The digital landscape has evolved significantly over the last few years, and it can be tricky for e-commerce companies to navigate the changes and stand out from the competition.

In April of 2019, over 6,000 Amazon employees urged the company to release a climate plan and in response, Amazon and Global Optimism announced The Climate Pledge, a commitment to meet the Paris agreement a decade early. The pledge calls on signatories to be net-zero carbon across their businesses by 2040. With over 100,000 fully-electric delivery vehicles and $100 million in reforestation projects around the world, Amazon has stepped up its sustainability initiative, with more progress to come in the future.

Let me set the stage...

Brands, Publishers and Advertisers have been relying on cookies(AKA Browser or Tracking Cookies) to provide relevant messaging, optimize their advertising efforts and track overall customer and prospect browsing behavior roughly since the internet began.

At Amplio Digital our employees are our family and are treated as such. When we opened our doors over six years ago, our CEO, Marshall Hayes, knew that in order to achieve the best results for our clients, it was of the utmost importance that our employees are treated with the highest level of integrity, respect, and equality. While our team has expanded over the past six years, we still maintain these core values and continue to grow thanks to the hard work from our amazing team. 

One of the trickiest things about being an Amazon seller is finding ways to distinguish yourself from your competition – and that’s where having a complete marketing strategy can really make your brand shine.

Online marketplaces provide superior convenience, access to a vast array of products, and the ability to comparison shop with ease. Having been fully embraced by consumers, online marketplaces are growing rapidly worldwide—and are projected to keep growing at an exponential rate.

Amazon has officially surpassed Walmart as the largest retailer on the planet. Now, more than ever, brands are looking for ways to strengthen their presence on Amazon and grow sales fast.

Until recently, the Amazon Search Term Report has only been available for Sponsored Products (SPA) campaigns. This is a valuable report for advertisers on Amazon, and now that it is offered for Sponsored Brands (SBA) campaigns, we can optimize it in the same, efficient way that we already know how to do for SPA campaigns.

Targeting the right keywords in your sponsored ad campaigns is a successful strategy to get shoppers to your product on Amazon. But it’s just as important to avoid keywords that are not relevant to your campaigns. Negative keywords help you achieve more efficient targeting and consequently increase your return on ad investment.

When it comes to selling on Amazon, there are a lot of different roads to success. For example, some brands do really well in brick & mortar and also do well on Amazon simply because they are a well-known brand. Other brands do very well with their digital marketing and have embraced Amazon as part of their online sales channel mix. And then there are others who are born on Amazon and have emerged quickly by designing their entire business around Amazon.

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, has just announced that, for a limited time, it plans to temporarily lower the price of select items on their marketplace site which third party vendors pay a fee to list their products on. Walmart has agreed to continue to pay merchants the same price during this period and subsidize the difference.

The fourth quarter is the biggest and most important time to drive sales on Amazon. With an increase in traffic and buyer intent around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, this is the quarter where sellers make the majority of their annual sales.

Are you a small business selling on Amazon? Are you looking to engage with customers leading into the 2019 Holiday season? You have until October 6th, 2019 to apply for the new Amazon Small Business Awards to share the story behind your brand and get the chance to win a prize package worth up to $80,000.

As a consumer marketer, you know how important Q4 can be to your bottom line. It's a time when consumer buying power is at its highest, and shoppers are likely to spend until they can't spend anymore.

Amazon has created a sleek and simple customer shopping experience by limiting the influence of brands and sellers on their listing layouts. For the most part, this is great because it maintains consistency and quality across the board. Unfortunately, this simplicity also limited brands with more complex stories from fully engaging with their potential customers.

Back to School season generates more retail sales than Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Prime Day, and Superbowl combined. That equates to 80 billion dollars in purchases during this season. Although some companies may be surprised by this data, Back-to-School is more than a lull period before gearing up for the holiday season - it gives brands and incredible selling opportunity for a strong Q3.

Similar to Instagram’s “Verified Accounts” symbol, Amazon has been testing a new “Top Brand” badge for products with established brands to help them stand out from competition. Experts speculate that if this experiment advances beyond a testing phase,  brands that are verified by Amazon and receive the Top Brand badge may also rank first in search.

Amplio Digital has been named one of Inc. 5000's 2019 fastest-growing companies in America. Coming in at number 1236, this is the second year in a row that Amplio has made this list, and the award is an incredible honor for our growing business.

Amazon’s Demand Side Platform was born out of brands expressing a strong desire to sell their products to audiences and potential customers more effectively.

Amazon Prime is a subscription service that gives its 100 million members access to a variety of perks, like Amazon Prime Video streaming, discounts at Whole Foods, and exclusive deals on Amazon Prime Day. The biggest perk, however, is free one or two-day shipping on select products.

Trying to wrap your head around Amazon’s acronyms (ACOS, AMG, AMS, AAP, DSP) can make you feel like you are going mad. But as Amazon advertising is now just as important for product promotion as Facebook and Google, brands need to understand how Amazon advertising works in order to stay competitive.

As more consumers demand organic, convenient food options, your biggest challenge as a natural food brand is determining how to stand out and win on Amazon.

If you’ve seen this recent Amazon commercial play during prime time, you know that half of everything sold through the company comes from small and medium sized businesses.

The internet giant may be threatening industries left and right, but its newest campaign aims to discount one of its longest-standing critiques: that Amazon is bad for small business.

Whether you are planning to work with an Amazon advertising agency or another marketing firm, you'll likely have questions before selecting a new agency. Before moving forward with an agency partnership, you will want to set some expectations for how you would like your partnership to look. To help guide your discussions, here are some of the most frequently asked questions we get from new clients about how to sell on Amazon:

Whether you’re new to selling on Amazon or have been around the block a few times, you know that reviews are important. And they are, but it’s what you do with those reviews and how you learn from them that could really make an impact on your business.

