Amazing Amazon Stats every Seller Need to know

Amazon is the world’s largest online marketplace with millions of visitors every month. That’s why so many entrepreneurs are interested in Amazon. Sellers can reach a much larger audience and sell their products via Amazon. To stay competitive it is very important to know the most important facts and trends. This infographic shows the most important facts that Amazon sellers shouldn’t miss.

Click on the image below for the full infographic!

Infographic from smartminded: https://www.smart-minded.com/en/

5 Ways Your Recruitment Strategy Goes Wrong

Growth is an organic process that needs to happen across the whole business. You can’t just hope to bite off a bigger slice of the market without putting first the work into it. And by work, we mean equipping your business to handle your ambitions. Growth is, after all, a bet you take on your company. While on paper it looks like an investment to reach the next level, the reality is a little different. Every investment is built on hope, namely the hope that your business can sustain growth and increase its revenues. While some might call it expectation or forecast, there is no denying that even data-driven decisions sometimes need to rely on a little luck too. You can, after all, only predict what you know. Most businesses don’t receive sufficient insightful data to define a clear growth trajectory. As a result, planning growth is a delicate balancing act between making the necessary expansion investments and keeping your fingers crossed. However, somewhere in between, there is plenty of room for costly mistakes that can put your growth process at risk. Messing up your recruiting strategy is, by far, one of the most destructive things you can do to your business. 

You don’t understand what you need

Growing your team is an overwhelming challenge that implies filling positions that didn’t exist previously. As an employer, you need to be very clear about the type of skills and talent you need. However, gaining clarity about roles that you haven’t needed until now can be tricky. Therefore, it’s not uncommon for employers to create unrealistic expectations in their job descriptions. While the desire is to make the role sound important; there’s a thin line between underlying real functions and “accidentally” exaggerating requirements in an effort to make your company appear more professional. Similarly, failing to include essential and unique details about the company processes and niche market can confuse potential candidates and attract the wrong crowd. 

You don’t know how to check candidates

So, you’ve read the resumes? That’s only the beginning. You can’t afford to pursue the hiring process without the support of professionals. Indeed, you need to hire a background check company to ensure your potential employees are suitable and trustworthy. The typical background check includes criminal records check, credit history, specific industry accreditations, right to work, and even identity verification. Depending on the type of industry and the level of confidential data your employees are entrusted with, the checks will be more or less detailed. For instance, credit checks may not be relevant to jobs outside of the financial sector. 

You don’t plan their stay

Hiring the right candidate is detrimental to your growth. But keeping your employees once you’ve hired them is a lot more critical. Unfortunately, employee retention can be challenging, especially for companies that are growing rapidly. The best employee retention strategies require time and effort, which may not be manageable when you’re trying to run an expanding business. Ideally, you want your employees to feel appreciated from Day One, which means that you have to make your priority to plan their arrival and integrate them into your team smoothly. Employers can’t afford to neglect job satisfaction; running regular surveys in-house can highlight potential issues that affect your staff happiness and motivation. Making your business a great workplace is a promise you make every employee. 

You don’t make time for your employees

Everybody grows. Your employees are keen to embrace their personal development journey and learn new skills with you. Additionally, they also hope to discuss areas of improvement, both within the company and with their work. Supporting personal growth is detrimental to your expansion. While it might seem like a waste of time, your one-to-one meetings play a crucial role in maintaining your success. It’s about making time for each employee and helping them to become the best they can be. Falling behind on your one-to-one meetings affect your relationship with your team. 

You’ve changed the role

You might have hired someone for a specific position, but as the company grows, you realize to need a new palette of skills. Ultimately, your employees understand they need to adapt to new demands. However, they are not ready for an unplanned role change. It is not unfair for your staff to move them into new functions – more importantly, functions they didn’t apply for – without addressing the issue with them first. Similarly, you can’t pile up new duties to their list of existing responsibilities without considering what the new role means, both in terms of training and pay rise. 

Finding the best talents for your company is the easiest part of the recruiting process. Keeping your employees, ensuring they can grow with your business and deliver the best performance day after day is the biggest challenge you’ll ever face. Learning to put people’s interests first can help you to maintain your growth strategy and aim for success. 

Exclusive Guests And A Launch Party Worth Having

Any time a business launches a product or a service, it’s a big moment in its history. However, it’s really a celebration that should be had and focussed on before the official launch occurs. Why do this? Many people have worked hard on developing it and making it what it is. They have worked long hours, late nights and done it all over again the next morning. On top of this, you want to make it even for your clients. Imagine the people who have given you money, have partnered with you, get an exclusive look at the product or service before it’s launched. That would be one of the best ways to say thank you to those people and entities. But how best to go about it? If it’s too big and lavish, it will feel overdone. If it’s too small, it won’t be worth having. The key is to invite exclusive guests, rely on your handling of those people and making it worthwhile.

