This Issue's TLDR...

• The one non-obvious thing that is hurting your sales.
• How well do you know your Amazon back-end attributes?
• An image hack that will immediately give you an advantage over 99.9% of other sellers.

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SPONSOR Seller Sessions In case you didn't know...I'm going to be speaking at Seller Sessions in London in 9 days. And I'm pumped to be doing it. I've said previously that I'll be sharing stuff that I've never shared before, and that's true. In fact, there are two sections of my presentation that are just blank slides, because I don't want any record of what I'm talking about to be in writing anywhere. It's purely for the people IN THE ROOM. If you haven't grabbed a ticket, there are a few left. Use promo code "JonDinner" for a discounted rate on the VIP Dinner, and promo code "JonConf" for a discounted rate on your ticket to Seller Sessions. ​ Join Me at Seller Sessions​

BEST from Me

I've been thinking about geo-ranking for the past few weeks.

Mostly because of this recent Seller Sessions podcast with Garfield Coore from Rank Diagnostics.

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All I can say in reaction to this video is... 🤯🤯

Garfield very much lives up to the headline of this podcast episode.

ALL OF YOU should carve out an hour to listen to this episode (or 30min, if you're one of those crazies that listens at 2x speed).

But, for those that don't have time, here's one of the key takeaways from Garfield in this podcast episode:

Put differently, stock levels become ranking modifiers, when you don't have enough stock to meet expected demand.

I know this to be true.

I've experienced it in my own business in the good ol' days before Inbound Placement Fees when I would use software to avoid sending trucks from my warehouse in Chicago to somewhere in California.

And, I once solved a sales mystery for a brand client that was directly related to this.

Let me tell you a story...

About 9 months ago, I had a brand client that had sea freighted 5k units of an ASIN to the US, which naturally made port outside of Los Angeles and .

The problem came when an NCX complaint caused the brand's entire inventory of that ASIN to be sidelined, and Amazon's transship process on those 5k units to be halted.

I helped the brand to resolve the NCX issue. Problem was...Amazon didn't reinitiate the transship.

As weeks went by, the brand's sales slowed on this ASIN and its BSR tanked. It took me awhile, but I eventually diagnosed the inventory imbalance as the root cause for this slowing sales.

Cases to Amazon to rebalance the brand's inventory in the network went nowhere.

At this point, my client wanted to create a Removal order and then re-inbound to different FCs.

I suggested that we cost out a multi-channel fulfillment (MCF) order instead.

There were two reasons that I suggested this path:

1. We’d receive the units faster (3-7 days vs 45+ days for a removal), and
2. We’d send a demand signal to Amazon that might trigger a transship.

The MCF order ended up being ~18% more expensive than a Removal order. But, we rebalanced the network in a fraction of the time and, lo and behold, Amazon started to transship some units from LA.

What's the point?

The point is...

...Your inventory distribution matters.

...Your stock levels in each region impact your organic rank in that region.

...Your organic rank in a region impacts your sales in that region.

This is all VERY in the weeds.

Honestly, this is the sort of esoteric Amazon stuff that falls far outside the normal 80/20 of what most sellers and brands should focus on.

But, it's instructive.

It's instructive in the sense that there's more going on behind the scenes in ranking on Amazon than most of us know or appreciate.

The good news, though, is that all of that doesn't matter.

Build great products, merchandise them in ways that speak to your customers, drive traffic, and stay in stock.

Do those things, and you don't have to worry about esoteric ranking factors.

Oh, I almost forgot...

Let's say that you experience a dip in sales, you can't trace it to any of the "usual suspects," and you want to investigate whether it might be related to your inventory distribution and geo-ranks.

Well, the most direct path would be to use a tool like Rank Diagnostics.

There's a free trial version that will let you deep dive your geo-ranks on a single keyword.

Alternatively, you can pull your inventory by FC from Seller Central, and look for gross imbalances.

My approach?

I like to use Sellerise to visualize my FC inventory levels by State, and compare to sales by State.

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FRIENDS OF B@A Selling from the Beach Ready to learn the #1 highest leverage activity to improve your Amazon listing's conversion rate? ​ My friends Max and Rob over at Selling From the Beach have finally released their 7-Day "Better Amazon Image Challenge!" ​ Take the Challenge Today

BEST from Everyone Else

Best from the B@A Community

Want to go deeper down the geo-ranking rabbit-hole?

B@A friend and reader Eddie Wheeler is one of the foremost experts of this niche-within-a-niche, and hopefully weeks away from launching a killer geo-ranking tool to the public (I believe its in closed beta right now).

Have a watch of his interview with Seller Candy, and be sure to follow him and read his geo-ranking insights.

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Best from X

We're in the weeds on everything in B@A this week, so it's only appropriate that we stay there for "Best from X."

Do you know the answer to this question? (The correct answer is in the comments to the Twitter thread)

Evan Swanson @EvanSwanson_FBA What's the difference between: - Offering Release Date - Merchant Release Date The backend catalog fields of Amazon continually change and confuse me. 6:44 PM • May 1, 2024 0 Retweets 3 Likes Read 2 replies

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Best from LinkedIn

My good friend Daniela from Mindful Goods stumbled upon something.

Her hypothesis stems from the fact that AWS tools and services have almost entirely evolved from Amazon's own internal needs (True) and, it stands to reason that they would use a tool like Rekognition to better interpret and understand the relevancy of products on Amazon.com.

But it's not just a thumb-in-the-air guess here. The tests that her and her team have run on this seem to validate this hypothesis.

My take?

Well, there are "insider" things that I can't speak about, or simply don't want to speak about (because I feel like they give me an edge).

This is one of those insider things that falls in both categories, so I will neither confirm nor deny that Daniela's hypothesis carries weight, and I'll leave it at that. 🥸

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Here's her full video on this hack (and make sure to follow her channel!):

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Updates to the Amazon Private Label Pathway

No updates this week.

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Back Story on the Amazon Private Label Pathway, ICYMI...

A few months back, I had a small group of coaching clients that were at the same point in their Amazon seller journeys.

I found myself answering the same questions, and pointing them to the same resources, so, in true Amazon fashion, I asked myself "What's the 1-to-Many solution here?" and built a Notion page of helpful resources, which I've called "Amazon Private Label Pathway."

You can get access to it here: https://auxo.gumroad.com/l/amazonpathway (it's free; but if you want to buy me a beer, I won't object)​

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Amazon Questions? Amazon isn't easy. Everyone needs a little help from a friend sometimes. If you ever have a tough Amazon question, I'm only a phone call away. Let's Chat

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