Powerful Amazon Seller Analytics to Improve Your Business

Transcript

Becky: We're here today with Mayuresh Nirhali from SellerApp, he's the CTO there. And we're really excited because we're talking about Amazon seller analytics that can help you improve your business, and we have the perfect person here to help you with that. So Mayuresh has a lot of experience with product leadership. He's really strong in technology and has entrepreneurial instincts. He works a lot with platform and infrastructure domain. So he is definitely here to talk about everything analytics, any questions that you have, he is the guy to ask. Sorry, I should have flipped to that slide so you can see him.

Becky: So today we're going to be talking about analytics to help you grow your business in 2022 and beyond. So we're going to get into important trends and numbers to watch, category trends, market share, product search visibility, profitability, which I know is a big one for a lot of sellers. It's hard to track sometimes so Mayuresh has some great tips for that. Ad spend optimization, just making sure that you're putting your dollars where they need to go. Price optimization and we'll talk a little bit about review analysis. And I will actually hand it over now to Mayuresh, and let him show you.

Mayuresh: All right. Great. Thank you Becky, for the kind words. I'm super excited to be here. eComEngine and SellerApp complement each other in many ways when it comes to helping sellers or supercharging everything that they need in terms of tools, whether they're data, whether anything around Amazon eCommerce business and other marketplaces. So very, very happy to be a part of this.

Mayuresh: I'm just going to dive into the topic for the day, but before we get there just a little bit about myself. I spent 10 years at Sun Microsystems doing operating systems, Java, moved over to Oracle, that's where my data journey really began. Did a lot of big data over there, eventually started working with the private equity firm, helping them acquire businesses and finally took the leap with my data and tech background into analytics and what a place than SellerApp, which has a great opportunity with so many challenges and technical problems to solve really enjoying my stint at SellerApp.

Mayuresh: So let's move ahead. What we are going to do today is we're going to talk about two main things. One's, I would really like to share a few Uber trends as we are gearing up for this year, 2022. And then I'm going to spend a lot of time on talking about 10 key areas of your Amazon or eCommerce marketplace business, and understand really what are the data points that we need? What do we do with them? Why are they so important? What benefits we could get if we had access to those. Right. Right. So let's get started. So the context for us today is Amazon, right? It is the market leader when it comes to eCommerce. I am sure every one of you have a game on Amazon in terms of your brands, in terms of if you're a vendor, then all your brands.

Mayuresh: I think Amazon has really made a lot of difference in terms of changing buyer's mindset to think about Amazon first. And as much as they are focused on the buyer side, they're also significantly focused on the seller side creating APIs, providing avenues for the sellers to grow. Having said that, it is just a big or a very, very large ecosystem. And then there are challenges for which you need a lot of data to make your decisions, whether they could be at a strategic level, tactical level or at operational level, right? So if you really look at Amazon, there are three things that they really do great, right? One is fulfillment, purely from a buyers point of view, which is what makes buyers come to Amazon.

Mayuresh: Advertising especially in the Americas and the Europe region. And of course the customer service, right? So they really allow brands to kind of take care of these three parts. And hence it is very important to understand how to kind of work with what Amazon is already doing, and what it is that the seller needs to do in order to make the most out of the ecosystem.

Mayuresh: And we are going to talk about how some of those aspects could be primarily driven by the data that is available out there, right. So we moved to the first trend and I would really like each of you to think about taking your eCommerce store from one marketplace to other geographies on Amazon. And I think what is really happening right now is that Amazon has been focused on individual marketplace, individual geographies, looking at their specific nuances of the geographies. And eCommerce is a very complicated set of steps that needs to go through making sure that the experience is great, right?

Mayuresh: And now that they have solved this problem with respect to specific geographies, it is time that there are a lot of initiatives that Amazon is taking on, which is going to help the sellers with a very little effort and you'll be riding on the ecosystem that Amazon has set up in different geographies to be able to sell elsewhere. Right.

