Show notes
Listen in as Bradley unpacks the latest twists for Amazon product launch strategies, which may have sent sellers back to the drawing board. Bradley’s tale with a bat bath mat launch illustrates the high stakes of this new game, and a PPC-centered approach has risen to the forefront. I'll guide you through the intricacies of setting introductory prices, navigating the minefield of buy box retention, and leveraging tools like Helium 10 to keep a finger on the pulse of your sales trajectory. This is an essential discussion for any seller aiming to crack the code of maintaining those coveted page one rankings in Amazon's ever-evolving marketplace. As we continue, you'll discover the fine art of pricing strategy and the critical role it plays in the aftermath of a product launch. Sharing his personal experience, Bradley reveals how calculated PPC maneuvers, without the reliance on top of search modifiers, propelled this product to the top, only for an unforeseen buy box loss to threaten everything. We'll also discuss the Maldives honeymoon method, a savvy technique to capitalize on Amazon's honeymoon period, and offer advice on how to regain your Buy Box and rankings with swift pricing adjustments. Whether you're a seasoned seller or just starting out, this conversation is packed with insights on optimizing your Amazon journey. In episode 550 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses: 00:00 - Amazon Product Launch Strategy Changes 00:57 - Amazon Product Launch Strategy Insights 07:29 - Amazon Buy Box Pricing Strategy 09:27 - Amazon Honeymoon Method Success 21:00 - Optimizing Amazon Product Launch Strategies 27:42 - Safe Price for Buy Box Competition 29:54 - Tracking Amazon Variant Sales With Cerebro Transcript Bradley Sutton: There's something new that Amazon has been testing that could completely change how we do product launches, and I'm going to tell you exactly how I got to page one in my recent product launch but then lost it instantly because of this change. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask Me Anything, where we go and answer any and all of your Helium 10 questions, or even some general Amazon questions as well, and we usually go into a certain topic at first. Now, this time I didn't mention that I was going to go into a certain topic, but I want to show you guys something that could be happening when we're talking about Amazon product launches. That I think is very important. Bradley Sutton: I wanted to show you what happened with my recent product launch testing that I did, and this is going to be interesting because it could impact how we launch products, just as a kind of like a recap. What kind of launch strategy do I use and have I been showing other people? Well, it's mainly has to do with PPC. All right, so I'm like hey, you have a product that has no reviews at the beginning. Well, you need to convince people that they're going to buy your product if they see it at the top of search in PPC, and so my strategy has always been, you know, since Amazon turned off the search find, buy that people want, you know you should try and do or two-step URLs is I would create a listing and then I decide at what price point do people or are people going to buy my product even though it has no reviews, or only one or two reviews where they're just like you know what? I have never heard of this brand. I see other products on this page. I have a couple hundred reviews, but dang, at this price point, I've got to go ahead and buy this other product, even though I've never heard of it. Bradley Sutton: And so for some bath mats that I was selling for me, that price point was $9.99. All right, my list price is going to be $29 and my target price. I was like, hey, I want to start selling this around $24, if I can, right. And then so I was like you know what? At $9.95, I think, or $9.87, whatever I picked, I think that people are going to be like, well, this is a killer deal, I'm going to go ahead and buy it. And so what I've always taught is all right, well, you can either do a big coupon to get to that $9.95 price, like maybe a 50% off coupon if the price was like $19, right. Or the other thing is, do a sale price, because if I were to just change the regular price of the product and then try to raise it up, you guys know what would happen, right, the buy box would disappear after a certain point because Amazon would think that you're price gouging. So the way to get around that is using sale prices only, and the other thing that I was doing was trying to get the strike through pricing and in the past it would work like 80% of the time, where as long as I got one order at the regular price, the list price, then I did a sale price. I would usually like, again, 80% of the time I would get a, a strikethrough price on that list price. Bradley Sutton: So the first thing that I did for this launch, for this bat shaped bath mat say that five times fast was I created it at $9.97, like I said, and I did a sale price. All right, let me actually show you the listing. You guys can see this yourself. So if you type in bat bath mat, you'll probably see it. All