For one veteran eCommerce seller, a winning Amazon formula looks a little something like this:
Mainstay product with a great market appeal + excellent review potential = a steady flow of sales over time.
Sure, some sellers may prefer to try and make a big splash with popular fad products, but Jeff (name has been changed to maintain confidentiality) has seen first-hand how demand for them often wanes pretty quickly. For these reasons and more, he prefers items with longer shelf lives that won’t be impacted by seasonal trends or other market shifts.
We recently caught up with Jeff to learn more about where FeedbackFive factors into his equation and what it’s meant for his recent success working with a seven-figure seller on Amazon.
A few years ago, Jeff and a few other experienced Amazon sellers teamed up to introduce a large house of brands to Amazon for the first time.
As the Chief Merchandising Officer of their agency, Jeff was tasked with curating an extensive product catalog for the Amazon marketplace.
“We started by slowly showing them a few styles and the potential within those styles, and then explained the potential of onboarding their full catalog online. And that's what we've been in the process of doing in the past few years,” he said. “It's been about three years now and we are growing very rapidly.”
The competition is fierce in the clothing and accessory categories, so Jeff knew he needed more help in the review department. If he could find a way for these products to consistently gain reviews throughout their relatively long 3 to 5-year shelf life, they could remain competitive for several years to come.
Jeff had heard great things about FeedbackFive from others in the industry and decided to give it a try. It wasn’t too long before he began to see results.
When it comes to requesting reviews, Amazon sellers may contact buyers in a few different ways: Amazon’s Request a Review button or third-party software that connects to the Amazon API and automates requests for you (like FeedbackFive!).
FeedbackFive comes with prebuilt campaign options to automate review requests, including Amazon’s official Request a Review message (which Jeff uses) and a customizable Buyer-Seller Messaging template.
The automated approach is exactly what Jeff was after - with such a large product lineup and sales volume, there was no time to be hassling with manual requests.
The automatic feedback request really generates a steady flow of reviews that builds up on a listing. So month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year, you look back and you have a really nice accrual of reviews and you jumped maybe 30 to 40% because of the software. It really helps solidify your placement with a lot of products. So for our business, it kind of works out perfectly,” he said.
It’s especially important to build up your reviews right after launching to help a product gain visibility and climb Amazon’s coveted Best Seller rankings. If you fail to gain any traction early on in a product’s lifecycle, it becomes increasingly difficult to do so later on.
“I think we average 30 reviews a month off-season and much more during the peak holiday season. The reviews are especially helpful with new product launches,” Jeff shared.
“It's a low-ticket, high-volume market that we're in. So we needed a system that could just automatically request reviews for us. It just worked so easily where it literally was a plug and play or a set it and forget it type of thing.”
Now that Jeff’s team has found its groove, the guys have had more time to go in and create different campaign rules and explore FeedbackFive’s Product Review Management features.
“Since we have more time now, we have a virtual assistant going in to look at the negative reviews that you have in the product review section,” Jeff said. “It's an easy way to look at them. So we started using that as well as the automatic review requests. We're excited to see how that works out.”
FeedbackFive makes it easy to track your product reviews and see ASIN-level trends. You can also choose to receive text or email alerts for new negative reviews so you can take action quickly. Too many negative reviews can impact customer confidence, your product ranking, and even your account health.
“With some of the bad ones on a new launch, if you can see these in an organized way, it really does make a difference,” Jeff said.
“In a space where there's so much competition and the ranking has such an effect on your sales volume literally per day, you want to make sure that you're doing the best you can to stay ahead of the game. You don't want it to be something that you could have prevented that's going to pull you down in the rankings.”
With a strong product portfolio and a proactive review strategy, the sky’s the limit for this seller.
One thing that’s clear is that FeedbackFive will remain vital to Jeff and his team.
If you have a way to get those good reviews consistently, then you have to take it. It’s kind of like a must-have if you want to be a real seller on Amazon and position yourself to win the fight. You have to have a feedback software like FeedbackFive.
If you’re ready to start improving your Amazon reviews, sign up for a free trial of FeedbackFive!
If you’re a current FeedbackFive customer who would like to share your story in an upcoming case study, please contact us.