Amazon Experts Tell What To Be Aware of in 2020

Get Your Brand Registered

Franz Jordan, Founder & CEO of Sellics

In 2020, Amazon will distinguish more between sellers who have their brand registered and those who are not. It's going to be super beneficial for sellers having their brand registered for a couple of reasons: advertising will have more things such as sponsored brands, sponsored display, advanced content - all of it will be tied with brand registry. 

And another thing - I believe Amazon will invest heavily into everything around product protection and one of the requirements will be brand registry. So for product protection and for advertising purposes brand registry will be critical.

Start Optimizing by Browsing Behaviour

Chris Rawlings, Founder & CEO Sophie Society

Amazon wants you to browse all over the place, searching cooler things or things that are more relevant to you and adding them to your cart. They've been taking action to drive user behaviour more towards browsing. So while we all are still focused on the search ranking, PPC search results, keywords that we put in the backend, there's going to be brands in 2020 that will be optimizing by browsing behaviour, not just search behaviour. So think about it in your strategy for Amazon 2020 because this is going to be a huge trend.

Click here to watch video by Chris Rawlings.

2020 Is Going to Be All About Trust

In 2019, we saw Amazon come under increasing scrutiny from many different places and that's continuing into the new year. What that means is that sellers are no longer automatically earning this trust that Amazon had worked so hard to cultivate for so many years. Instead, the responsibility of building and maintaining trust is going to fall more onto brands. So make sure you're communicating clearly with customers, take care of their safety and best interest, have a reputable and legitimate brand image.

I think it's very easy to fall into this trap thinking that everybody should purchase from you. As customers become more and more intelligent and vary, they're going to respond very positively to brands that really have their best interest, event if that means steering them away from making a purchase. 

Pay More Attention to Personalization

Personalization and customization are the best practice to draw a customer to a website at the right time to make an action, which is, in Amazon's case, a buying decision. It means Amazon needs to deliver specific and different content to every customer rather than showing the same thing to everyone. There are some of the factors by which Amazon decides what content to show, including your shopping history, region, browser type, etc. It means they make a decision based not only on the buyer's behavior but also on their cultural and psychological aspects.

What you can do is to make a list of all possible factors that you think Amazon might be changing and everything that they're tracking as well as making a list of what you know about your audience, your product, and brand. Only then you can make a decision on what targeting you need to achieve the best results.

Build Your Mastermind Team

Tomer Rabinovich, Amazon Expert & Consultant

I would recommend building a core valuable professional mastermind of 4-6 members that can support you and be part of your “team” without being present in your company. This professional network can inspire you with new ideas, promote you as a group to be exposed to important content and give you solutions for problems that come up. Building a fruitful friendship which can push you forward to achieve your goals. In a sole business and in an often changing environment, it can help you push your limits and hold you accountable. Don't underestimate the power of a mastermind.

What Impacts Amazon Sellers in 2020, IP Protected Products, Amazon Beta Programs

Shane Oglow, Co-Owner @ prReach.com

There are a few things happening at the moment that could affect Amazon sellers. The first thing that I'm keeping an eye on is coronavirus. There are many questions around whether workers in China will get back to work after Chinese New Year and how manufacturing and shipping be affected. Either it's overdramatised or not, the situation will have an impact but we don't know yet at what cost.

Another thing is how Trump's administration cracking down on counterfeit goods will impact Amazon sellers. These new regulations might end up putting Amazon on the hook for policing counterfeit goods. It can end up in many different ways but maybe there will finally be some forward movement dealing with the fraudulent products from predominately Chinese sellers?

The next thing I'm looking at is the development of unique intelectual property (IP) protected products. To me, creating products with various measures of IP protection is the clear choice. It takes longer and costs more but the protection allows sellers to set themselves apart and have less copycat issues.

Also, in 2020 I'm looking forward to continuation of Amazon Beta programs. I love these programs because the early adopters usually get the benefit for the lower cost - it's like when PPC or DSP first rolled out. You can really leverage your business by using these programs, so keep an eye out and take advantage of it.

Track the Effectiveness of Your Storefront

Marcin Chaszczewski, Founder & Consultant @ Amazing Work System

2020 is the year of browsing habits and patterns, brands and storefronts. Speaking of which, do you track the effectiveness of your storefront? Do you actually design your storefront to cross-promote other products from your brand? Thankfully, we have the data on the storefront and also the data about your visits to your ASIN listings. 

