Canada, the home of hockey, maple syrup, and moose, right? Well, yes, but that’s not all. Businesses shouldn’t dismiss Canada so easily for its stereotypical offerings, and instead dig a little deeper in the ecommerce market.
Pattern has been a marketplace seller in Canada for over 5 years now, and we’ve seen the corner on the market for success. Canada is often the first market that astute U.S.-based brands look to after they’ve established themselves domestically. But what is it that makes Canada a great opportunity for brands? Well to start, Canada has the following:
While there is certainly a great opportunity for growth in crossing that border north of us, as with any international expansion, there are regulations that must be met and duties and taxes that must be paid. As an expert Canadian marketplace seller, we provide our analysis here of why we recommend brands expand to Canada and how we help brands get there.
The ecommerce site competitive landscape in Canada is somewhat similar to the way we see it in the U.S. currently: Amazon CA is largely dominant over all other major players, but Walmart Canada comes in as the second largest. Other familiar faces make up the top 10 ecommerce sites in Canada, including eBay, Newegg, Best Buy, and Home Depot.
Amazon Canada is the #1 ecommerce marketplace in the country, generating nearly $7.5 billion USD in net sales in 2020. Of those billions of dollars in sales, the top categories for Amazon Canada shoppers are:
Deciding which products to list in Amazon Canada and which to promote is more complex than just using the same strategy you utilize in the U.S.. Pattern’s marketplace experts help brands determine things like which products can be sold, non-tariff barriers like product labeling and regulatory compliance, and expected taxes and tariffs of this new market.
Pattern recently helped a vitamin and supplements partner get the data they needed for a successful, compliant launch on Amazon CA, resulting in 55% brand growth year over year. And that’s not the only brand we’ve helped launch.
Fulfillment in Canada is best managed using FBA, similar to what is done in the U.S. market. Pattern’s brand partners send their product directly to our Toronto warehouse where we prep them for shipment into FBA, and send them off on their behalf. For products not eligible for FBA, we set those products up in our warehouse and ship them directly to customers, handling fulfillment and logistics across borders.
Walmart Canada is the second largest ecommerce marketplace in Canada but serves as an excellent expansion opportunity for brands looking to sell there. In 2020 Walmart Canada brought in $3.1 billion USD in ecommerce revenue. Additionally, the company is investing $110m in store renovations to enhance the omnichannel experience, expanding their product assortment, and piloting 10 hybrid locations with fulfillment space within stores.
For brands with products compliant with Canadian labeling and other regulations, products are shipped directly to the customer from a warehouse. While the best customer experience is created by having products in-country before shipping them to the customer, Walmart is running a program called Ship With Walmart. Similar to Amazon’s NARF program, sellers based in the U.S. can make their products available on Walmart Canada and ship them cross-border. However, buyers and sellers should be aware that many products will have additional tariffs and taxes on top of what the customer purchases, and shipping will be 2-8 days.
Many of Pattern’s brands find great success as they expand to Canada, with most brands seeing revenue around 2-5% of their U.S. Amazon revenue. Success in the Canadian market, however, is directly correlated to how aggressive of a strategy the brand pursues with advertising, catalog breadth, and maintaining their supply chain. Some of the brands taking Canada the most seriously are seeing revenue north of 10% of what they are making on Amazon in the U.S., not bad numbers to see.
Ready to expand into Canada or explore other new market opportunities? Get in touch with Pattern’s marketplace experts and learn the global potential of your brand.
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For far too long, brands have lacked a data-driven methodology to gauge the health of their ecommerce presence relative to their competitors. As the top ecommerce accelerator, Pattern knew its proprietary technology and data could solve this for brands, so we leveraged our AI, rich Amazon seller information, and millions of cross-category data-driven insights to provide all brands with the information they need to succeed on Amazon and beyond.
The result—the Amazon Revenue Scorecard. The scorecard provides a powerful way for leaders to simply and transparently assess how their ecommerce strategies are performing relative to their competition and where they can optimize to maximize their brand’s ecommerce revenue potential.
The Amazon Revenue Scorecard was developed by Pattern’s data scientists to holistically measure the ecommerce performance of a brand’s top products across three key drivers—traffic, conversion, and price—and 18 dimensions that impact a brand’s ecommerce revenue growth. The result is a score from 1-10 that helps brands in an ever-increasing array of industries measure their performance relative to their competitors. Strategically, an Amazon Revenue Scorecard is a rating index that provides real-time data to highlight missed revenue growth opportunities.
An Amazon Revenue Scorecard analyzes your top 25 ASINs to identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in revenue growth potential on ecommerce marketplaces. With a rank score of 1-10 in each revenue performance metric, it helps you understand the full picture—identify problem areas quickly and lean in on strengths. The higher the score, the more revenue you’ll generate on an ecommerce marketplace.
The key levers in the score are traffic, conversion, and price, which are the key variables in the ecommerce equation for all brands. As the top ecommerce accelerator, Pattern knows that the ecommerce equation (traffic x conversion x availability x price = revenue) is essential for brands to succeed on ecommerce. Therefore, it is imperative that brands continue to monitor the health of each input in order to have long term success.
