For many CPG brands selling on Amazon, there’s a vast number of challenges and opportunities that they’re presented with daily from content management to sales and inventory forecasting to Buy Box monitoring and much more. There are a few scenarios which can result in a ton of revenue leaked from your business. In this post, we will highlight some of the most frequent challenges facing vendors today and what to do about them.
A Third-Party Seller Attaches Itself to Your Variation
Let’s say you’re a first-party vendor selling a 1 and 2-pack of your product. A third-party seller on Amazon can figure out a way to source that very same product to create a bundle of a four-pack. Next, they will latch onto your variation and leverage the goodwill of your product as a vendor. The third-party seller’s four-pack of your product provides a better price point for consumers looking to buy in bulk and save money, which ends up draining revenue from your business.
Your Product Variation Gets Broken Out
If your products get deemed by Amazon as CRAP outs (Can’t Realize a Profit) or are subject to being suppressed pages, the products will be “de-variated.” So, the effort needed by an account management team to re-variate the products result in hours of manual labor and lost sales.
Vendors and brands are responsible for managing third-party sellers and need to create and enforce a legitimate process. Whether it be tracking in a spreadsheet or tracking these instances in such a way that your eCommerce team can stay on top of third-party sellers latching onto your products on Amazon. Your brand could utilize spreadsheets to set up and operate a manual process for third-party seller enforcement.
“Un-variate” Your Products
One best practice for vendors who find themselves in these situations is to “un-variate it.” An effective way to get around this issue is to remove your product from variation with other products not sold by you. The brand owner can submit variation updates and has higher priority over third-party sellers reselling that same product. Although this can be a cumbersome task, it’s worth it to un-variate over and over.
The manual 13-step process in Vendor Central to follow in order to file a ticket to un-variate your products is very long but still very much worth it.
Check Your Ads
Another way to check for money spent with no return is to check the marketing ads you’re running. You should constantly be checking your ads to make sure you’re still winning the Buy Box, receiving sales, and to monitor impressions. If vendors don’t stay on top of this, they will continue to spend more money to help someone else get more sales.
Keeping Up with Your Content Management on Amazon
If a third-party seller ends up winning the Buy Box, then they own content on Amazon by DeFacto and have the ability to change the content on the product listing. They can change everything from your title, image, bullets, and description, the only caveat being: If you aren’t the brand owner, you will need to provide proof supporting the suggested changes to the product detail page. A lot of third-party sellers who source first-party vendors’ products in bulk from wholesalers like Big Lots and Costco will end up selling those products on Amazon at a lower price, which often leads to them winning the Buy Box.
Protect Your Brand
One way for vendors to tackle this problem of managing their product listing’s detail page on Amazon is to enroll in the Amazon Brand Registry program. This is a proactive path to having more control over their content for all products that they sell. Vendors who register as an official brand get access to tools and features like A+ Content, Amazon Stores, Video ads, Virtual Bundles, Amazon Posts, and other advertising solutions not available to non-brand registered, third-party sellers.
How Pacvue Commerce Helps to Prevent Revenue Leakage
Buy Box Monitoring
Pacvue Commerce is constantly monitoring a vendor’s Buy Box ownership and leverages automations to resolve losing it. Buy Box tracking will prevent you from spending your advertising budget on driving 3P or low inventory items sales.
Ticketing Resolution
Pacvue Commerce’s automated ticketing system is constantly monitoring your eCommerce business health. The system files tickets with retailers on your behalf, which can save vendors hundreds of hours of manual work. On average, Pacvue Commerce saves you 24 to 48 hours for each ticket filed on your behalf. This allows your account management teams to focus more time on the strategies that will scale your business.
Monitoring Content
Having total control over your content on Amazon is critical for your product performance. Pacvue Commerce’s content monitoring system keeps an eye on the most impactful areas, such as content quality, reviews, and keywords, to provide actionable recommendations and increase sales.
Monitoring Product Reviews
As we all know, ratings and reviews are hugely related to the success of your product on Amazon. Pacvue Commerce tracks reviews from shoppers and reports sentiment trends, including verbatim comments, which allows your eCommerce team to address feedback in real-time.
Case Study
A popular health & wellness CPG brand was having major troubles with revenue leakage until they leveraged the power of Pacvue Commerce. The brand ended up resolving much of the inefficiencies in their ticketing process with Pacvue Commerce’s Alert feature and ticketing automation, which gave them actionable recommendations and resolutions that saved over 260 hours of manual labor. The brand prevented an estimated $275,000 in revenue leakage and generated an impressive $500,000 due to Buy Box improvement. Learn more about how the leading CPG brand used Pacvue Commerce to save time and prevent revenue leakage here.
Your business can gain millions by preventing revenue leakage, growing margins, and saving time with Pacvue Commerce, too. Contact us and we will calculate how much revenue your business can save with Pacvue Commerce today!
