really intricate stuff that a lot of us don't do right out of the gate but you've had some experience like you said and also I think now other people that are listening can see that to do the trademark and to do all that stuff it does require time and an investment. Right. You've been around the game a little bit, you kind of know what you want to do here with this additional brand or this new brand and it's really awesome that you did that and now you're ready to launch. What I would say here in this… I can't really say for sure. I got to be honest. It's going to depend. If I depend on your listing are these going to be like things that I can say it relates but no I wouldn't want that because it's something that's totally different that what I'm looking for.

It really depends on that, I guess. It's like if I'm going to land on a listing, am I going to look at those and go, “Oh, I'll take this one versus this one? Or am I specifically looking for something that has a certain size handle.” Let's say. Like if it was like I need this thing is or this handle is going to be thirteen inch because that's what I'm looking for. Then the other one is a nineteen inch… Well yeah, you could have like the main garlic press let's in an every size handle could be a variation or you could then list them separately on their own listing and then have more real estate in a sense. Even though you have a variation, you have more real estate in a sense it's just not visible real estate. I want people to understand that. When you have a listing, unless there are… To me a variation makes a lot of sense when you have colors or you have quantities. Right.

If you have something that's like a ribbed garlic press and then a smooth handle garlic press I would put those on two separate listings personally. Okay. Now if I had a garlic press that had red, blue, yellow and silver well then yeah, I would put those as variations because it's the exact same product just with a variation of it or you could do the size thing. Now, again I just talked about the size depending on how much of a demand there is for those specific things. If I was going to buy a thirteen inch there is no way I was going to buy the other but it might make sense to do it's own listing. In this case, let's say that you had a garlic press, it was identical but it had an inch longer handle on each variation. One was an eight inch, one was a nine inch one was a ten inch one. That might make sense.

Without really knowing the product it's hard to say exactly what I would do. For the most part I would say probably and it's like you said they are similar but they are not the same. If that's the case, then I would probably do independent listings. I would still create a variation underneath that listing just incase I wanted to add those other variations of the main product. Right. This way here it does allow you, it does allow you to have three different pieces of real estate out there that could take three different listings spots. We just talked about having a product that can rank on the first three spots or the first ten spots somewhere in the first ten spots. That's going to be really, really huge because now you're taking three spots on that same page.

[00:25:05] SV: Just like we were talking before about doing that with pay per click. It's the same idea but you're just doing that using pay per click. It's not that easy to do that we can say that we can do that for sure but if we know that we can rank those three different products on the same keyword on the same page our chances of getting sales on all those goes up. The benefits of doing a variation as you guys probably all know is know we can share the reviews and we can share the ranking. All right. There's really not one set answer that I can give you unless I seen it and I said yeah, this is what I'd do. It doesn't make sense that if I go there you've got one that's round and one that's square. That might not make sense for me. I would never buy a square one. Why would I even want that to be even brought up to me.

It's a little tricky but I hope that this was helpful to where you can say to yourself yeah that makes total sense Scott because mine I wouldn't want people to be confused when they got there, right. Again I think it makes a lot of sense if you can kind of envision that. You've got something that is the same thing like let's say garlic press but it just in different colors or maybe it comes in a different width. Like maybe if I was going to go and have a garlic press it might be that the press area is an inch but for a commercial one it might be an inch and a half. That might make sense. We're just talking a small variation of that exact product. Hopefully that makes sense. Good luck to you and congratulations on going through the work to get the trade mark and to get your product really ready to go to market and then from there having a plan to get it to market is also pretty important.

Really, really great job. The other thing is to remember this as well is that now if you had had three different listing you could also then piggy back off on each other so you can then promote the one listing inside of the other listing and vice versa. You can kind of piggy back back and forth which is pretty helpful too. There's pros and cons to both but hopefully this is made it a little more clear and then you can make a decision moving forward. Congratulations and good luck to you as well keep me posted on that. All right guys

That is going to wrap up this session of Ask Scott. I want to thank you all for hanging out with me. I know you guys have other choices out there and for all of yous that are coming back and listening, I want to say thank you and if you guys could do me just one quick favor is share this. Share the podcast with people that you think would get value from it. Only people that would get value from it. I don't you to just invite it to random people that you don't think would get value. If you think this is valuable and you want to invite people please let people know about it and I would really truly appreciate that. Also if you guys want to connect with me on Periscope you can head over to Periscope.tv and search for @scottvoelker. If you want to head over to SnapChat and I've been hanging over there a little bit. You can hang out with me over there as well and that is … I can be found on there @scottvoelker1. That is my Snap Chat profile name. All right.

Then one last thing, anyone that's brand new, first time listening or maybe you just started listening if you guys are brand new, you guys want to get caught up to speed really, really quickly I created a ten day free course for you to go through. It's an email course with videos and it will walk you through exactly what you need start to finish to find a product, to source a product, to launch a product, and to promote a product, everything you need to in between is there for you and you can find that by visiting freeprivatelabelcourse.com again that's freeprivatelabelcourse.com and you can find it there. Just register, you'll get your first lesson immediately and then from there you'll get one every day for the next ten days and it will give you everything you need to get started.

All right guys. That's it. That's going to wrap it up. Remember I'm here for you, I believe in you and I am rooting for you but you have to, you have to… Come on say it with me, say it loud, “Take action.” Have an awesome amazing day and I'll see you right back here on the next episode.

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