Whether you've got a fake Amazon review problem or just want to see a boost in your sales, Editorial Recommendations can help. In this webinar, Eric Suddarth of Seller Rocket explains everything you need to know about Amazon Editorial Recommendations.
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Plus, get answers to all of your questions about this Amazon program. Watch the webinar today!
The rise in scams on the internet has damaged consumer trust, and fake Amazon reviews have only made things worse. When you’ve worked so hard to build your brand reputation, watching your business be impacted by this dynamic can be devastating. If you’ve been left wondering what you can do to get back on track, we have some answers!
In this webinar, Seller Rocket’s Eric Suddarth and eComEngine’s Becky Trowbridge discuss Amazon Editorial Recommendations and how they can put more trust behind your products and help you fight back against fake reviews.
Buyers rely on Amazon reviews to make purchases. Despite its convenience, shopping online comes with unique challenges. As Becky explained, “You can't go into a store and just pick something up and examine the quality. You really have to rely on what you're being told in the listing, what you're seeing in the images, and then what you're actually hearing from other buyers in the reviews.”
Having accurate, positive reviews can make or break an Amazon business. Not only can they attract buyers and build your brand, but they also provide crucial information. “Reviews are critical because they tell us so much. Where else can you get this much information directly from your target audience? They're telling you what they love and hate. They're telling you ‘fix this, add this feature, add this color' and more.” For so many reasons, the importance of Amazon reviews cannot be overstated.
No matter what they’re buying, people like to do research. They compare prices, quality, and look for what others have to say about a product. As Eric noted, “We have data that shows about 50% of product research today is done solely on Amazon.com...50% of people are going straight to Amazon with a high intent to purchase, but they want to do some research before they click the purchase button. And so they are looking for recommendations.”
That’s where Editorial Recommendations can make a huge impact. These types of reviews are written by trusted publishers such as The New York Times and Forbes and help set expectations about the products you sell. Having this type of endorsement can go a long way towards offsetting fake Amazon reviews and gaining trust from potential customers.
Currently, there are two types of Editorial Recommendations — those that can be found directly on Amazon and those that are published on other websites.
Amazon Editorial Recommendations appear on the first page of Amazon's search results and are usually placed within the top third of a product page. The publishers who write these full-length articles have been invited by Amazon through their Onsite Associates Program.
Meanwhile, off-Amazon Editorial Recommendations, or Publisher-Site Recommendations, are written by members of the Amazon Associates Program. These publishers include influencers and bloggers who are compensated for any traffic they drive to Amazon that leads to a sale. Remember when we said that 50% of shoppers do their research on Amazon? The other 50% use Google. When they perform a search, they’re met with thousands of articles, blog posts, and videos of people sharing their reviews. That’s where customers will find these Editorial Recommendations.
While you'll hear a lot of information about how valuable Editorial Recommendations are, accessing them on your own is extremely difficult. That's where Seller Rocket can help. Watch the video to hear Eric explain how Seller Rocket can also help you get your products featured.
(Spoiler: Your reviews play a key role in your inclusion, so you'll want to use FeedbackFive to improve your ratings!)
Running an Amazon business takes hard work, dedication, and a little bit of luck. Gaining valuable insight and support by using the right tools and resources can give you the edge you need to stay ahead of the game. Don’t let fake Amazon reviews take you down. Take action and go from surviving to thriving!
Becky: My name is Becky and I'm the digital marketing manager here at eComEngine. You've probably seen me around before. I've been here for about five years. Today I'm joined by Eric Suddarth from Seller Rocket. Eric is actually based in Indiana like I am. We discovered that he's on the north side of Indianapolis and I'm on the south side. We're really excited to have him here to talk about Amazon Editorial Recommendations and how they can help you and your business offset fake reviews, negative reviews, and also just hopefully see a sales boost.
Becky: Eric's a really interesting guy. He actually went to West Point, spent five years as a US army officer, served a year of combat deployment in Iraq. And then he went on to work at Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly. He has an MBA from Kellogg, but maybe the most interesting thing about him is he is a fantasy football dominator. Apparently, his team has something to look out for.
Eric: That's true. That's my favorite part about the bio. Thanks, Becky.
Becky: We're excited to have Eric join us today, and he's got a lot to talk about with Editorial Recommendations. I'm sure y'all are going to have lots of questions throughout the webinar, which is being recorded, and we will send it out tomorrow as an email and it will later be on our website with the show notes and the transcript and all that. Any resources from the webinar today we'll have posted for you. Feel free to ask questions at any time throughout the webinar and we'll either answer them in the chat or save them for Eric at the end. I know he really likes answering questions, so bring them on.
Becky: I just wanted to go over our agenda quickly if I can. There we go. All right. Today we're talking about Amazon fake reviews and how they impact your business. Then we'll turn it over to Eric and talk about Editorial Recommendations, how they can help drive sales, pros and cons of on Amazon versus off Amazon Editorial Recommendation. He'll talk about what that means, and I'm sure you'll have lots of questions about that. And then we'll get some answers to your questions. I'll stop sharing now and just briefly talk about the fake review problem on Amazon, which is something that Eric had a lot of interesting thoughts on when we were talking about and preparing for this webinar.
Becky: We often see fake reviews on Amazon, on the news. It's definitely a topic that is very important to sellers, buyers, and Amazon itself. Over the years we've seen Amazon get more and more strict about how they handle reviews because the ecosystem is so important to them. And I think it's worth pointing out that Amazon was really the pioneer in the online review space. They're writing the book as it's happening. More and more scams, things have come up over the years as the internet has progressed. Amazon really has to protect that review environment because buyers rely on reviews to make decisions about what they're purchasing online.
