3 Strategies to Achieve Marketplace Control on Amazon
Amazon is a competitive marketplace where brands are constantly fighting to win the buy box and the sale, sometimes not realizing they are losing control on the marketplace along the way. Control on Amazon is when a manufacturer’s brand image is being represented with integrity and its products are being sold through authorized seller(s) at authorized pricing. Pattern’s ecommerce acceleration platform of proprietary technology and resources helps brands gain control on Amazon.
Do you have marketplace control? Marketplace control is the combination of brand, listing, and distribution control.
Three Strategies to Achieve Control on Amazon
- Brand control
- Listing control
- Distribution control
Let’s dive into each of these strategies.
Here are three areas to check to make sure you have marketplace control:
Strategy One: Brand Control
Four tactics to achieve brand control.
First, a you must audit who is selling your products on Amazon. And, more specifically, identify the sellers causing issues. It showcases a lack of brand control when you see the price sold differently, and, even worse, prices going down. To start, you really have to have a clean channel or know where to clean up your channel. You can partner with Pattern to do this. Pattern uses proprietary technology to identify rouge sellers and partners with a law firm for takedowns following legal law principles. Once you have started to clean up your channel you can move to the next step–MAP enforcement.
MAP enforcement is an essential way to stay in control and ensure your brand is protected on Amazon. The sooner you get your MAP compliance in place, the easier it will be to maintain it long term.
Next, omnichannel pricing parity is important to maintain pricing across all channels. Pattern helps brands develop and execute a pricing strategy for marketplaces, like Amazon, and all retail channels, that allows you to stay out of the Death Spiral and maintain profitability.
Another way to maintain brand control is ensuring all authorized sellers adhere to a national promotional calendar. By setting promotional cadence and strategic discounts, you make sure your consumers have the best brand experience and you maintain their loyalty to maximize their lifetime value.
Strategy Two: Listing Control
Three key tactics to achieve listing control.
First, on each listing, it is important for a brand to provide authorized sellers brand-approved and consistent images. This also helps to identify unauthorized sellers who could repurpose and edit your images on your listings, which misrepresents your product and brand and creates customer confusion. Shoppers are left asking the question, “What am I buying?” In addition, the product images may differ from the final product Amazon delivers, so consumers suffer a lackluster experience and leave negative reviews–hurting your Amazon seller rank.
Next, compliant copy is essential to listing control. Similar to the effect of poor and inconsistent images, copy is a key component of any product listing that needs to stay within brand guidelines. Without clear and consistent copy, a consumer may misunderstand the product or your brand or both.
A final callout for a brand is to have unified messaging on customer questions/reviews. Customer service is paramount and very transparent online. Without control, rogue sellers will generate and allow negative feedback to pile up, and, due to the algorithm, Amazon will penalize the brand.
Strategy Three: Distribution Control
Three tactics to achieve distribution control.
It is essential to success to get product quality adherence. Amazon’s algorithm awards low prices and knockoffs and past season products are typically what is available at lower prices. You want to make sure you know where your products are shipped and sold so only your product, and not knockoffs, are available on Amazon, to keep your MAP pricing
An up-to-date authorized seller list is key so your brand can identify and enforce takedowns of unauthorized sellers. The process is exhaustive and time consuming to do alone, and Pattern’s specialized software allows us to track authorized and unauthorized sellers, which means Pattern helps you identify leaky spots in your distribution and bad sellers. To remove unauthorized sellers, Pattern also partners with an eControl firm like Vorys, because they have the legal expertise to enforce the takedowns, and without that control you will lose the Buy Box on Amazon.
Aligned channels incentives will help prevent price erosion. By keeping everyone at MAP pricing, they will not undercut your pricing to win the sale–both online and in brick and mortar–therefore you can keep your logistics and fulfillment streamlined and operating to full potential.
Why Pattern?