Amazon is the largest revenue engine for eCommerce. Amazon’s market share dwarfs retail giants like Costco, Walmart, and eBay. If you’re winning on Amazon, you can take those efforts and reproduce them in other marketplaces and retailers.

We’ve already referenced using a tool like Google Trends when first starting out with your keyword research for Amazon. Google Keyword Planner is another free Google tool you can set into motion with regards to analyzing your competition’s performance. Plugin the website to your competitor(s) and you’ll be able to see what existing keywords they’re ranking for.

Search Engine Marketing is a bedrock foundation of eCommerce, and it all starts with keyword research. Without optimization around keywords and search intent on Google, a website is prone to fall into a black hole of lacklustre traffic and even more abysmal conversion rates.

As an ecommerce business owner, you may find yourself in one of two situations. Either business is so good that scaling production to meet demand and maintaining sales requires some extra hands. Or, you just can’t seem to meet those revenue goals, no matter which strategy you pursue.

Can you use coupons on Amazon? You may be happy to know that the answer is "yes".

What started as an online bookstore has long since turned into the biggest name in online shopping.

Whether you’re new to Amazon or a seasoned seller, you likely came to the fast realization that surfacing products to potential customers requires much more than a snappy listing description. And for some, the shock and frustration is all too real.

Getting started with selling or advertising on Amazon can be extremely overwhelming. Even if you know ecommerce best practices and a thing or two about paid advertising, you’ll realize that it’s a whole different ball game when it comes to transitioning to the Amazon ecosystem.

Brands of all sizes are grappling with the implications of listening to their customers. Listening to customers (whether B2B or B2C) is the underpinning of the upside that Omnichannel, Customer Acquisition and Demand Generation promise. In all three concepts, customer feedback holds the key. Customer feedback holds the key to unlock a profitable customer acquisition strategy. It carries the insight about what tactics will generate more demand. It delivers the information about how to improve the customer experience.

Why Amazon Product Reviews are Critical to Your Omnichannel Sales Strategy

The answer to this question, in two words: Product Research. How many new products have you purchased recently where you DID NOT do any product research online?

Amazon’s rapid rise to dominance, which now accounts for upwards of $0.43 of every dollar spent on e-Commerce, has resulted in a hyper-competitive selling environment for physical products brands. For an increasing number of product categories, Amazon is a battlefield, with sales from end-consumers as the prize. Brands are engaging in all-out “business warfare” including espionage and “Black Hat Tactics”. For founders and executive teams (generals, lieutenants, etc) looking to win the battle on Amazon, take heed of Sun Tzu’s warning that war must not be commenced without due consideration. Fortunately, the strategy and tactics required to beat the competition on Amazon are analogous to two well established concepts of military theory that you can learn from and use to gain an advantage.

The past couple decades have seen a shift in U.S. grocery retailers moving, in large part, to bulk purchasing and offerings with lower prices on a per item/unit/serving basis. Bulk retailers like Costco and Sam’s Club are great examples, and if the bulk product is not offered to the end consumer, then bulk purchasing is completed at the corporate level and the distributed at lower individual item rate. Walmart’s success of bulk-purchasing at the corporate level, and distributing those cost savings to their customers at the store-level is a great example

No Quality Score? No problem.

Amazon’s ad business eclipsed $1 billion in 2017 largely in part to increased investment in Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) & Seller Central Ads. With these increasing numbers, it’s easy to compare Amazon advertising to more mature platforms like Google AdWords, but the truth is there are some important differences between the two.

What's New?

Date Range, Placement, and Search Term Reports across campaigns are a few of the new features Amazon revealed last week for Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), their Vendor Central (VC) only advertising platform.

First, some context. Let’s assume you’ve already registered your seller profile as a “Professional” or “Individual” seller on Seller Central within Amazon. If you haven’t, Amazon provides great resources on this process. Let’s also assume you have listed your available products to sell on Amazon along with some basic bullet point descriptions and a few product pictures.

At Amplio, we’re fortunate to have a background of intense data-driven marketing and an innate desire to provide gratuitous value to our clients. We are passionate about helping companies grow their sales on Amazon regardless of their starting point, company size or exit strategy. Our experience and expertise in a rapidly growing channel like Amazon brings both opportunities and challenges. Amazon is a convoluted, menacing, beast that can completely change the way your business runs… and we are 100% confident that Amazon can change your business for the better.

For those not yet familiar with the Headline Search ad type, it is supported by Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), the ad platform made available to Amazon vendors. Third party sellers (Seller Central sellers) often gain access to AMS by signing up as a “vendor” with a poor performing product.

Given the rise of Amazon’s Prime customer base that now includes over 20% of the entire US population, marketers are working full speed ahead to solidify Amazon into their Omnichannel strategy. This isn’t to suggest that brands in the IR500 have neglected the Amazon marketplace altogether. In fact, many Enterprise and SMB brands alike have been selling on Amazon for 10+ years generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue in the process. These brands have profited largely through vendor relationships with Amazon Retail, the division of Amazon that secures wholesale relationships with brands through salespeople and brokers. But only recently have marketers, as opposed to sales people and brokers, been tasked with growing sales on the channel.

To utilize Amazon Sponsored Product Ads (SPAs), you must be selling your product(s) through either Amazon’s Seller Central or Vendor Central. The reasons for leveraging Amazon as a sales channel are numerous. A recent survey suggests that 2016 was the year Amazon overtook Google as a starting point for product search.

Amplio Digital opened its doors with the goal of helping other companies grow their businesses. At the time, our work centered around helping clients drive conversions via paid search and display advertising. While our service offerings have expanded over the past two and a half years, we still believe paid search is an important part of our clients' ability to grow their businesses.