We didn't post audio last week due to the Ching Ming holiday, but Bryan Porter, a super seller in Amazon's glassware category #1, announced on Twitter that he would reduce Amazon's advertising budget to 0 starting in April. Today, Hui.com will explain Bryan's comments on Amazon advertising in detail, and also give some of our own suggestions on the way we Chinese sellers place Amazon advertising.

Part 1: The Differences in the Operational Methods of Big Selling in the U.S. and China

In the past few years, Amazon's Chinese sellers have developed very rapidly. According to Amazon's statistics in the past two years, 70% of the new sellers are from China. At the same time, the Chinese seller circle is also very active. We often think that Amazon is already the platform where Chinese sellers are king. .

However, after contacting the US seller circle, Hui.com found that many of the #1 sellers in the high-traffic category are local sellers in the United States. The way they operate is very different from ours, and Bryan is a typical example.

Big Deals in America #1: Transforming Traditional Offline Retailers

This is a big feature of American sellers. According to our observation, there are very few entrepreneurial sellers in the United States on Amazon. Almost 90% of the sellers we have seen have their own offline and stable sales channels, and then sell them online through online channels. For further business expansion. Simply put, Amazon is just a promotional channel and a new way to acquire customers, not a platform that decides the life and death of an enterprise.

Operation method #2: VC account operation mainly

Recently, there are many Hui members and sellers who have asked Huiwang about VC accounts, but we do not recommend that you buy accounts, because after all, VC purchases and payments will be linked to the company, and hundreds of thousands or even millions of accounts are copied. Really a bit exaggerated. If you ask us whether we can open a VC account, the answer is yes, but the chances of Chinese sellers winning are almost 0, because Amazon in the United States does open more VCs for American sellers, but as we have introduced above, these American sellers basically They all have their own offline physical stores and are also distributors of some big brands, so most of them operate through Amazon VC accounts, and external sales are also in the name of Sold by Amazon, but Listing and brands use more own brand. It also makes people understand why they see Amazon as a "+1 option".

America's Best Selling Method #3: Don't choose products, rely on distribution

This is another characteristic of the big sellers in the United States, because they are very familiar with their own sales areas, so they will basically still be based on their existing categories, but their SKUs will be very large, and we have seen US stores in the United States have few SKUs There are more than 2,000 of them, and there are as many as hundreds of thousands of them, and many SKUs are big-brand products, which are shipped directly from their own warehouses, and shipped from FBA to FBA. This can be said to be a unique advantage for American sellers.

America's Best Selling Approach #4: Off-Site and On-Site Amazon

In terms of promotion, the basic method adopted by these American sellers is the multi-pronged approach of Amazon advertising, FB, INS, and Google, but they will pay more attention to "customer retention" rather than "orders". This is why all American sellers focus on promoting independent websites while doing Amazon.

America's Best Selling Practice #5: Promote Outsourcing and Keep Small Teams Running

The American seller circle is indeed not as active as the Chinese seller circle. When Hui.com was with them or participated in various forums and activities, we found that they discussed "operational skills" very little, and even said that they were not interested in "operational skills". At first we thought it was very strange, but after really in-depth communication with them, we found that: maybe the labor cost in the United States is too high, so most American sellers hand over the operation and promotion to the system, or outsource to a third party to take care of them, while They focus more on how to improve operational efficiency through tools, and how to respond to Amazon, Facebook, and Google's platform policies.

Part II: Getting to Know Bryan Porter and His Operational Ideas

Now let's take you to understand how Bryan Porter and his Amazon work (all based on his Twitter content, no non-public data involved).

First of all, speaking on the basis of strength, I believe everyone wants to know how much Bryan Porter's sales are now? In fact, I believe that everyone, especially the sellers in the kitchen, home, children, and outdoor categories, should know that a brand of Amazon is called "Simply Modern". The following is the sales volume of a kettle listing in his store in the past 30 days. The order volume of this listing alone is 35,304 in one month, and the sales volume is $705,726.96 (about 4.6 million yuan).

Take another look at their store to see how many similar SKUs they have now.

According to Bryan's own post on Twitter, Simply Modern is already Amazon's #1 water bottle seller, with more than 4 million total orders for water bottles in their store in 2022, based on an average price of $20 for a water bottle. That would be $80 million (over 500 million RMB), and that's not counting other product sales in the store.

And that's not what set off the buzz among U.S. sellers last week, because many U.S. sellers are actually tops in different categories, with sales no less than Bryan's. However, what everyone really cares about is that Bryan said that he has spent more than $10 million in advertising on Amazon in the past, and will start to give Amazon's advertising budget to 0 from April!

In fact, Hui.com learned that Simply Modern opened an Amazon account around 2012, and the real advertising was concentrated in the past 5 years. In other words, Bryan spends about $2 million in advertising on Amazon every year, and the monthly advertising fee is about $170,000, which is 1 million yuan. But considering the large number of SKUs in the Simply Modern store, and there are not many products with a unit price of around $10. Therefore, I believe that in the eyes of most Chinese sellers, such advertisements are good, but why did Bryan still announce the suspension of all Amazon advertising?