Mayuresh: So if you're not already caught up on this trend, I think this is going to be another great set of opportunities. You will have to do some homework though, in terms of which markets do you want to think about immediate, adjacent markets. And there are again, a lot of tools out there which can help you understand different geographies or different marketplaces and what are the kind of products? What is the kind of assortment? What is the coverage for your brand? And then kind of plan out on how you can make your move. So keep that in mind. Moving over the second one.

Mayuresh: B2B, those of you, you've not already doing this, given that each of these B2B buyers are essentially also been buying on Amazon for their B2C needs, the mindset change is now I mean, so deeply penetrated that there is a big trend that we see now that a lot of B2B products are coming on Amazon and various geographies and hence it is important that you also have a very strong B2B strategy for the kind of products or brands that you have, right.

Mayuresh: Moving on. I'm going to spend a few minutes on our analysis in the last few months about what's going on, on Amazon. I mean, you can imagine last month being February and moving into March now, if you look at the keywords, they're primarily around Valentine's Day and all of that seasonal stuff. Having said that, there are few categories that you will see will always have a lot of competition, but they will also have a lot of products coming in, and they are also making a lot of sales in terms of units and also in terms of overall revenue, right? So these are some of the categories out there. If you are already playing in them or related categories.

Mayuresh: Of course, I'm talking about these to be the top level categories. If you look at all leaf level categories, there are possibly, I believe the last time I looked at it was close to 400,000 leaf level categories on Amazon. So these are, you really need to drill down on some of these and understand. I mean, if you take an example of electronics, maybe the CD and DVD players is not doing as much as cell phones and related accessories. So you get the point. Moving on to the next one. I thought it would be also interesting to talk about what are some of the most profitable categories, right?

Mayuresh: When it comes to eCommerce, there is a lot that goes on in terms of your inventory, how do you balance your inventory, trying to reduce your storage costs and your fulfillment costs, your commission fees. And we'll talk about that a lot in some of the slides in some of the coming slides.

Mayuresh: But the key parameters with which we look at some of the profitable categories is clearly the cost of good sold, the other cost that is primarily borne by the seller. And then advertising cost, if you're really big on advertising, then your fees in terms of commission, in terms of storage and your refunds, your discounts. And we kind of look at that, analyze all the products in various categories and then identify. Now I feel the key differentiator if you look at these is that, what is the profit margin you will have on your product that really plays a very critical role when it comes to profitability.

Mayuresh: There are a lot of factors when it comes to Amazon fees and related areas. So it is important that you have a significant margin to be able to play on some of these categories and make more profits. So with these quick sort of insights into what is going on, on the Amazon world that all of you should be looking at, are now going to move on to a deeper take on analytics for Amazon.

Mayuresh: What we are going to do today is that we're going to look at various aspects of any eCommerce business and understand that, which are the say top 10 jobs that you will have to do being an owner, or being a category manager, or some of you might be agencies or might be responsible for a certain part of the operations. Depending on that you would be working on one or more of these areas in the entire life cycle of say a transaction. And understand what are some of the numbers that you really need to know in order to make important decisions. Let's say you have a strategy around building a brand for your store or your brand, and how do you go about it?

Mayuresh: You've decided that, okay, I'm going to overlook some of the profitability measures for now, because I think I need to build my brand first. So if that is your strategy, how does that kind of play out? What are the numbers that you need to keep in mind for each of those? So let's jump into that. Before we get into those 10 areas, I just wanted to kind of make an important point here. All commerce companies, brands, and vendors have been doing a lot of data analytics for several decades. With eCommerce though, a lot of things have changed, right?

Mayuresh: What used to be many month-long projects that need to be done very carefully and yet you always could be touching on much smaller sample data to understand how do people perceive my price? What is really the size of the market? What is the share I have? What is my share of search? Or in other words, what is the visibility that my products are getting? Now all of that, given that all these activities are in the digital world, it is possible now to bring together technology to make this much more accessible and also have increased coverage on the data that you would be processing to be able to come up with insights. Right?