If you are feeling the pain about being out of control on Amazon and would like to discuss any of the strategies above, feel free to click the link below and we can schedule a meeting to learn more about your brand. We help brands worldwide execute these strategies and get control back on Amazon.
More Resources
8 Signs Your Brand is Out of Control on Amazon—CEO Cheat Sheet
Download 1-Pager
How LifeSeasons Took Back 91% of the Buy Box
Download 1-Page Case StudyExplore Our Ecommerce Resource Library
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Aug 10, 2022
Pattern Increases American Pet Brand Tmall Sales by 500%
American Pet Brand, one of the largest manufacturers of electronic pet training products in the U.S., had entered into the China market and, after a few years, established an impressive level of brand awareness in the country. Content with their level of success in China, the brand was cruising on Tmall without much support.
However, without investing in their brand growth and maintaining a competitive edge with advertising on Tmall, sales slowed down and their social media engagement with customers became idle. The brand was left trying to figure out how to regain its momentum.
After a year of flailing, American Pet Brand realized they could not do it alone and partnered with Pattern to redirect its trajectory on Tmall. Pattern, an ecommerce accelerator, provided the global expertise and resources the brand needed to regain control and succeed on Tmall.
Pattern Developed and Executed a Brand Creative Strategy
Building from a strong brand foundation in one of the world’s largest ecommerce markets, Pattern’s experts:
1. Focused on Brand Image across Advertising and Marketing
Pattern’s China experts worked with the brand to reactivate the existing customer base and attract new customers through a series of marketing activities. Using proprietary technology and data-driven insights, Pattern developed and launched advertising campaigns to drive both traffic and conversion to its listings.
Additionally, the brand launched influencer marketing campaigns that heavily revolved around Key Opinion Leader (KOL) and Key Opinion Consumer (KOC) campaigns. With the extra validation from key voices in the market, increased the reach of and American Pet Brand profile.
2. Updated Product Listings to Optimize Tmall Presence for All Products
Pattern experts helped the brand optimize the Tmall store set up, design, and customer service support. The increase of customer support is essential to gain a competitive edge on Tmall. Primarily because positive customer experiences improve a brand’s Detailed Seller Rank (DSR), and is crucial if you want to ensure that one-time purchasers of your brand are converted into repeat purchasers. Together, these improvements provided for a global increase in customer experience satisfaction.
3. Re-established Seller Control with a New Reseller Cooperation Arrangement, including Marketing Terms
Pattern’s team worked with the brand to set and execute a new reseller cooperation arrangement that invited resellers to purchase through the official channel with better control of pricing, discount, content, and marketing messages.
Creative Refresh Leads to 500% Sales Growth on Tmall
Together with Pattern’s China experts, American Pet Brand was able to achieve incredible results:
500% sales growth in only 3 months
Successfully reactivated the customer base and existing resellers with effective, consistent, and focused marketing campaigns
Increased brand awareness from social marketing activities, which also increased engagement
Pattern Drives Revenue on Tmall and Beyond
Working together with the American Pet Brand team, Pattern revived the brand and redirected its sales trajectory on Tmall. The quick sales success showcases that by focusing an ecommerce strategy on key brand and advertising components that drive traffic and conversion, a brand will grow its profitability on global marketplaces.
Looking to succeed on Tmall and beyond? Contact Us.
Aug 9, 2022
The Ecommerce Equation: 4 Levers CEOs Use to Drive Marketplace Revenue
Developing your ecommerce strategy for digital marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Tmall, and Alibaba gets complicated fast—there’s a lot to think about, including marketplace SEO, product photography, advertising tactics, disjointed sellers, distribution logistics, managing ratings and reviews, and more. It can be overwhelming for brands, especially those with small teams, to know which behaviors to optimize for for the highest gains in profitability.
The good news? Revenue performance all comes down to data. Pattern was built on a data science approach to ecommerce success. We find the patterns that drive profitability, then apply them to boost our brand partners’ revenue on ecommerce channels.
