I know exactly zero Amazon sellers or service providers that have the faintest idea how to use the Shipping Speed data that Amazon provides in the Search Query Performance (SQP) report.
I think it's because most of them -- myself included for a long time -- thought of Shipping Speed as an "uncontrollable" input for your business. After all, if you're using FBA, Amazon controls every aspect of the order fulfillment process, starting with the fulfillment centers to which you send your products.
But there were two fallacies in this thinking that I overlooked:
Let's unpack that first fallacy a bit more.
SQP tells us, for a given search term, how many Impressions/Clicks/ATCs/Purchases have Same/1Day/2Day Shipping Speeds attached to them, relative to the total for that search term. So what?
Well, here's the key detail: Amazon shopper searches are contextualized (that's the internal Amazon term) and Prime members are shown faster Shipping Speeds than non-Prime members.
This means that we can infer, from the Shipping Speed data, the relative proportion of Prime customers that shop a particular search term.
And we can back into the Prime/non-Prime split for a given ASIN or Brand.
🤯 🤯 🤯
Cool, right?
It gets cooler.
Because even though it's maybe interesting intellectually to know the Prime/non-Prime split, it's all about how you use that information. The "hacks" if you will.
Here are the ways that I have used it with my brands, which I tested over the course of April-June:
I had a hypothesis that Prime Exclusive Discounts would perform better with ASINs that had a larger % of Prime customers.
The thinking was...the discounted PED price is displayed to Prime customers more prominently, and there's not any added friction to the check-out process (i.e., sign up for Prime to get this discount), so it would stand to reason that ASINs with PEDs in more Prime heavy "categories" would perform better than those in less Prime heavy categories.
In my small sample testing, I observed that PEDs were most effective in driving post-PED ranking improvements in categories with 75%+ Prime customers.
My Statistics 101 professor wouldn't consider these results significant, but they're good enough for me to inform how I spend promotion dollars and use PEDs for maximum impact.
The inference from above still applies: Shipping Speed data in SQP provides an indication of the split of Prime/non-Prime customers in a category.
So, the hack here is...
This was learned from painful experience, rather than tested thoroughly like the PED hack above.
For the first half of this year, I got a little too clever with my FBA inbounding strategy on my Oversize products. I didn't love the LTL freight rates to the West coast, so I shifted my shipments to FCs in the Midwest (where my warehouse is) and the Northeast.
Around May, I observed 20-30% sales declines across nearly all of my Oversize products. My deep dive into "why" this was happening took a long, winding path, but I ultimately discovered that my California sales were down substantially YoY. Going deeper, I found in my FBA inventory reports that my stock levels in West coast FCs were in the low double- and single- digits.
In short, customers in one of my largest sales states (California), and in categories that were Prime heavy, were seeing longer delivery promises on my Oversize listings.
I've since corrected the issue, but...lesson learned.
PS: There are a lot of moving parts to this hack; far too many to cover in this newsletter. If you want a primer on how to route inventory, see the thread below. If you want a more detailed walk-through of either of these hacks, book some time with me.
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This week's BEST from Everyone Else is in 3-1-2 format: 3 videos, 1 article, 2 tweets.
3 Videos
1 Article
Why Amazon’s Search Query Performance Dashboard Is Awesome. I would maybe re-title this article as "Why Michael Facchin and Elizabeth Greene are Awesome" because the two of them put out heaps of high value content ALL THE TIME. In this article, they've teamed up Avengers-style to deep-dive the SQP reporting dashboard.
2 Tweets
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Since the topic of this newsletter issue was SQP data, I thought I would double down on that topic and add something cool to the Amazon Private Label Pathway:
Important Context: I consolidate content from a large sample of paid courses and masterminds in an internal repository that I call 'Corpus', which I then use to train my team and keep my own skills sharp. These are meant to be internal, and not shared broadly. For that reason, I won't leave this video up on Amazon Private Label Pathway forever.
You can get access to the Amazon Private Label Pathway here: https://auxo.gumroad.com/l/amazonpathway (it's free; but if you want to buy me a beer, I won't object)
I'm a former Amazon marketplace leader and current 8-figure seller. I write about advanced strategies and tactics for Amazon brands, that you won't read about anywhere else. Not for beginners.
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