Mayuresh: For example, we do millions of products on a daily basis, we keep track of them. We also keep track of a lot of order data. We keep track of advertising data to be able to come up with insights that could be useful to the eCommerce brands or vendors. So with that, let's jump in. First one, I think this is the most key one.

Mayuresh: Every week I would have a few conversations with our clients and they have a very important problem to solve, which is about what is the total market size and what is my share. And even more importantly sometimes, that if they see any trends, say they have seen some increase or decrease in their revenue, can they attribute it to the overall market going up or down or it's just that their competition is eating up their market share, right?

Mayuresh: So they are extremely important information primarily used for strategic, for tactical sort of decisions. There are a lot of tools including SellerApp that focus on this area. We do a lot of analysis of product data, like I said, auto data and are able to provide market share numbers. The key thing here though is that often brands need to look at specific categories. And by that, I do not mean the categories as defined in particular by Amazon. But let's say you are a medium size brand who's looking at a particular, say face masks, in this COVID world, you don't want to be competing in the entire health and personal category or even subcategory.

Mayuresh: So you would have a very focused set of brands out there against which you consider as your market and against which you would want to know what is my share, right? So typically, you would see there are a lot of tools that provide estimated data. There are tools that give you more credible, more accurate market share data.

Mayuresh: Best Selling Rank, if you don't know, I don't believe that is used as well by any other marketplaces other than Amazon, is a very important aspect. You should be tracking how the Best Sellers Rank is performing for you and your competition. Those are, I think, an extremely important set of aspects or factors that could play out in the market share.

Mayuresh: And there are tons of decisions that could be made based on these data points, right? So that's on the market share. Let's move on to the other one. Product search visibility. This is really about when somebody is searching on Amazon. Let's say with certain keywords or a search term, where does your product or your set of products or your brand stand? Are you on page one? Are you on page seven? Are you beyond page seven? How does that work? How do I make sure that I can get organic visibility to, or how do I measure the organic visibility? My products are getting in the marketplace.

Mayuresh: Like I mentioned, Amazon has worked really hard so when the buyer thinks of buying a product he comes to Amazon first to search. So looking through searches on Amazon gives a significant idea of some sense or a good sense of demand for a certain search term or related products, not only on Amazon, but even beyond that given that they are the leaders, right.

Mayuresh: There are a lot of tools that do this including SellerApp, that will allow you to track progress or think of that as monitoring, you are running out on a lot of advertisements and you want to make sure that has helped at all in terms of you gaining more organic visibility. I think these are extremely important terms because even if you're making changes to your listing or whether it is advertising, you would really want your organic ranking to go up.

Mayuresh: And it's important to be able to understand how to look at organic ranking on Amazon and understand where do you stand and then come up with a strategy. A lot of tools provide recommendations on what you would do now at this stage in order to get up on the ranks. Let's go to the next one. Listing optimization.

Mayuresh: This might sound like this is one of those most basic things that everyone has to do, but there is also some science to this. Primarily your listings need to be indexed to the most popular or highly in demand keywords. Now, if you just look at that particular idea, there are a lot of things that are happening in and around you, like your competition is doing a lot of things.

Mayuresh: So it's very important to be able to understand, and consistently be able to monitor, how does this play out while I am making my own changes? Are they taking any effect against some of the best sellers in the category or the small market, or a segment of a market that I want to focus on? Right.

Mayuresh: SellerApp is a pioneer with the first one created listing quality score. And we are also very recently looking at more dynamic listing quality scores, which means that at a cadence, the listing quality will be analyzed against the category average on various parameters. It could be the rating and review rate.

Mayuresh: It could be number of bullet points, number of images, whether it's A plus content. So that constantly allows you to understand where is your listing in comparison to some of the others. Could be competition, could be any other focus areas that you may have, right. Clearly there are other factors that you need to look at while thinking about listing optimization is, where do you stand?