A presented journey

As you’re creating the product or service, you should film the process of its development. These behind the scenes takes, can then be spliced together to make a short presented journey. You’ll require a professional editing company to make it look great. But in the end, it will be worth it. The guests at your event will get to come along on a ride that allows you to give them the experience of watching something come to life. Your employees will also be in the limelight, giving them a chance to be recognized by all those who attend. You may also wish to present the video as part of your introduction to the event. It could help your guests to understand where your vision comes from and where you want to take the business in the future.

Feeling special

The event should be worth going to. Many of your partners are businessmen and women, and investors. They go to a lot of parties, not all of the product launches. So, in order to make it worth their while, you should provide them with custom gift boxes that have any kind of gift you want inside. It might be one of the first products off the manufacturing line. It would be awesome to be given the first of something, but it would be amazing to be given the first of your product; particularly if it’s groundbreaking. Who wouldn’t want to get one of the first ever Apple iPhones? It’s vital that your personalized gifts somehow. You may want to write a handwritten letter to the person and wrap it with their gift. 

The location

Anybody that’s somebody wants to go to an event venue in the city. So if you’re in the UK, hold the event in London. Even if you’re not based there, it’s a big night and it should be held in a big city. If you’re in America, launch the party in New York. 

For any product launch party to be worth going to, you must give each guest a personalized gift and a good presentation for why they’re there. 

Custom business applications – creating an app for your business

If you own a smartphone or a tablet (or anything futuristic!), then you’re going to know all about the amazing features of them. You might even be reading these words off of one right now – that’s pretty cool, huh? You’ll know that, over the past decade or so, these devices have completely taken the world by storm. Their sole existence isn’t what has encapsulated so many, nope! It’s the applications on them that have done it. Social media apps, games, flashing lights – you name it; they’ve probably sucked one of two people in. Custom business applications are your way of getting a piece of the action. 

Custom Business Applications (Apps)

Apps are pretty impressive, as we’ve gathered. They’re so impressive that most businesses look to create an app to supplement their work. People are glued to their phones and tablets, so getting them to download such software wouldn’t be an issue – it’s just a case of actually creating one.

What’s the point of an app for your business? Well, quickly and conveniently displaying info, hooking more and more people in, and looking more professional are just three reasons, but there are many more. How can you get one up and running? Well, you’ll need to think of a few things and work on a couple more! Here’s what you need to do:  

Figure Out Whether an Application is a Good Idea for Your Business  

The idea might seem better than the need at this stage. Make sure you’re in the position to focus on an app. Branching out to this kind of thing should be done when you’re established and settled. It’ll cost money to create, so make sure you’re not chucking money at the wrong thing at the wrong time. Also, it’ll take a while to create: are you sure you’re ready to allocate time to something like this when you could be working on something more appropriate? 

Plan Absolutely Everything Out Beforehand

Write out what you want your custom app to contain. What will be the point of it? How much detail will go into it? When you have a plan that you can refer back to, you then have a clearer vision of how things will go. 

Without a detailed plan, you could waste thousands on employing an app developer and relying on him or her to know what you want. Sounds ridiculous but we’ve seen it happen more than once!

Find A Genius That Can Create your custom business application 

If you have the ability to develop an app, then you’ll be grand! Not many people have that skill, though, and if you’re in that group, then you’ll need a pro. You can get in touch with the likes of Xibis if you’d like that professional and high-quality service. You’ll be able to work with them through every step, ensuring that your needs are met. 

Make Sure It’s Compatible On All Platforms

You probably know this by now, but there are a few types of gadgets these days. They’re not all the same company; some devices function differently than others. Make sure that you have everything covered in that regard. No discriminating against a particular type of phone or tablet!

Market Your custom App Properly 

Once the app is sorted and underway, you’ll have to get people’s eyes on it. The best way to do it these days is by using social media. People are always looking at those platforms, so it’ll be a great way of attracting potential customers. But be realistic – because apps are getting easier to create, the competition is getting bigger too. You’ll need to focus enough energy and time on this part to get the payoff from all your work. 

Three Essential Organisational Tips For Amazon Sellers

Organisation for Amazon Sellers

So you’ve decided to take that step and launch your own business on Amazon? Be aware: you’re taking a lot into your hands. Unlike your normal office job, suddenly all the deadlines, planning meetings and catch-ups fall away – it’s up to you to manage and grow your sales so that they can provide you with a steady income. Organisation is important for all people; but organisation for Amazon sellers will make or break your business.  