According to the explanation in his tweet, every year he uses 8% of Amazon's revenue to put 8% of Amazon's revenue into Amazon's internal advertising, and competes for the advertising space at the top of the keyword.

But then the problem he discovered was that his listing would appear in the top ad position on Amazon for the same keyword, as well as in the organic search position. Because the top ad slots have more traffic, more customers are now not buying in the organic search results, but more clicking on the ad to buy the product. This has increased the cost of sales a lot and diluted profits.

Another problem he found was that when the same product appeared in both the homepage advertising space and the natural search position under the same keyword, if the advertisement had more clicks and conversions, it would actually cause the ranking of the natural search position to drop.

He also quoted Bezos as saying that Amazon advertising only works for new products that no one knows about. So, he needs to disable all ads if he thinks his Listing has enough sales and organic search volume.

Next, he mentioned his strategy after deactivating ads, which is to focus more on branded searches and encourage customers to find their products more through "simply modern". Bryan didn't say how, but we learned that Bryan did not put an after-sales card in each product package, but a catalog of all the products in his Amazon store to encourage customers to repeat purchases.

And he also allows his opponents to use simply modern as a keyword to advertise, because he thinks that this is a competitor promoting himself, and customers will still click on products with Simply Modern in the title in the search results.

And he also emphasized one point, that is, as a VC seller, you can participate in more promotional activities on Amazon, because he found that the promotion of seckill, BD and other activities on keywords is far greater than keyword advertising.

Bryan's 3 takeaways on Amazon Advertising

1. For sellers with thousands or tens of thousands of reviews on most products in the store, high star reviews and stable sales, they should start exploring more promotion models that avoid advertising on Amazon;

2. For most sellers, Amazon's advertising is still very important. If you grasp it well, it can effectively dilute the orders of Best Seller's popular products and popular products.

3. But for all sellers, advertising will dilute the seller's profit.

For all Amazon sellers, his advice is:

Good-performing product advertisements can quickly improve keyword rankings and greatly increase non-advertising organic orders; advertising is only a "+1 option", but shipment rate, new products and off-site advertising will be an important operational task in his opinion . Sellers need to continuously optimize their listings so that the conversion rate can continue to increase.

Part 3: Hui.com's view on Amazon Advertising

In our opinion, there are not many sellers like Bryan Porter on the scale, and Bryan himself will know that once he stops Amazon advertising, it is very likely that all the listing organic rankings and sales of the entire store will drop significantly. It's an adventure, but also an attempt.

Here, I will also share with you the experience and experience of advertising in the process of Huiwang Smart Camp.

First of all, let's see that Bryan actually has his own off-site platform (
), which means that even if he doesn’t get customers from Amazon Advertising, he can import off-site traffic into his products on Amazon. This is something that most Chinese sellers can't do, so if you don't have off-site operations, Amazon's on-site advertising is still recommended not to stop.

Secondly, the reason why Amazon's on-site advertising has improved keywords is mainly because the click and conversion of the advertisement will double the calculation of a Listing.

Anatomy of Amazon Advertising Click Weight Algorithm

The following is an example of the Listing link that we have clicked on an advertisement for you (to protect the seller's privacy, the Listing information has been modified), you can see:
1. The first group of orange marked keywords is the ad group ID of this group of Amazon ads, followed by the keyword kids water bottles

2. The second group of orange labels are timestamp-based search results keywords, which are also kids water bottles

Amazon Advertising Link Analysis:

; keywords=kids+water+bottles &qid=1649367554& sprefix=kids+water+bottles %2Caps%2C255&sr=8-2-spons&

After this link, there is a long paragraph of Amazon's advertising click code, which we will delete first. But from here, it can be explained why advertising can quickly improve keywords, but the natural ranking will drop rapidly after not advertising.

Finally, we can also see from the advertisements that Huiwang Zhiying helps Hui members, the ACoS and conversion rate of the advertisements are often not very good without any sales data for the newly listed listings, but for those with sufficient history For listings with sales data, even if the advertising budget is 50-70% less than the new listing, the conversion rate and ACoS performance of the ads will be better. We can't say that the number of reviews in the old and new listings is the only factor that causes this problem, because after all, customers buy products based on their selling points and cost performance, so a new product proposal needs to use a more competitive price in the early stage of promotion to accumulate for advertising. Conversion rates and data.

It doesn't take long but the purpose is to let Amazon's algorithm know exactly what keywords and who to show your listing to. For products with sufficient historical data, although we do not recommend that you cut off all Amazon advertising budgets like Bryan Porter, at least the amount of advertising can be much smaller.

I hope this article will give you more inspiration for Amazon advertising.