Is it time to audit your Amazon account? Here’s how to know

Welcome to the Bring your product idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.

Hi and welcome as always to this episode of Bring your product idea to Life. If you've been around for a while, thank you so much for continuing to listen to me.

And if this is your very first episode, thank you so so much for giving this a try. I'm hoping these episodes I've planned for you this month are going to be really useful.

I'm really excited about the content for October because I'm going to be talking a lot about how to spot if there's something going wrong with your Amazon account. Or maybe not wrong, but if something isn't working as well it could and the things we can do to resolve them.

So the first thing I would like to ask you is have a little think about when was the last time that you checked your Amazon account was working as well as it could.

So auditing your Amazon account or giving it a little health check if audit sounds a bit too severe is a really good thing to do because you can spot issues you might not have spotted before and most importantly, you can fix them. Issues on Amazon can build up or even occur.

Maybe it's not a build up, maybe just one or two things are going wrong, but they're unnoticed, especially if you've got a large inventory, a busy account, or actually, let's face it, Amazon is not your full time job. And even if it is your full time job, Amazon is tricky. It's really hard to spot everything.

But if there are issues that are preventing you from doing as well as you could be. So selling at your optimum, this can be costing you time, it can be costing you sales and ultimately money.

So you might be already keep a really close eye on your Amazon account. Maybe you're in there every single day, or maybe things are going really well and you can be a bit more hands off.

Or maybe you have someone else managing your Amazon account for you. Whatever of these apply to you, how do you know if it's worth spending a little bit of time auditing your account or giving it a health check?

This is what we're going to cover today.

My key signs that maybe it's worth you spending a little bit of time, just a couple of hours and looking through your Amazon in more depth and trying to figure out if there's something that could be improved. And in next week's episode, I'm going to talk you through all the things that I would do if I were to audit your Amazon account for you.

I'm going to talk you through all the things I would look at some of the things we might find, why they might be issues, and how we could resolve them. So if any of this sounds like you do, listen out next week.

So here are a few of the key signs that your account might benefit from you taking a look into what's going on so if your sales have plateaued or dropped and you don't know why, this is a sign that there's something you might need to look at.

There are definitely quieter times of year, and these might vary depending on when your product is so many sellers see their sales don't go down over the summer, for example. But what if it's continued through September? What if you've got to October and your sales are still going down?

Now this could be due to a number of things we don't know what, but if this is you, it's worth finding out why? Is it that your listings need refreshing? Is it that your competitors have dropped your prices and now your listing looks less appealing?

Is it that the category you're selling in has got busier? Is it that there's something wrong on your account? Is it that you've got key listings aren't being shown in search?

Is something has something been suppressed and you're not aware of it? All of these things could be the answer.

But if you're noticing your sales have slowed down either slightly or significantly, it's probably worth having a look into why. So my second sign is if you're spending money on ads but not seeing results.

So if people are clicking on your listings but they're not buying, this is a sign that there is something you need to work on. So it could be your listing text, it could be your images, it could be the price, it could be that something's missing.

It could be they're not clear what your product is. It could be that it's not been sold as compellingly as it could be.

It might be down to the fact that another competitor is advertising really aggressively on your listing.

Again, it could be a number of things, but if you've noticed that your ads performance either has never got to where it needs to be, or perhaps even more tellingly, it's dropped. So maybe your ROAS has really gone down. It's definitely worth looking into why this might be the case.

The third sign is if you're getting stranded inventory alerts or your storage fees are creeping up. Now, these are two different things, but I'm grouping them together because they're both to do with inventory.

So stranded inventory means an issue with a listing. If you have stranded stock, it generally means that your listing isn't sellable for some reason.

And so therefore the FBA stock assigned to that listing is what Amazon call stranded. Especially if you have a large inventory, it can be really, really hard to keep track of this sort of thing. Amazon often don't notify you of this.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. You might find the communications you get are a little inconsistent, to say the least.

But if you have stranded inventory, one, it means you're paying for inventory that you can't sell, and two, it means there's a bigger issue because you need to find out why. So if you're finding that you're getting stranded inventory alerts, this is definitely something to look at.

If your storage fees are creeping up, this generally means that your stock isn't selling. Long term storage is a pain. Sending your stock back to yourself is a pain, but you need to do something.

So if you're finding that your stock isn't selling through for some reason, this is a sign that you need to do something to improve that. Whether that's working on your listing, whether that's running some ads, whether that's looking at your price, whether that's looking at a promotion.

It could be all kinds of things and maybe a combination of all kinds of things.

