Keep in touch with your Amazon business DAILY

Check your new orders daily

Normally when a product sells on Amazon, you receive an email notification, but don’t rely on this as your mechanism to keep in touch because the email is sometimes delayed or goes missing.

Being disengaged from your Amazon site is risky if there is a problem or customer dissatisfaction.

If you ship products yourself, Amazon will only charge the customer after you manually confirm shipment, so to receive payment quickly, avoid delays in confirming shipment.

Amazon will also refund the customer if you don’t ship within 30 days.

Keep in touch with customer feedback and product details daily

Amazon is dynamic and changes quickly.
If you are a Seller or Brand you may have thousands of pages, so you must at least create effective standard procedures to check your top selling pages frequently.

If you forget to check even for a few days a lot can happen:

  • Your images update to something odd
  • You may lose the Buy box to another seller
  • Pricing errors
  • Out of stocks
  • You miss a flurry of negative customer reviews that feed upon each other and escalate, even though the trigger issue was out of your control and could never be anticipated.

To ensure that you do not miss Orders and Customer communications:

Create a reminder and a routine to manually check the Seller Central portal every day for new orders or customer communications.

Confirm as soon as possible after you ship products

(This applies to Merchant Fulfillment, where you ship products yourself)

Critical Points for confirming shipment:

  • Amazon only charges your customer’s credit card after you confirm, so confirm asap.
  • If you do not confirm shipping within 30 days, Amazon cancels the order without charging the buyer, even if you have already shipped the order.
  • The Tracking Number is important in all communications:
    • It is compulsory for more than 95% of shipments.
    • Without it you cannot qualify for Premium Shipping or Guaranteed Delivery Date.
    • Without it you are vulnerable to a Guarantee Claim against you.

Information that you will need to confirm your shipping:

  • Shipping date
  • Shipping method and the carrier information)
  • Tracking ID supplied by the carrier

To confirm that an Order has been shipped:

On the Seller Central portal, go to the Orders tab and select the Confirm Shipment button for the order that has been shipped.

> Amazon then charges the buyer, credits your seller account, sends a shipping confirmation email to the buyer, and updates the buyer’s Amazon account with the shipping information so the buyer can see the status online. IMPORTANT: If you do not confirm within 30 days, Amazon cancels the order and refunds the customer.

To meet your Shipping commitment, confirm asap when you ship:

(Applies to Merchant Fulfillment, where you ship products yourself)

In your shipping settings you need to specify the time frame for shipping.
Amazon holds you to this time frame.
To keep to this time frame and avoid trouble, you must confirm shipment every time and as soon as possible.

Check inventory regularly to avoid out-of-stocks and negative feedback

If you go out-of-stock and cannot fulfill an order, both you and Amazon get negative customer feedback, which makes Amazon unhappy with you and strongly detracts from your future sales.

Keep pricing current

If you lower your prices, update your product listings immediately.

Why? When shoppers search for a product, they are most likely to choose the lowest-priced shipping-included products that are listed at the top of the listing page.

Respond immediately and proactively to customers

Amazon works hard on its credibility, reliability and superior customer service.

It works equally hard on rewarding or punishing Sellers on their ability to maintain these standards.

To keep on the good side of this equation you must be responsive, punctual, reliable and proactive in dealing with customers.

Examples where you must contact the customer immediately and keep them updated:

  • An order is delayed
  • A customer hasn’t received a shipment
  • A customer received a damaged product

Work at a 5-star Feedback Rating

Customer Feedback Rating is a BIG factor in your Amazon sales:

  • It determines buyer perception of your product listings,
  • It determines your products’ placement on the Offer Listing page.

To improve your feedback rating:

  • Use the Fulfillment by Amazon service – likely to be the biggest factor in good customer relations. For example, a survey showed that 13% of Sellers who switched to FBA doubled sales within a year.
  • Accurate, detailed product descriptions.
  • FAST product shipping.
  • Proactive communications, especially with bad news.
  • Answer customer queries asap, and never later than 24 hours.
  • Use your product packaging slips to solicit positive customer feedback.

Keep sufficient stock

Out-of-stocks kill your good will, rankings, and sales possibilities, so

  • It is worth having excess inventory available at Amazon Fulfillment centres
  • Look into the backup option of Fulfillment by Merchant.

Be truthful and accurate in your product descriptions

Based on a study by Shotfarm, if you misrepresent your product in its product description,

  • 87% of consumers are unlikely to shop with you again
  • 42% of US consumers will return the product

Learn and keep to Amazon’s Terms of Service

Amazon protects its customers from advertising pressure and spam and is uncompromising on anything that detracts from the customer experience. For example, it is strict on what you can say or include in follow up emails (you cannot offer incentives for reviews and you need to be careful of including inserts in product deliveries).

It is not worth violating their Terms of Service in any way because if you slip up, Amazon can warn you, suspend you, or block your seller account.

Respond to customer inquiries within 24 hours

To avoid repercussions, you must respond to Customer and to Amazon inquiries within 24 hours.

The good news is that there are automated tools to help you with at least an initial response.

Failure to respond in time can result in negative feedback for you as Seller and to your Product.

If you are going to be offline for a while,

  • update your listings to Vacation Mode
  • have someone else help with customer inquiries

Remove negative or incorrect feedback asap

Buyers can leave you negative feedback or incorrect feedback. Amazon wants you to work with these people to try and address their issues and get them to remove the negative feedback (in most cases people are willing to remove it).

Create an Amazon SEO Strategy and work at it continuously

Amazon is a Search Engine as much as an ecommerce platform!

Customers almost universally find your Amazon product by searching, so you need to have good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for your product listings. SEO for Amazon is so important for sales that people make a career doing it.

As an e-commerce platform Amazon is optimised for making sales and profit, so its algorithms reward high conversions:

  • page hits
  • clicks
  • engagement
  • sales

It continuously and proactively identifies those product listings that are most likely to convert, using an “A9 Search Algorithm” that updates hourly to derive an Amazon Search Ranking per product category.

In doing this, it considers the degree of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of all product listings, including yours.

You need to SEO-optimise all of these elements of a Product Listing to get them visible on Google, Amazon and other search engines:

  1. Product URL
  2. Product Title
  3. Product Images
  4. Key Product Features
  5. Product Listing Description
  6. Amazon Product Reviews
  7. Amazon Product Rating