An Established Sporting Goods company which has had success on its online store as well as a strong distribution network came to us to establish a stronger presence on Amazon. They had the best products in the market and the only one in their industry that was made in the USA. While their business did in excess of $10 million a year, their business on Amazon was less than $200,000 annually. They had hundreds of listings with little organization or marketing strategy.
The Challenges
How do we convey the higher quality of the product? How do we get their items to the first page of the search results? How do they manage a catalogue of hundred of items on Amazon? How do they determine the products to focus on and invest marketing dollars? How do they keep their margins when a price-driven market on Amazon is considered and their product is a premium version to their competitors’? How do they manage their inventory and shipping on the merchant-fulfilled network (MFN) and Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) at the same time?
The Goals
We targeted a sales goal of $350,000 for the first year with a gross margin of 30% after advertising expenses. We wanted to maintain MAP pricing policy and ideally grow the business without impacting sales from their own website.
How Velocity Sellers Helped
We looked at the business holistically and considered the what was already working with their store on Amazon. We learned more about their customer and started optimizing and marketing their best performing items to get them to higher search ranks. Then we looked at opportunities for under-performing items with high potential.
We focused on all the aspects that were operating inefficiently for their business and created a structure around listings optimization, marketing, brand presence and fulfillment practices.
In managing their Seller Central business we:
- Optimized all existing listings for organic search (starting with highest volume items)
- Improving keyword relevance across their line of products
- Updating titles for SEO
- Utilizing enhanced content
- Updated content for conversion
- Wrote listings for their new catalog of products
- Removed Unauthorized Sellers
- Added enhanced images
- Creating strategic bundles
- Product development research (new categories)
- Managed fulfillment
- Converted seller from Merchant Fulfilled (MFN) to FBA . This secured the prime badge for their listings
- Reduced out-of-stock rate
- Created profitability reports