right. So originally I put the price the first day I got some sales or I got one sale at the $29.97. You guys see right here, $29.97. You could see right down here. I actually had a sale on February 12th, all right, and then immediately I made a sale price of $9.97 and started getting sales. All right, let me let's actually look at the orders. By the way, maybe you guys didn't know you could do that. You could do it in Helium 10 here, where you look at your orders day by day and I also did the same thing for I tried some Tesla scenes for coffin shelves. So you see, February 22nd, I still have the price at $12.97. So I was like going up in price, but I want to find the first day that I actually had orders here. Here we go. You can see, February 19th. I was selling this for $9.97. Exactly like I said, but I know I got one at a higher price. Let's see if Helium 10 is going to show it for me. There's still $9.97 there. Hold on, what date are we on here? Let's see still 1697 for the coffin shelf. Now I'm at February 14th $9.97. Where was it? February? There it is. Look at that right there. Boom. Thank you, Helium 10 for showing me this right here. February. What is this date? This right here, February, what is this date? Uh, February 14th. I actually got sales at $29.97, but I did not get that strike through pricing. Now, immediately after I got that, look at that same day, I lowered the price as a sale price for $9.97. And, as you can see here, I was selling products left and right. Bradley Sutton: I did a PPC campaign. All right, I made a special launch campaign inside of Atomic. Where it was, it was specifically to rank for my main keywords and I was getting the orders. I'll show you the actual campaign that I made. Like I started from day one with this special launch campaign where I was targeting top of search, not using the bid algorithm, not using the top of search modifier, but I was just targeting in general the top of search, and let me show you what happened on the keyword. So, like, everything was a success. Like you know, I've launched hundreds of products and it's always I always have success, but it was always the same business as usual. Uh, let me show you the keyword rank so you guys could see how it was going. Let me show you like bat bath mat was one of the main ones, and let's look at my rank history here. I'm going to explain what happened here, but look at this, all right. So right there, remember I launched a product like February 12th, February 13th, I had those orders. See where I was ranking for bat bath mat right away because of my the Title Density on this keyword is low. Without even doing anything. Before I even got that first order, look, I was at position 126, 128, right. And then what I did was I started my PPC campaign on that day. Let me show you where that's at. What I did was I started my PPC campaign on that day. Bradley Sutton: All right. So I started my PPC. Remember? I got that first order on February 4th. Well, look at that. Why did I get that order? Look at this. On February 14th, I should say look at that. My position was number one, all right. So I was first. I was and this is why I don't use top of search modifiers. I could see from Helium 10 that every single hour almost, I was at the top of search on February 14th and 15th, all right. So now let me go into my Adtomic and see if I can find my original campaign that I did. So here's the exact campaign that I made in Adtomic and I don't think I'm running almost any of these anymore. I had a $40 a day. I had a $40 a day budget. And then the keywords that I was targeting are right here Bat bath mat, gothic bathroom rug, bat rug, bat bathroom rug. You see I just had these are like my main keywords and I did a high bid because I was trying to be top of search. And I didn't have to guess if I was going to be at top of search because I could see that in keyword tracker and even here in Adtomic under the search terms, it's showing me my keyword ranks right here. See, it's showing me my organic rank and my sponsored rank right here in Adtomic. And so, again, everything was business as usual. I started getting sales. Let's go back to my sales here. These are all organic. Organic in the sense that you know, I wasn't paying people to order my product or anything. These were just people seeing it in sponsored results. Look at this February 15th, I got one order, two orders. Let's keep going here. February 16th, I had two, three more or four organic orders, still at $9.97 price point. The February 17th, another two, three orders. So my PPC campaigns were working. How fast was I able to rank because of these one, two, three, four orders? Well, look here Bat bath mat in Helium 10 keyword tracker. Remember I was at position 125. We'll take a look here Within just two days, within one day, the very first day I got orders, I already jumped up to page one. Bradley Sutton: That's the beauty about the Maldives Honeymoon method, guys, and the honeymoon period on Amazon. You can just do ridiculous things, especially with lower search volume keywords like this. Page one, position 23, from day one of my first sale