Mayuresh: In the previous slide we talked about keyboard tracking or search visibility. We could also call that share of search. So it is important to kind of work together with these data points to be able to then go back to listing, monitor them on your tracking dashboards and then go back to your listing and make changes and sort of move forward in an iterative way.

Mayuresh: Moving forward, profitability, right. One of the most important aspects of Amazon business especially. I'm not sure how many of you know this, but Amazon charges over 60 different types of fees. And I'm not saying these are hidden fees. These are important aspects of how Amazon is adding value to your business.

Mayuresh: Some of them could be at account level, some of them could be at a brand level, some of them could be for different services, but there could be, if you are using all Amazon programs, your expenses would have 60 line items. What this really means is that it makes it that much more harder to be able to understand what is my profitability on Amazon.

Mayuresh: It's not just about commission, which sometimes becomes the entry level decision. There are a lot of other aspects that everyone needs to understand. And here it's not only about costs on your side, it's also about how much advertising are you doing? What is your advertising? What is your ACoS or your ROAS. Some of the key data points that you need to understand is essentially all the fees and taxes that get cut.

Mayuresh: At an order level, you might be making discounts and how does that play out in your profitability, which is I think a very, very important aspect. We've helped our clients work with this feature allowing them to make important decisions such as, should I do FBA, which has a lot of benefits or should I do FBM, looking at my overall profitability, right?

Mayuresh: And of course, I mean, at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you have a very strong, well thought out plan. And these are all important numbers that could feed into amount of profit that you're making. Okay. Let's move forward. Advertising optimization.

Mayuresh: Obviously, especially like I mentioned earlier in the North Americas and Europe, there are a lot of brands that are using optimizations, that is quite clear from the revenue numbers of Amazon, especially or particularly on advertising.

Mayuresh: Right now these might look like very initial set of numbers, but when it comes to advertising, it just gets that much more complex in terms of making sense of how do I really organize my campaigns to what are the conversion rates? How do I play this big changing game? How do I work with my budget and at the same time maximize my profits?

Mayuresh: So while some of these are basic numbers, you really need to kind of put down a strategy around whether I want to focus on brand building, in which case I might be willing to let go or have a higher ACoS, or I want to be able to focus on profitability. And hence, it's very important for me to have an ACoS that is in some range within the reasonable range that I'm looking at and hence target ACoS.

Mayuresh: Advertising is also a complex game. There are ways Amazon dashboards allow you to work with automatic campaigns, which play out in ways that might be difficult to comprehend because you don't understand how that system works. At the same time having manual campaigns requires so much more expertise to be able to understand the nuances of how things work, and be able to maximize your profits or getting conversions.

Mayuresh: And there are analytics tools that can help you provide insights on both automatic and manual campaigns, allowing you to kind of identify how you could tweak your campaigns or ad groups and make sure that you are cutting down on your wasted spend, that could be one strategy, and they will also help you on achieving your specific goals in terms of whether it's brand building or conversions and things like that. Right.

Mayuresh: Moving on. Review analysis. I think this is one of the most important areas, especially on Amazon. And the reason being that Amazon has been working on building possibly the most important thing with their buyers is the trust, right? Everyone, they've spent a lot of time and effort making sure there are no frauds when it comes to reviews.

Mayuresh: And today that ecosystem is at the point where having maximum number of reviews is extremely important, which means that you need to not only in terms of gathering feedback, but in terms of getting better on your organic ranking, getting better in terms of overall conversions.

Mayuresh: And to that effect, there are a lot of things that a seller needs to look into in terms of, what is the review rate for example, and I may have thousands of reviews, but were they for a version of my product that was one and a half to two years ago and the review rate has gone down all of these factors are going to play a role into your overall desirability of the product, right?

