If you’ve been selling on Amazon for any amount of time, you have probably felt like you’re constantly reacting — feeling like you don’t have control over your business on marketplaces and can’t be proactive with so much outside of your control.
Brands often confuse visibility (knowing what’s happening) with control (being able to change what’s happening). The reality is that there are certain things you can control, and certain things you can’t. Knowing the difference will allow you to actually move the needle where it matters.
You can’t be proactive unless you have an understanding of where things are in your business. Here’s four simple steps to help you stop reacting and start planning.
Step 1: Establish Visibility
The first step in having a handle on your business so you can stop reacting is to establish clear visibility into the areas of your business that matter. You need to have a clear picture of all aspects of your business so you can make a plan to improve certain areas, rather than knee-jerk reacting.
Kapoq helps to eliminate your lack of visibility by bringing the core data you need to your fingertips:
- Sales data across all regions and channels you sell on
- Ads data for all regions and channels
- Profitability data
- Inventory planning data
- Promotions data
- Returns
- Customer lifetime value
Step 2: Understand What Can Be Influenced
After you have a clear picture of all data for all areas of your business, you can then start to understand what facets can be influenced by your decisions.
For example, your advertising strategy can be adjusted to lower your ACoS — you can develop new creative with Amazon’s Creative Agent, refine your audiences, and set new budgets. Making incremental changes to your ads strategy can improve your return on ad spend, increase your conversion rate, or improve your placement on the SERP.
Step 3: Understand What Can’t Be Influenced
This next step might seem counterintuitive, because it doesn’t really require any action from you. But it’s important nonetheless! You need to understand (and accept) what parts of your business can’t be influenced directly. Things like your cost per click and return rates are outside of your control and won’t change with any action from you.
Now, that’s not to say that you can’t indirectly influence some of these metrics by making changes to various aspects of your business! For example, you can attempt to reduce your return rate by looking at common reasons for returns. If a common reason is “inaccurate product description,” you could potentially reduce your return rate by ensuring all images, descriptions, and A+ content are accurate to the product.
Step 4: Plan Instead of React
Once you have a deep understanding of your data, and what can and can’t be influenced by you, you can truly start to become more proactive instead of reactive. If you are only knee-jerk reacting, you’re never able to actually strategize and see what’s working and what’s not; but when you plan, you have a much clearer picture of your business and what’s actually moving the needle.
Rather than impulse reacting to your sales numbers each month, you can craft a strategic plan to actually make a difference in your P&L on Amazon. By sticking to that plan, and only making small alterations as needed, you can actually see what’s working over time.
Conclusion
Understanding what can and can’t be influenced by you in your Amazon business is crucial for you to effectively grow your brand. By planning instead of impulse reacting, you’re allowing your strategy to actually work, rather than changing tactics each month.
If you need a software to show you every aspect of your marketplace business, sign up for a free demo of Kapoq today!