and then towards the next day, February 15th, page one, position 11, I jumped up after a few more orders. Look at this. February 16th, two days after I got my first order, I'm at page one, position four. And then shortly thereafter I am at the very top of the search right here, page one, position two, three, four, consistently. All right. So everything was great. I'm like, boom, this is so good. And you look at my orders, they started picking up and so, because they were picking up, I started raising the price. Let me see if I can see what day I raised the price I still had on the 19th I was still at $10. Let's take a look here. You guys can see. Still on the 20th I was at $10. When did I raise the price here? And then I started raising, I think to $10.97, first of all and that was on February, let's see or $12.97. I jumped up at $12.97, all right, on February. When was this? February 22nd, and I was still selling really well, I still didn't have any reviews. Bradley Sutton: So I wanted to keep that price low. But I started bringing that price gradually up and you can see that I did that actually here on the BSR graph, here on Helium 10. You can see that on oh there, it is right there. February 22nd I raised the price to $12.97. On February 28th I raised it to $14.97 because I'm like, hey, sales are still piling in, I don't need to keep that really low price point because I already got to page one for my main keywords. Alright, almost all my main keywords okay. Um, $14.97. I went to $15.97, $17.97. Uh, I did on March. What is this March 1st? But now all of a sudden take a look here, what happened? Where my BSR goes way down, all right here. Uh, at this point my BSR and sales went to almost zero. And look what happened in Keyword Tracker guys, all right, bat bath map, my main keyword, all of my main keywords on March 5th I lost the buy box. That's basically what happened, guys. All right, I lost the buy box. Now it dropped me to position 32. Look at this. It went from position 1 to 32 consistently for almost two weeks. I was doing it. Do you see here, guys, every single one of my keywords dropped to position 32. This is what we call the page 32 or position 32 glitch. But it's not really a glitch. This is like something Amazon has programmed in, where I lost the buy box. Now, why did I lose the buy box? This never happened before. Bradley Sutton: Basically, it seems like I mean, at least it could be a test. But I literally did this on four different product launches all at the same time, and the same exact thing happened, where Amazon, even though I was using a sale price, is now kind of like considering the sale price, the regular price, and then so if you raise the price too much, you are not going to get the buy box back. All right, because Amazon thinks that you are price gouging. And I was like this is just flabbergasting me. What is going on? So I even went to azrank.com and I was like, hey, I need to have 10 orders, buy 10 orders at this $24.97 price, which is my regular price to send Amazon signals. I was just doing a test. I'm not trying to break Amazon terms of service or anything. It wasn't like search, find, buy or anything like that. But I said AZRank, please have 10 people buy it. And the cool thing about using AZRank is they give you a whole bunch of like customer information on your product. You know, like they say, hey, how's the packaging and how's the search experience and what are the other products on the page that they're clicking on? So it's not just a matter of trying to get quote, unquote, fake orders or anything like that. No, there's a reason. You get customer intelligence from AZRank. But for this particular reason or for this particular case, all I wanted to do was ask, or was try and see, what do I have to do to get the buy box back? And here's the thing 10 orders at 24, it wasn't enough. Bradley Sutton: So it seems like Amazon has this rolling history now of price where they're going to suppress your buy box if they feel that you're price gouging. It's not like there's another listing somewhere else on Amazon or on another website that was at a certain price. No, so what I've been doing, little by little, I had to find out what price point I could get the buy box back, and that price point was at first, $17.97. All right, so I had to get the. I got the buy box back right here at $17.97. And then I'm like, okay, let me get some orders at $17.97. I did, and then I was like, all right, things are going good, let's go to $18.27. All right, so now I've been raising the price little by little, kind of like if you had to raise your regular price, and now I'm all the way at $20.97. I don't know why Amazon price history is saying is saying $27.97, but $20 and 97 cents, what is it, or no, $20.07.? And I still have, as you can see here, buy box. Even Amazon is throwing a coupon on here. Now I'm still getting sales, but now this means that I've been losing money for a little bit more time because, remember, my target price is $24.97. So what is my next thing that I am going to test here? Well, basically, if…
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