Mayuresh: So there are tools that also provide you with understanding or getting or extracting important insights out of the text that goes into reviews, are these verified customers. As you all already know that Amazon does not directly share the buyer or the customer details, but an important area in terms of review management is being able to remind your recent purchasers to come forward and make a review, right?

Mayuresh: So these are some of the important aspects and the data points that you need in order to understand where do you stand in terms of review analysis and what you can do to make that better? Okay. Last one is the, sorry, this isn't the last one, the price optimization, right? Of course, a lot of work has been happening traditionally or historically on understanding what is my right price.

Mayuresh: There's a lot of competition perspective that needs to come in. There is also perspective of profitability and there are now a lot of predictive analytics models that allow you to get this kind of information, which tells you insights. One example that I have on my slide is that a certain percentage of decrease on price could give you potentially an X percentage of increase in sales or overall conversion.

Mayuresh: Right now a lot of data gets crunched or processed and the background to be able to produce this. The data uses a lot of historical information, seasonal trends, and then be able to come up with any indications that'll help sellers determine if they should be changing the price and by what was sent or by what margins, right.

Mayuresh: Moving on. Price wars. For those of you who are third-party sellers, or are in fierce competition in certain segments, or basically retailers, who're also selling on Amazon with the same ASIN, but a different. So the game there is to really be able to win the Buy Box, right.

Mayuresh: And there are a lot of data points that become very crucial in terms of what is the overall percent of Buy Box that I'm able to retain given whatever timeline within a month or within a week, and then how do I kind of respond to that situation?

Mayuresh: Look at the changes onto the Buy Box and understand what is really playing out in terms of these Buy Box kind of flipping between one or more sellers and how does one really play this kind of a price war, right. So clearly important points. There are historical data. All the events on the Buy Box changes need to be tracked.

Mayuresh: And that kind of gives you insight on what might be going on and what you could do to respond to it. Product research. A lot of our clients we spend a lot of time in figuring out growth strategies in terms of, it's not just about growing sales for the products that we already have, it's also about what are the adjacent categories, or within the same categories are the subcategories that we should look at, right?

Mayuresh: And it's very important to be able to understand all the product aspects and make a decision, or get insights on what type of products that are out there, and the ones that seem to be organically ranking on the higher side, what is really the key differentiator.

Mayuresh: Tools allow you to also kind of define that these are my competitive products and be able to track them. So any changes to them are also understood and then can be fed into decisions in terms of opening up new product lines, or even making sure that your current set of products can get better on the organic ranking, right? Moving forward.

Mayuresh: This is something that is coming out really fast and is really important. We talked about advertising, we talked about keyword tracking. We talked about listing optimization. Can someone, something do these things while I might be busy doing something else. So think of this like the stop loss triggers in stock markets, right?

Mayuresh: You set up some of those triggers and you don't have to be making sure that you are there when a particular price is hit and things get automatically executed, right. So there are tools that allow you to kind of do such automation primarily around advertising that kind of helps you build a bounding box around your strategy, right?

Mayuresh: I would want to make sure that if I am not getting a good CTR, a clickthrough rate, I may want to pause that campaign, because I don't want to drain money if I'm not getting a good impression to click ratio and stuff like that. So for that there are a lot of data points that you would need, which would depend on whether it's about advertising or listing.

Mayuresh: Like we say, there could be listing optimization possible, which would look at a comparative data between some of the best selling products in your category, and then be able to make decisions and execute them on Amazon in terms of either changing the listing and adding certain important keywords and things like that.

Mayuresh: Right. So with that, I just like to quickly recap on what we've talked about today. Global selling is really getting easier, if you're not looking at it this could be the year that you may want to take that leap. B2B is going to be really, really big, it might be bigger than B2C.

Mayuresh: Most important message is there are tools that now help you monitor your business from various aspects of your Amazon business that allows you to kind of touch and feel real data, and then use that in your strategic or operational decisions or changes. And this is going to be an incredible year, we just coming out of pandemic.