Here we breakdown the three key drivers of a brand’s scorecard:
Traffic is the first strategic lever to drive revenue on marketplaces. Without generating more ecommerce traffic to your listings, you don’t have a hope of increasing marketplace revenue. A traffic score breaks down and rates your ecommerce traffic in the following key areas:
Paid Traffic — the effectiveness of a brand’s advertising efforts, including keyword strategy, ad programs, and ad tactics
Organic Traffic — how well a brand is capturing organic traffic within its category
Marketplace Coverage — how many global marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc.) a brand’s products are being sold in
Conversion is the second strategic lever to drive revenue on marketplaces. Once potential buyers interact with your product, they have to be compelled to convert on the listing. The conversion score breaks down and rates your marketplace conversion into five key areas:
Listing Titles, Bullets, and Description — the degree to which a brand is utilizing best practices for titles, bullet points, and descriptions
Listing Images and Videos — how well a brand is using high-quality and optimized multimedia to convey product features and benefits
Content — how well a brand is conveying its voice and branding across the marketplace
Ratings & Reviews — how well a brand’s products are being accepted by marketplace shoppers according to ratings and reviews
Competitiveness — the degree to which a brand effectively utilizes promotional elements on its product pages
Pricing is the third strategic lever to drive revenue on marketplaces. Without consistent pricing across marketplaces and sellers, your profits will steadily erode and you’ll have a hard time winning the Buy Box on Amazon and other marketplaces. The price score breaks down and rates your ecommerce price into four key areas:
Channel Conflict — the likelihood that an online marketplace will undercut a brand’s brick and mortar retail partners on other platforms and channels
Number of Sellers— the number of unique entities selling a brand’s products on a given marketplace
Product Compliance — a measure of the stability of the price of a brand’s products on a given marketplace
Cross-Channel Consistency — an assessment of the price consistency of a brand’s products across ecommerce marketplaces and D2C websites
Don’t leave your share of the global ecommerce market to chance—analyze ASIN and competitor performance now.
The Amazon Revenue Scorecard has been an integral and exclusive part of Pattern’s offering to its partners and is now available for all brands to assess their success on ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon. The standard is a measurement of the key drivers that impact revenue growth and it matters to brands since you need to see where your missed opportunities are and where your competition is outranking you.
Pattern can break down your brand’s revenue score on Amazon so you can command the maximum share of the exploding $6 trillion ecommerce market.
Executives interested in receiving your brand’s Scorecard can do so here.
Surprised by your score? Contact Pattern today and we will dive into the data.
If you’re looking to improve your performance on Amazon, honing in on your ad strategy is one of the best ways to start getting your products in front of more eyes and increasing sales. Because they’re disguised as traditional products within search, Sponsored Product ads should be the cornerstone of your Amazon ad strategy. They’re able to capture consumers’ eyes in more organic ways to drive traffic, and, ultimately, revenue growth, for your brand on Amazon.
Traffic is a key component of Pattern’s ecommerce equation: revenue: traffic x conversion x price x availability. When you can optimize your strategy to get more of the right traffic to your listings, you’ll be able to spend on initiatives like ad strategies in a smarter way to drive better product performance on Amazon.
Here’s why Sponsored Ads, in particular, are a great move for any brand selling on Amazon:
Many brands hesitate to invest in Amazon ads like Sponsored Products, preferring to increase product rank organically instead of worrying about paying a long-term cost. We know, from our vast experience accelerating brands on the platform, that Amazon wants to promote and boost high performers. So, to get more traffic, drive revenue, and spend your ad dollars in a smart way, you’ll need to “show” Amazon’s algorithm that your product is worth promoting in the first place.
Pattern’s ad strategy takes a particularly deliberate approach to tracking and feeding this virtuous cycle. Your listings’ success in conquesting each keyword leads to more growth, lower costs, and better listing rank over time—as your Sponsored Products get higher traffic and perform better over time, you’ll start rising in rank over your competitors and be able to reduce your overall spend on ad placements. As your brand continues to win conquests over your competitors, you’ll get even more traffic, and the cycle continues.
When executed correctly, Sponsored Ads on Amazon are one of the smartest and most cost-effective ways to drive traffic to your product listings. For a snapshot of the value, here’s how Amazon ads compare to Google:
Amazon ads return an average of 10% conversion, as opposed to Google ads, which convert at 3.75%
54% of product searches happen on Amazon now, rather than Google.
The cost-per-click (CPC) is significantly lower for Amazon ads—$0.96, as opposed to $2.69 for Google’s display ads.
What this tells us is that spending money advertising on Amazon, rather than on Google or other channels, has a twofold benefit: products are more likely to get in front of consumers who are in the mindset to buy, and you’re able to save on your overall ad costs by getting more bang for your buck with every click.
Sponsored products are taking up more and more real estate on Amazon’s search results. You can see as many as four sponsored listings before the top organic results for any given search, giving brands without an ad strategy a significant disadvantage in winning consumer attention.
Our teams have learned that 80% of sales go to listings with the highest placement on search, and it’s a key aspect of our Sponsored Products strategy for brands. Advertising the right amount on top of search placements is a balancing act to make sure you're leaning in the right amount to maximize results. If your organic listings aren’t already primed and fully optimized for top keywords your consumers are searching with, Sponsored Product ads should be at the top of your list for strategies to win their eyes and traffic to your listings.
Because they show up at both the top of search and rest of search, they can get the attention of your best audience—consumers searching for products like yours with the intent to purchase now.
Sponsored Product ads can also appear on the listings of products related to yours—in other words, your competition. As a consumer scrolls through a listing and isn’t finding what they’re looking for, you can be poised in a perfect position to capture their interest and bring them to your listing instead.
This traffic is particularly valuable—besides being ready to buy and actively looking for a product like yours, these consumers have the potential to switch brand loyalty from your competitor to you.
Building an effective Amazon ad strategy can be a daunting task for many brands, but it doesn’t have to be. By partnering with an ecommerce accelerator like Pattern, you can get the full benefit of true Amazon expertise without having to learn and do it alone. We have all the global resources brands need to succeed, including expert teams and proprietary technology. We help you drive the right traffic to your listings, at the right time, to improve your revenue and performance on Amazon.
Find out how Pattern can help you grow your traffic and revenue on Amazon. Schedule a call here.