But you will have to do something if you don't want to keep paying long term storage fees and ultimately risk Amazon charging you, by the way, for the pleasure of having your stock returned. Nobody wants that. The fourth sign is that your listings either aren't showing in search results or that you know you're not ranking at all.

So what I mean by this is if, let's say you sell a vegan shampoo and you're searching for vegan shampoo and you're not coming up on page one, page two, whatever of the search results, that is a sign that something isn't working. So that might be that you're, you don't have the correct search terms and keywords in your listing, it might be to do with ads.

If you're running ads, it might be nothing to do with you. You might have the best product listing.

It might be completely optimized it might be fantastic, but it might just be that you've got competitors that are bidding quite aggressively, therefore they're all getting shown on page one and you're not. Again, we, we don't know. And the point of this isn't to kind of diagnose what's going on.

It's just to give you, you know, to let you know how you can identify, okay, something isn't working and I need to take a look because let's face it, as I said right at the beginning, Amazon probably isn't your full time job.

And there's a, you know, you've got an awful lot of things to do and some of these things can just pass you by or you might be sort of aware of them, but they're not big enough of an issue.

But as we're getting into Q4 now, I think it's a really good time if there's something that isn't quite working when it comes to Amazon to identify what that is and then ultimately why it is and what you can do to fix it.

So the fifth thing that shows that maybe there's something you need to do on your account is if you have some listings or compliance issues that maybe you've been ignoring or putting off or thinking you're safe for another day. So, for example, country of origin is a big one.

So all listings need to have the country of origin on them or Amazon's going to start suppressing them fairly soon. I believe, however, this is a big job, especially if you've got a big inventory.

And I do know there will be lots of sellers who are thinking, I'll do that next week, I'll do that next week, I'll do that next week. Because let's face it, going in and adding the country for all your listings isn't fun, it's time consuming. It's style, it's all of those things.

However, it is also really, really important.

So if you know that you've got some compliance issues, whether it's to have country of origin, whether it's to do with titles, I will speak about titles on next week's episode because that's something that's dripping people up at the moment.

But whatever it is, if there's something that means your account isn't working as it could, maybe it's just you need to update your credit card details or whatever it is, this would be a really good time to get it fixed because what you don't want is to end up in a, in the sort of the size of issue where it's going to take you significant time to resolve. And actually, I'm going to give you a bonus one here as well. This is something I've seen a bit recently.

If your branding is inconsistent across your product listings, this is also a sign that you need to do some work.

This is something, as I say, I can give you the answer to right now, which is, you know, make sure you make sure your branding is consistent across your listings. But that one just occurred to me as a good one to share because that was one I've seen recently.

And I think that really decreases trust from the customer because they can't be quite sure if this product is the same brand or if it is, is it the same brand selling it it. There's a little bit of a disconnect there. So that's a bonus one for you.

If your branding isn't consistent, then that's something else you can look at. So, and then my final one, gosh, I've actually given you seven, even though I said I was going to give you, I was going to give you five.

Either I can't count or I'm being way too generous of what I'm sharing here today. But the final thing I would say is if you haven't reviewed your account for at least six months, then go in and have a little check.

Things can and do change. And spending a little bit of time doing some quick checks now is time well spent if it saves you time and if it saves you or makes you money.

So I think as well, while we are gearing up to really busy time of year, and while this can seem like it's not a priority, and while you might think, okay, we can just leave this until the new year if you do have time.

And any of the signs that I've spoken about, so, for example, sales plateauing or dropping, spending on ads, but not seeing a result, issues with your inventory, issues with your listings, if you're seeing any of those things, I really do think it's time to have a quick check at your account and see what's going on. And do know that all of these issues are fixable as well once you know what to look for.

And in next week's episode, I'm going to be sharing a bit more about how I carry out account audits, what I look for, what it reveals and importantly, what you can do to resolve some different issues. So do listen in next week. I also have a free audit checklist.

So this is a download that I put together that you can use to just go through key areas of your account and just do some checks and make sure everything is working as it should be. So I'm going to link to that in the show notes in case that would be useful. And I also do offer, as I mentioned, full account audits as well.

So if that's something you're interested in, I'll put the link to the webpage on also in the show notes. And of course you can contact me for more information as well. So that is it. Have a lovely, lovely rest of your week.

I'm aiming for these episodes to be short and snappy because obviously we have our main interview episode on a Friday. I really hope you've enjoyed this episode.

If you have any questions or anything you want to ask me about, it's vikki@vickyweinberg.com and I will hopefully see you again on Friday and then again next Tuesday where we're going to go into audits in a bit more depth.

Thank you so much for listening Right to the end of this episode.

Do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickyweinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.