From the storefront analytics, you can get all the visits to your storefront. Then you can gather what percentage of people visited your storefront from your listing. If you do send traffic to your storefront from outside, you might have the data here as well so you can subtract this data and calculate the percentage of people who came to your storefront directly from the listing.

This number can vary from 1% to 3%. However, it's important, because you can get up to 60 % conversions from your store visits. So if you look at the conversion rate, the data that you have from your storefront analytics and then you look at the conversions from sessions to visits to your storefront, you will see you end up with around 1% from your sessions to your storefront sales.

So as the other experts mentioned, 2020 is the year of customer behaviour on Amazon as well as the pathways of how they interact with Amazon listings and pages. So keep tracking every change you do in visual designs or listings and see how they work because you can affect those percentages to your benefit.

Always Keep Your VA Updated

Gilad Freimann, Founder & CEO of VA Academy Philippines

If your super talented VA will not be updated about changes in Amazon, he/she will be left behind. And your business too. On the other hand, if you will teach your VA about these changes the second they are announced, and make sure your VA will immediately apply them to your account, then your Amazon store will be one step ahead of everyone else. Because no one else will do it so fast.

Example? Have you heard about the new release of "Amazon posts"? Is your VA updated about this feature and is already writing for you killer posts that appear on your competitors listings? If your answer is "No", then this should be your thing to improve in 2020...  Be ahead of everyone else. Use your VA to give you this edge!

Start Selling on the Dutch Market

In 2020, try to sell on the Dutch market. I think this is going to be a super hot market on Amazon this year and I would always recommend somebody to go there and try it out. It's very important who gets there first so it might as well be you.

Use Attribution For External Traffic

One of the most important things is driving relevant traffic to your listings. From now on, your PPC can affect your product listing in a negative way if you're making lower conversions, comparing to average in your niche. Always check your organic ranking for keywords when you're doing PPC. 

And when it comes to this, attribution is very important. You need to make sure you're driving external traffic and one of the great things about attribution is that you can use different platforms and channels to drive traffic. Keep in mind - your traffic needs to be relevant. Check your audience through Google Analytics and send that traffic to your product listing.

Another thing you need to be fully aware of is headline search ads (sponsored brand ads). Have in mind that since December last year, you are allowed to advertise using sponsored brand ads only with 2 products. So if you have some campaigns that had more than 2 products and some of them were paused just because you went out of stock, go to your headline search ads and double-check your spendings - make sure you're not spending money for no reason!

Be Careful Expanding Outside of Amazon

Carina McLeod, CEO @ eCommerce Nurse

It's always highly recommended expanding outside of Amazon partly you want to spread that risk - Amazon can pull the plug at anytime and that could be quite dangerous place to be. So it is important that you spread your risk but you need to be careful. If you want to expand outside of Amazon and sell on other platforms, then there's less risk because you still maintain control of your products and pricing. However, if you decide to start selling through other retailers, a distributor or another wholesaler, this is when you need to start being careful. Otherwise, your product will end up by being sold by them, they will become a seller on Amazon and possibly start competing on pricing. Be aware of your distribution strategy and make sure you're working with someone you really trust.

Trust is really important here because you can't control retail pricing and what a retail does but you can always make an agreement where both sides set their selling territory and does not compete with one another. It's highly recommended to hire a lawyer who can arrange a contract between you and your retailer and advice you on what you can or cannot do.

Prepare for Increasing Competition

Anthony Cofrancesco, Amazon Conversion Optimization Expert

In 2020, you’re going to see a huge increase in competition, not only from big companies deciding to get into Amazon but also increasing competition around the world – not only North America, not only European sellers but also people from Australia, China and other continents. I think it’s gonna be a real big threat.

The second very important thing is going to be content, specifically around sellers who are “brand-registered”. There are many cool things how you can build your content: PPC video ads, unlimited number of videos on your Amazon storefront or your listing. These are the things to consider in 2020.

Beware of Fake Webinars

Beware of commercials masquerading as webinars. I've noticed an uptick in the Amazon World of people herding individuals together with explosive claims "WE FOUND A NEW STRATEGY TO TRIPLE YOUR GROWTH" only to then speak vaguely about said strategy and leave you with absolutely no actionable option at the end of the webinar except to shell out money for their service / software / product / genius. 

When you're watching things just ask yourself "Does this sound like this person is helping me or selling me?"