Mayuresh: So I wish you all have a great year. We just probably getting started, although the second quarter is going to come in. But I wish you all the best. And thanks again, Becky for giving me this opportunity to talk about the analytics and stuff that we are up to.

Becky: Of course. Yeah. Thank you for all of this. It was awesome. I'm just going to talk a little bit about review analytics. And sorry, bear with me. And then we do have some questions in the chat so we'll get to those right after this. So just to follow up a little bit on what Mayuresh was saying about tracking your reviews and making sure you're getting that data.

Becky: We also obviously think that's really important here at eComEngine FeedbackFive is our flagship tool and it's used to request reviews. You can get alerts for new reviews and new feedback. And then we also have some really cool analytics. So I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the things that we do for our customers.

Becky: So one is we redesigned our product review analytics and we're automatically tracking top ASINs, that's included at all plan levels and you're getting that review data. So if you go into the reviews page you can see all kinds of great analytics that I'll show on the next page. And just some best practices. I think Mayuresh mentioned the importance of the trust that Amazon has built in the review ecosystem.

Becky: And one thing that you really want to look out for is if you start seeing a lot of trends like suspicious reviews or anything that looks kind of off make sure that you're reporting that to Amazon and that you're really paying attention and watching your reviews. Sometimes you can get those removed.

Becky: Sometimes you can at least flag it to Amazon and let them know that there's an issue and hopefully that will prevent any problems with your account down the road. We like to say that reviews let you make informed decisions. So when it comes to things like, how's this product trending, does it make sense to restock this? Is it time to make a change?

Becky: Do I need to add a new feature? Am I staying competitive? You can really look at that review data and get those kinds of insights directly from your customers, which is something that you can't do in very many places. Amazon really gives you this awesome insight directly into what the customer is thinking.

Becky: And in that same vein, you can also use your reviews to improve your products and listings. If you start seeing negative reviews, we've seen some really bad ones related to mismeasurement or the wrong color. Sometimes your description is no longer up to date if your manufacturer changes something, or if you make some changes to your product.

Becky: So reviews can really give you insight into when you need to go and make changes to your listing, maybe change your A+ content to emphasize things. Make sure you're always answering those customer questions that come in. But anything you can do on your listing page to set.

Becky: I think also to the listing optimization piece that you talked about, anything you can do there to make sure that your listing is as accurate as possible is going to set you up to get those good reviews. So this is just a little sneak peek at our UI. This is our product reviews piece, and we track a lot of really cool data here. It's all filterable.

Becky: You can actually look at the last seven days, 30 days, 90 days, I think 60 days. You see the total ratings, the positive and negative reviews over that time period and the number of orders, the average rating. And there's a lot of data there. You can also click over on the product and it'll take you directly to the page on Amazon.

Becky: So you can go look at your listing really easily. And then one thing that I think is really cool, that is kind of a hidden cool feature of FeedbackFive, is not only do we track reviews, we're also tracking ratings. So the difference there remember is back in 2019, Amazon rolled out the one-tap rating system at the same time that they pulled out the request to review messaging system.

Becky: So that means that buyers are getting messages where they can just click on a star rating and just leave the rating and not leave a written review. They used to be required to provide written context. So for a while it was like, well, are my review requests working? I don't know if I'm getting reviews because the written reviews aren't coming through.

Becky: So we actually updated FeedbackFive to pull in those ratings. And you can look at this graph down here on the bottom left is showing you the number of emails that you sent versus the total ratings you received, positive reviews and the negative reviews. And then you can drill down by timeframe, you can drill down by feedback, ratings, reviews.

Becky: And so you get a lot more insight into how your emails are working and if those requests are getting through and getting the results that you need. And if they're not, and if you're FeedbackFive customer, or if you're not a FeedbackFive customer, we do offer free account reviews as well as product review consultations.

