Keyword: The Amazon Insider Podcast

Building an Amazon business is a great way to create your own job, to become your own boss and watch nothing become something. While building, you have to determine your final goal: will you sell or continue to grow and scale? Amazon Seller Sophie Howard builds from the beginning to sell and shares her best advice to help other sellers do the same.

The number of sales matter. It’s important that you’re having strong sales and improving year over year, but it’s not as important as profitability. Profitability tells you how strong and viable your business is. In this episode, Seller Accountant founder, Tyler Jefcoat, talks us through what profitability is, how you determine your own profitability, plus how to manage it.

Establishing and using licensing deals can help expand your customer reach. In this episode, we’re talking with former Amazonians Rachel Greer and Emily Murray about ways sellers can create licensing deals, what needs to happen to set them up plus the impact they can have on business.

There are lots of easy mistakes and information sellers can miss when it comes to eCommerce accounting. Tyler Jefcoat, founder of Seller Accountant, shares with us some ways sellers can avoid those mistakes and improve their own accounting processes.

Prime Day 2018 featured glitches with Amazon web pages, but it also brought in massive sales and Prime membership sign ups. Peter Kearns, vice president with 180Commerce advises how sellers can analyze their Prime Day results and use those insights heading into Q4.

A great way to increase the reach of your brand is to bring in Social Media Influencers and enlist them to promote your brand. Former Amazonian, Emily Murray with Cascadia, tells us how sellers can find the best influencers for their brands, how to reach out to them and best use them to increase your reach.

Prime Day 2018 is a week away. Last minute changes and listing optimizations are being finalized but you’ve got to make sure your Sponsored Products strategy is going to bring lots of traffic to your listing. Former Amazonian Mike Ziegler with Marketplace Clicks, shares a strategy to help get the most traffic to your listing and a couple mistakes you want to avoid.

Listing hijackers are getting really sophisticated and they’re creating problems every day for sellers on the Amazon Marketplace. One of the worst problems is sellers getting locked out of their listings, even locked out of Brand Registered listings. Former Amazonian Chris McCabe with eCommerceChris.com joins us to give us three steps sellers can take to regain control.

Amazon Prime Day 2018 is just around the corner. For a little bit more than 24 hours, Amazon hosts a massive sale with Black-Friday-type deals. The deals bring millions of shoppers to Amazon searching for those deals and looking at other listings too. The massive amount of people on the site means that every seller, every listing, every ad needs to be ready to capture the attention of new potential customers. Former Amazonian Emily Murray with Cascadia shares a couple things sellers need to make happen right now to be successful for Prime Day 2018.

There’s been a sharp rise in the amount of action Amazon’s investigative teams have been doing in recent weeks. Former Amazonian Chris McCabe tells us, there’s more review abuse that’s happening and being investigated. In some cases, positive reviews that are legitimate are being deleted. So with all the abuse and different interpretations of the review policy, we’re talking with Chris about what sellers need to know and how they should react. 

The Supreme Court has issued their ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair overturning a 1992 ruling that said states can only require sales tax in states that the store has a physical presence. This new ruling says states can require online marketplaces like Amazon to collect and pay sales tax.  This new ruling means that states can now more aggressively go after sellers and require they collect and pay sales tax for orders sent to their states. Former Amazonian John Naughton breaks down to tell us what this ruling means for sellers. 

Amazon has made it possible for some sellers to enter the beta test for Sponsored Products Ad Retargeting. This program extends Sponsored Product Ads off of Amazon on other websites in the World Wide Web. We talk with former Amazonian Mike Ziegler who has been testing the extended network for a couple months. He gives his insight on how it works and if it’s something sellers should be doing.

Counterfeiters continue to cause problems and wreak havoc on the Amazon marketplace, all with an intent to steal sales away from you.   Former Amazonian, Chris McCabe from eCommerceChris, talks with us about some counterfeiter tactics to look out for.

Product injuries can happen. Sometimes electronics malfunction, other times it could be a pinched finger.  It’s important to know how to investigate claims and what action needs to be taken.  Rachel Greer with Cascadia, breaks down the process sellers need to follow if they do receive an injury complaint. 

Apparel items are some of the most competitive products on the Amazon Marketplace. The competition shouldn’t scare away apparel sellers. It’s still possible to launch and successfully compete in the category. Former Amazonian Rachel Greer with Cascadia gives us strategies she uses with her own clients to help them gain market share.

Recently, Tygh and Michael, founders of SellerSmile, joined us for a webinar where they broke down ways sellers can create a strong customer service campaign, including introducing us to the 3 T’s for customer service success. If you’ve had negative customer feedback, bad review issues or just need help with customer service, you need to listen to their advice.

You want your business to always be growing. Growing in sales, products and marketplaces. You also need to make sure it’s growing off-Amazon too. Former Amazonian, Chris McCabe from eCommerceChris, talks with us about the importance of growing on social media and ways to do it. 

If someone purchases your product, you want to thank them for the purchase and you want to hear the feedback. However, if it was purchased from Amazon, then technically they’re not your direct customer, they’re Amazon's. That’s why you have to make sure every single policy is followed to make sure Amazon and the customers are happy. SellerSmile joins us one last time to talk us through how to interrupt Amazon’s policies and interact with customers.

Pictures are worth a thousand words but a bad picture can cost you thousands. Good product photos will capture shoppers’ attention, help them fully understand the product and decrease returns.  In this episode, we’re talking with Rachel Greer and David Johnson from Cascadia about ways to create eye-catching photos that showcase your products and help increase clicks and conversion. 

The whole goal and focus for the month of April has been on customer service. We’re hoping that at the end of the month sellers can create a solid customer service strategy to improve your Amazon business. The founders of SellerSmile are joining us again to discuss reasons why sellers should consider outsourcing customer service. We’ll cover when sellers should look at outsourcing and how long that transition can take. Plus, we’re breaking down some of the costs associated with hiring someone or outsourcing customer service.