And a key pattern we follow for all brands on digital marketplaces is the ecommerce equation: revenue = traffic x conversions x price x availability. As brands zero in on these four pieces of the equation, they can simplify and focus their efforts to reach truly profitable ecommerce growth.
1. Drive Traffic to Products
The first part of the equation is traffic—you need to get people to see your listings if you want to generate sales. There are two ways to drive traffic to your products: through organic search and paid search. Striking the right balance between both for your brands is crucial to driving enough of the right traffic to your products, ultimately increasing your ecommerce revenue.
Knowing this, Pattern provides the resources and technology needed to drive traffic to your product listings. Our brand management team, advertising specialists, and SEO technicians work in harmony to create a unified strategy to boost your brand’s organic profile and balance that with a paid advertising approach that works for your brand and listings.
Using this method, we took Feetures socks from ranking on longer-tail terms like “no show athletic socks black” to driving traffic on parent keywords like “no show socks.”
2. Create Content that Converts
Getting customers to your product listing is only half the battle. Once on your listing, you need customers to convert. Conversion is key to the ecommerce equation because it leads to real product purchases and revenue. Traffic without conversion leads to more time and ad spend without the ROI.
Optimizing your images, product description, bulleted details, customer reviews, and buy box performance is key to successful conversion. If you’re going to spend time and effort driving traffic, you should make sure customers can easily and clearly find what they’re looking for when they arrive at your listing.
While your imagery and descriptions are important, you also need to build customer trust to drive conversions. Studies show that your customer service efforts matter too—84% of people trust online reviews as much as friends, making strong reviews an important factor of conversion on marketplaces.
The good news is as you provide a quality product and a great marketplace experience, you’ll build brand equity, increasing your customer loyalty. Then, as your reputation, reviews, and traffic grow positively, marketplace algorithms will recognize your popularity and improve your rank accordingly. Rank drives both traffic and conversions, helping you to optimize your performance further. As your brand equity grows, your conversions will continue to grow with it.
3. Control Your Price
While setting a strategic price is an important step in your ecommerce strategy, it takes more than that to truly control your price on marketplaces.
Without proper control and with wide distribution, your product could end up in the hands of disjointed sellers who lower your marketplace price to sell their inventory and make quick profits. With one seller lowering price online, other authorized sellers and retail partners are forced to lower their price to compete, creating price erosion and sending your brand down the profitability death spiral.
This Death Spiral damages brand equity, hurts conversions, and can lead to Buy Box Suppression on Amazon, hindering traffic as well. And as prices get lower and lower, your profit margin withers away, decreasing your overall revenue.
Using our data-driven insights and Pattern’s eControl partner Vorys, we help brands implement narrow distribution, identify and take-down unauthorized sellers, eliminate price erosion, and control their price online. Focusing on price control, Pattern helped LifeSeasons, a premium supplement company, take back 91% control of the Buy Box on Amazon.
Download the LifeSeasons 1-Page Case Study Here
4. Optimize Your Product Availability
The last piece of the ecommerce equation is availability. It makes sense to think of availability as a contributing factor in conversion, but we felt that it’s important enough to call out on its own—you can fully optimize your traffic, conversion, and price, but without availability, you can’t grow revenue for your brand.
A lack of availability leads to stock outs, losing conversions to competitors, losing possession of the buy box, poor customer reviews, a decrease in traffic…the list goes on. The best-performing brands on ecommerce digital marketplaces optimize their availability with high-end technology, optimize their cash on hand, and inventory time on hand to keep the ecommerce equation powered and optimized in their favor.
How Pattern Drives Revenue Using the Ecommerce Equation
Pattern is committed to solving the ecommerce equation. We partner with brands to provide the expertise, resources, and technology needed to drive traffic, create content that converts, protect price, maintain availability, and ultimately accelerate ecommerce revenue and profitable growth.
Interested in improving the results of your ecommerce equation? Schedule a call.