Becky: Our team of customer success experts is always happy to help you. So if you have any questions about reviews, we're here. And then we do just have a cool feed that shows your latest reviews, I think that's always nice to see. And then we have an additional page that drills down by ASIN.

Becky: And this actually gives you the review, the written review so you can see all that information. Shows you whether or not it's a verified purchase. And then you have a lot of filtering options. You can look at verified versus non verified purchase. You can look at the star level. You can sort by when the review is left.

Becky: Filter by different types of products. So this is a really good way to get insight into what's working and what's not, and make those changes if you need to. And we're actually offering a 60 day free trial of FeedbackFive. So if you're interested in giving it a shot, use coupon code Q12022.

Becky: And if you have any questions, feel free to follow up with me or send us a message through our contact form or chat, we're always here. And then I believe Mayuresh also has a special offer for SellerApp. Looks like they're doing 30 days free. And SellerApp is an all in one tool for PPC, keywords and profit. I think a lot of the things that he was speaking about today you can actually do within the tool, right?

Mayuresh: Yeah.

Becky: Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you all for attending and we do have some questions. So I'm going to start asking those if you're ready to be in the hot seat Mayuresh.

Mayuresh: Sure. Go ahead.

Becky: Okay. So one of the first ones we got was, if you're a new seller, which metric would you pay the most attention to, or what do you think is the most important for someone that's just starting out?

Mayuresh: I would really focus on listing optimization to start with. It's really important to understand how to kind of make sure all the aspects of a good listing are kind of set out I mean, at the beginning, right. And I really always think about this in two ways, right? You can divide listing optimization into two parts. One would be discoverability.

Mayuresh: If somebody's searching for something around your product, what is the metric of discoverability for your products, how easily are they able to discover your products? Right. So that's where your organic ranking comes in and stuff like that, which is where indexes in your listing matter a lot.

Mayuresh: And the second aspect is desirability, right? They see your product on the search page, and now what is making them click on that product while there are 47 other products on the same page, what makes them click on that? And once they click on that, what is how the information is laid out on the product page? And Amazon does help you a lot on that.

Mayuresh: And the key aspect here is to be able to understand what some of the better or organically higher ranked products are doing in this area. So I would really start from listing optimization and then make sure that I'm monitoring that using the organic search positions. Yeah. That would be my answer.

Becky: Great. Okay. And then we have Jared asked, how do you track review and track category share?

Mayuresh: Right. How do you review and track category share? So the way we look at category share is pretty much two things, right? What is the total size of the market and what is my product share? Right.

Mayuresh: So essentially the key question you want to answer is what is the size of the market or a segment that you're looking at, right. And most of the tools what they really do is that they have analytical algorithms that can predict significant accuracy of estimated sales on a particular product, right?

Mayuresh: So essentially without using the tool if I were doing it, I would look at estimated sales or any other close to real world data of their sales, and then kind of sum them up, whether I want to do it at a subcategory level and, or overall category level or a custom set of products that I want to specifically target, right?

Mayuresh: So that's the approach that is taken right now. And in terms of tracking category share, it's really being able to sort of look at this data over a trend line as to, if my size value is kind of going and shrinking and my share value is going and shrinking over a period of time, and tools allow you to do that.

Mayuresh: The tools I mean, that needs sort of data and technologies around data in order to be able to fulfill this, but they do provide a lot of trends around this that can help you kind of super superimpose. This is a trend line of my sales, and this is a trend line of the category size. So I'm able to kind of quickly visually spot what is basically going on, right? So that's how all sellers could review and track the category share.

Becky: Makes sense. The next question is, Amazon moves really quickly, we all know that. So when would you as an analytics expert consider data to be outdated or what's the most relevant to look at?

Mayuresh: That's pretty interesting. I would still say that it depends on what you're looking at, right? So if you're looking at say category data, I would even say a monthly is great, because if you see even for example, let's take one data point as a Best Sellers Rank, right? For certain products, it could change multiple times in a day, right.