There’s a lot to do, but the key to it all is fairly simple – organisation. If you get organised, you can manage your sales proactively and focus on making a profit. There are over a million sellers on the Amazon platform. But only a handful of them can build and sustain a truly successful business as an Amazon seller – so you need to make sure that you have the edge. 

As a highly competitive marketplace, Amazon gives you access to millions of potential customers. That said,  it also gives those customers access to thousands of sellers, and they can easily go elsewhere. So get organised with your time management, product visibility and pricing and stay focused on winning those sales.

Optimise Your Product Details

If your products aren’t visible, then you simply won’t be found by impatient, time-poor shoppers scrolling through in a hurry. You have to bear in mind that there are well over twelve million products on Amazon. Consumers have to narrow their choice down to the one which suits them. The way this is approach is through drill-down product categories which continually refine a shopper’s search. Or a customer could type in a highly specific phrase into the site search engine.

Either way, it’s your job to make sure that your items are appearing at the top of their feed. Make sure you’re providing accurate and detailed descriptions which match the language your customers are using to search – a tool such as AskThePublic or Google Trends can help you determine popular searches that you can incorporate into your writing.

As well as a great title, make sure you’ve filled in all the details on colour, size and other identifiers too. There’s a lot which goes into organising this area of your business, so many sellers opt for a Product Information Management Application to help them manage. This is especially helpful if you sell over multiple platforms or even have a physical store as well – in which case you can get a credit card terminal here.

Make Sure Your Pricing Is On Point

The importance of pricing cannot be overstated. Many consumers use Amazon purely to be able to compare similar products and achieve the lowest price. So getting your pricing strategy right should be a top priority.

Understand your competition and what offers and pricing they have. Be prepared to do plenty of research in order to gain the edge for your products. Amazon’s own Low Price Match tool can help you to stay on top of the latest developments and win more custom. There’s a lot to keep track of, so this is when great organisation can pay off for serious Amazon sellers.  

Use Great Images

On the internet, imagery sells as customers can’t physically touch your product. So beat the competition by making sure your images are the best. Hunt around for some product photography tips and invest in high-quality, professional-looking photos.

Don’t be afraid to style an item up to make it seem more desirable – great pictures help to develop trust with customers. Get organised by batch-taking new imagery and styling with props in photography sessions. And always use Amazon’s product imagery guidelines to make sure you get it right. 

Get help getting organised…

New to Amazon selling? Click here to download our Free 10-step Guide to starting an Amazon FBA business.

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294 “Failing” ecommerce product? Why you should not throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Today I was inspired to leap to the microphone by a mentoring session with a client.

If you have existing revenue, you can get a return on mentoring very fast

I love working with clients who already have revenue/turnover because it’s so easy to help them get a win, and/or reduce costs by a large amount.

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293 Amazon Business Reports – Making sense of the numbers after Launching

After all the months of effort spent on researching, sourcing and launching your private label product, it’s tempting to feel your work is done.

In fact, it is completely vital to measure your numbers. They say that a business that doesn’t know how much money it is making or losing is a business that may be about to go under. This is just as true for an Amazon or private label business.

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292 Amazon Product Launch 2 – Traffic Strategy overview

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The Amazon Algorithm judges your product from day 1. Success breeds success -fast. However on Amazon, failure also leads to more failure just as quickly.

So it is critical to have a great launch plan. Otherwise, even with great product research and great sourcing behind you, there is a still a huge danger of wasting all that time, effort and money with a poor launch.

Launching is a coin of two sides: the Listing and the Traffic.

In this episode, Michael covers some critical details on how to drive traffic to your listing.

What we cover includes:

• A classic newbie traffic error
• The vital importance of how your listing and traffic integrate
• The solid core launch strategy that has been working like crazy for top sellers in the 10K Collective Mastermind

Links mentioned:

Private Label Process (overview and pre-order offer info)

Our Free 4-part Video overview of Amazon business building:

Private Label Class

Our free PDF Guide to Listing optimization:

Launch Planning Guide

291 Amazon Listing Creation Overview

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS

Vital as it is to have great product research behind you, and having sourced a quality, differentiated product at a profitable price, there is a still a huge danger of wasting all that time, effort and money with a poor launch.

Launching is a coin of two sides: the Listing and the Traffic.

In this episode, Michael covers some critical details on how to create a listing that converts traffic into sales, including:

• Two major mistakes related to keywords
• The missing step between keywords and persuading people to buy
• Some critical errors novice sellers make with product photos

Links mentioned:

Private Label Process (overview and pre-order offer info)

Our Free 4-part Video overview of Amazon business building:

Private Label Class

Our free PDF Guide to Listing optimization:

Listing Optimization Guide