What to consider when building your Amazon Team
Amazon is the ultimate shopping window for E-commerce customers worldwide. More consumers use Amazon to conduct product research than they do Google, so ensuring your products are presented well is critical for your brand – whether you choose to sell on there or not.
Unfortunately for brands, Amazon does not make trading with it easy. It’s almost completely self-service and very tough to navigate. On top of this, it changes and updates constantly!
Ideally, a brand should have a team of people working on the account who are skilled across multiple workflows, but quite often this is hard for brands to achieve.
Here we’ll outline some of the key roles within an Amazon team.
Commercial Lead / Account Manager
Having someone experienced in this area is very desirable in today’s market (and costly), this person would steer the strategy, report to senior stakeholders within the business, own the forecasting/budgets and delegate key tasks throughout the wider team.
Quite often, brands will provide this role to someone who also looks after other accounts within the business. This strategy sometimes works if the range is very small but will usually lead to the brand under indexing on Amazon due to lack of focus.
Account Support
Fixing issues, uploading new line forms, raising, and chasing cases, uploading new copy, loading images and A+, are just some of the day-to-day tasks involved in operating a successful Amazon business.
Again, many businesses do not have the luxury of this support so a lot of these tasks will often fall on the Account Manager or an admin team who have a much wider remit – usually leading to longer lead times on completing critical tasks
Amazon Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) / Traffic
Private label sellers who have built up 7 figure Amazon brands understand Amazon SEO, and it is why they can compete with household names.
Understanding the keywords that customers are using to find your products in your desired Amazon market is critical. This research should be completed for every product you set up and be geared around high traffic, relevant search terms related to your product. The performance against these should be closely monitored and reviewed on an ongoing basis.
Almost all brands do not have the resource to do this or even have a grasp on how important Amazon SEO is! Brands who understand Amazon SEO, will generally be most visible on Amazon across the most popular keywords in their categories.
Amazon Advertising
Advertising on Amazon is important for many reasons. It helps drive brand awareness and protects your brand from competitors. Allows you to target your competitors directly and supports you in scaling your business through increased branded, category and competitor traffic. In an ideal scenario, your advertising team will work closely with all other areas of your business (especially the SEO team) so they can set targets and prioritise ad spend accordingly.
For most brands, they will attempt this function themselves or outsource it to an agency specialised solely in advertising. The challenges they face here are that an experienced in-house resource is costly, and that specific agency approach is often too detached from the day-to-day operations of the business. See example diagram below (1-Dimensional vs 3-Dimensional)
Conversion Specialist / Asset Creation
A Conversion Specialist would focus on improving the conversion rate for the products within your range, mainly through optimising listing copy, images, video, and A+ content – but also through building and reacting to reviews, A/B testing and answering public customer questions accurately.
They would be responsible for the written and visual content on the detail page and use various data sources and competitor research to determine what a best-in-class listing should look like for each product. This would then be fed back to a graphic designer capable of producing the desired assets.
They will also use data gathered through Advertising and Brand Analytics/Search Query reports to determine the conversion rate for high volume keywords and adjust listings in attempt to improve the performance of focus keywords by benchmarking against other products on Amazon that convert well for the same keywords.
This function is very rare within most in-house Amazon teams. Adjustments to listings are usually made on an ad hoc basis, if at all, and rarely data driven or closely monitored.
Operations
You’ll encounter many operational challenges with Amazon – Chargebacks, short shipments, stranded inventory etc. It’s possible to tackle these issues by ensuring you have sound processes and systems in place, but this won’t always guarantee perfection.
The responsibility of understanding these deductions usually starts with the finance team and filters down to various teams for resolution. Big Brands will often write off large sums of money with Amazon to balance the books instead of tackling them head on.
Having talent within your organisation that understands the process of disputing charges and resolving them is a rare feature for most brands.
Choosing Your Amazon Team Resource
As you manage your Amazon business, you may need some support along the way. Push-Pull can plug their expert Amazon resource into any brand to make them best-in-class
We treat each of our accounts like we do our own company: by providing top-notch service that increases sales. We help clients analyse consumer data and access professional marketing strategies. Contact Push Pull today to learn more.