Mayuresh: Now imagine there is a product that is very low on the BSR rank, but suddenly decides to do extremely aggressive advertising and is now also that is helping him out get more conversions, but so it starts to move.

Mayuresh: So the shorter especially when it comes to say category sizing and some of those aspects, it's very important to kind of give that a little time so that these outliers, which are kind of playing out in that set of products kind of do not really affect significantly what is the overall trend, right.

Mayuresh: If somebody's consistently doing that and has been able to come up, it'll also show up on a slightly larger trend, right. But if you look at advertising, I would look at advertising at, consider the attribution of 42, 48 to 72 hours, I would look at weekly data, right?

Mayuresh: So that there are a lot of trends in terms of bids, in terms of overall budget, in terms of seasonality, say there was a huge search around Valentine's Day in Feb so there were a lot of dynamics that gets played out when it comes to advertising. Again, in terms of listing, it could still be monthly.

Mayuresh: Once you have a listing that you are confident of, I would look at every two weeks to four weeks and understand, what could be the new keywords, what is the next event that Amazon is going to give a push to the buyers. So it could also be event specific. Yeah. Those would be three important aspects and decadence at which I would review the data.

Becky: Makes sense. And then we have someone asking, I think we have a lot of people that sell in multiple marketplaces. And so the question is, should you pay attention more to certain data depending on which marketplace you're selling in the kind of the same, no matter where you are?

Mayuresh: Yeah. I mean, if you mean by marketplaces geographies, because Amazon calls marketplaces geographies, to us it is a completely different context, right? Now when we think about the category size, we also do a lot of analytics at a complete geography level.

Mayuresh: And for that let's say we are looking at a certain keywords are playing well in a certain marketplace, which means the geographical marketplace, they could have a completely different trend in another one. Right. So we consider them completely differently. Right.

Mayuresh: Because ultimately the market is representing the set of buyers that would come up there and any changes that you would do is targeting that audience. So I would keep these two as separate. Even if I'm looking at my listing quality, I would evaluate them separately for each marketplace because the context does play a lot when we kind of switch geographies or marketplaces on Amazon. Yes.

Becky: Great. And then the last one, I know you talked a lot about profitability and I was actually wondering, is there something that you should be looking for in terms of a percentage for profit? Is there a baseline? I know there have been a lot of changes with all of the supply chain and everybody's had to raise prices, and so what are you really looking for? Is it 20%, 40%?

Mayuresh: It would be really hard to kind of put down a number, but it generally goes by category. Subcategory trends, right? For example, someone who's selling water filters would be deeply affected by supply chain issues versus, or maybe electronics, but maybe say other health and personal care kind of products may not.

Mayuresh: So I think that would become very industry or vertical specific. And I think the key thing there to note is that, can I be more profitable if I do FBA versus FBM? Can I be more profitable on Amazon versus say, other marketplaces who are going completely on my own with a D2C website or things like that. I think those would be the decisions.

Mayuresh: And of course, it's very important to have a good hold on your current numbers. And then you are able to kind of understand where do I stand with respect to my industry or my vertical, right. So I think it would be very hard to otherwise put a number on that.

Mayuresh: We know that there are several of our clients with really thin margins. So they are totally focused on the volume game, in some others there are really great margins and so their decision making criteria or constraints are very different.

Becky: Thank you so much Mayuresh, this was awesome information. And I really appreciate you taking the time to join us and our audience today. And I just wanted to remind everyone, we will be sending out a recording. So if you missed anything, I know we covered a lot of really detailed information and those slides were awesome.

Becky: So you want to go back, you definitely can watch the recording and we'll also have a transcript up on our website probably early next week. And I hope you all have a good day. Thanks again, Mayuresh.

Mayuresh: Thank you, Becky. There's some really good questions, I really had a great time. Thank you so much.

Becky: Thank you.