Amazon agencies are cropping up, should you hire one?
Amazon was built for folks that wanted to sell their own products. Everything about Amazon – to an extent – has been created with small business owners who want to reach a larger audience in mind. Unfortunately for those small business owners, or even large companies looking to sell on Amazon, the ecommerce platform has become an ungainly beast that can change in moments. Hiring an agency that specializes in Amazon, and all that means, might be the only way to tap into and control this sales channel. We are going to look into a few different reasons when and why it might be a good idea for your company to hire an agency.
You simply don’t have time to effectively care for your Amazon store
Your amazon store is not simply another retail outlet and Amazon is not simply another distributor of your products. When you decide to use Amazon to sell your products, you are effectively signing up to accept and abide by any changes that they want to make with or without warning. This means that you have to keep your head to the ground as far as Amazon policy changes are concerned and that means daily reading. If you don’t have time to stay abreast of Amazon on a daily, or even weekly basis, you should think about hiring an agency to help you.
Amazon does give a heads up of when they will make large scale changes, or monetary changes most of the time. However, as the platform evolves, they may not take the time to alert every seller of every change; they may alert Seller Central sellers through the dashboard, or they may send an email, or they may inform folks via press release. Either way, it takes knowing and consistently reading all of these outlets to simply know what Amazon is doing or if they are rolling out changes that might affect your business.
Product optimization has plenty of nuances
Much like staying abreast of the information and policy changes from Amazon, knowing the ins and outs of Amazon SEO, product listings, product listing optimization, and product listing best practices is a lot of work. With a large enough catalog, that could be the work of one single person. If you want to throw in something like Enhanced Brand Content, lifestyle images, product videos, and more then you might be talking about the work of a graphic designer, video editor and producer, and copywriter. Doing all of that, and doing it well, might be out of your reach.
Ad optimization
Do you have PPC or digital advertising experience? If not, there are plenty of webinars and resources, but again, that takes time and you may not be willing to gamble with your own money while you experiment with running ads for your products. Luckily, there are experts out there than know the ins and outs of Amazon Sponsored Products, Headline Ads, and more. Again, it might be the work of one person depending on your ads, the seasonality of your products, and your desire to scale bids up and down depending on a ton of factors.
You are just starting your Amazon store
With one or two products, building out your Amazon store might not be the most daunting task. Again, if you are crunched for time, or you simply don’t have the knowledge of Amazon, hiring an agency to help you might be your best bet to open up this sales channel. Amazon has made store set up relatively easy, to some extent, but it can be a time consuming and frustrating process. Did you know that if you do not have the exact white background on all of your product photos that Amazon requires, they were not allow you to use those photos? Are you familiar with what keywords to use in the back end of your product listings? Do you have the time to talk to Amazon service folks regarding Brand Registry?
Basically there are a ton of hoops to jump through and if you aren’t familiar, or you don’t have the time, then you should consider hiring an agency to help you navigate the Amazon waters.