Becky: You can't go into a store and just pick something up and examine the quality. You really have to rely on what you're being told in the listing, what you're seeing in the images, and then what you're actually hearing from other buyers in the reviews. And then for you as sellers, reviews are critical because it tells you so much, where else do you get this much information directly from your target audience. They're telling you what they love and hate. They're telling you fix this, add this feature, add this color. I would really like this to do something else.
Becky: You get a lot of information from your buyers directly that can in turn allow you to improve your business. And so we've always really advocated for reviews, not only to improve your rankings, boost your sales, but also just to help you continue to improve your business, continue to grow your brand and just really shine on Amazon. And then for Amazon, something like 50% of product searches start on Amazon. People rely on Amazon because of the reviews. And so that trust is really important. And when that trust is broken, it can cause a lot of problems.
Becky: So as a seller it's really tough for you if you start seeing negative reviews. I wanted to talk about what to look for, patterns to look for. If you start seeing a lot of reviews in a short time, that seem sketchy, or if you're seeing things that are mentioning, maybe something that doesn't really have anything to do with your product over and over again or even just reviews about a different product entirely. We've seen that before. You definitely want to report those. It won't always go somewhere, but at least you can take the step. Then if you do need to escalate, you have taken the first step in trying to get rid of those fake reviews.
Becky: And so you can email communitysupport@amazon, or you can go to Seller Central and work on the help page, or you can actually just report abuse on the product detail page right next to the review itself. And then send a report to Amazon. Amazon is pretty strict about when they'll remove reviews. It's usually only if it violates the community guidelines. If you're seeing offensive language, something that includes personally identifiable information about you, something like that, definitely report it. It will almost certainly get removed. Otherwise, you're looking at either or the reviewer has to remove it. You cannot ask them to. Remember that that is a violation of Amazon policy.
Becky: If multiple products are incorrectly listed as the same product, sometimes Amazon will come in and clean that up and get rid of those reviews. Unusual review behavior, they might take away the reviews if they see a lot of sketch ones, or if you report. There are a bunch of reviews that don't look correct. Or in some cases, Amazon will only accept and display verified reviews that are actually from purchases made on the platform. We think that that tends to happen when there's been suspicious behavior in the past and Amazon's trying to control because anyone can leave a review on an Amazon listing at any time.
Becky: In some cases, Amazon actually tightens it up to just people that purchase directly on Amazon. Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do because you can't comment on these negative reviews or a fake review. There's not really much to do beyond escalating it and letting Amazon know and trying to report it. And then the thing that we always talk about here at eComEngine is, it's important to keep getting those reviews. If you're seeing fake reviews, but you have new legitimate reviews coming in, that's going to help offset the fake reviews and show people that real people are purchasing your product. They're having real experiences with it, and this is what to expect.
Becky: And so that's where I wanted to get with Eric because I think that Editorial Recommendations are really exciting. It's a different piece of Amazon that we haven't seen before. It gives this new level of trust because they're actually working with offsite publishers that are recommending products that are sold on Amazon. And working with a feature like Editorial Recommendations can be a really good way to bring in more reviews and offset those fake reviews. With that, I'll hand it over to you. Why don't you just tell us what Editorial Recommendations are?
Eric: Sure. Thanks, Becky. I appreciate that. Thanks again to eComEngine for your kindness and inviting me to this webinar today. I see 57 people on right now, so it's super exciting. So be thinking while I'm talking about all kinds of questions because I definitely want to take those. What is an Editorial Recommendation? Well, first let's start at the beginning. No matter what you're selling on Amazon, certain people are going to want to do research. We find that research differs based on price points. Sometimes there's a mental price point in my head. Okay. If I'm going to spend more than $25 on a purchase, I'm going to do some research.
Eric: Or if I'm going to buy something really important, an N95 face mask during COVID. I want to research. I want recommendations on what I should purchase. There are different things that are going to push people to do certain amounts of research. And so if I'm going to do research, we have data that shows online about 50% of product research today is done solely on amazon.com, search. 50% of people are going straight to Amazon with a high intent to purchase, but they want to do some research before they click the purchase button. And so they are looking for recommendations.
Eric: They're going to look at different products. They're going to look at reviews on those products. But another area that they can look at are called Editorial Recommendations. And so we'll get into that more in a second. 50% of people are looking on Amazon doing research. The other 50% are going to Google and they're out there. So let's take that N95 face mask example. Maybe I've gone to Google and I type in best N95 face mask. I'm going to find tons of articles that are written by different publishers that are going to give me product recommendations.
Eric: Within these articles, the articles will usually link to products that exist on e-commerce websites. I'm going to show you some examples of that here in a minute that I have pulled up. But 50% are searching on Amazon for your product. 50% are out on Google searching for recommendations on your product. And so at Seller Rocket, we want to help those users find you with a trusted publisher name behind your brand. An Editorial Recommendation is basically just an article written by a third-party publisher, that's talking about products in a specific category.
Eric: In the face mask example, let's say that I'm Everyday Health. I'm a publisher that writes about health-related topics. I have an article about best N95 face masks. In there I'm going to review several products. I'm going to give pros and cons, make recommendations, and then likely have links to products in that article that I reviewed. And so if I am selling an N95 face mask, and I know that I can get a trusted publisher name like Everyday Health to recommend my product. Now I'm helping, to Becky's point, I'm offsetting potentially fake views, negative reviews about my product with a trusted brand name of a third-party publisher, a neutral party that is recommending my product. And so we find that users want that. They're looking for that additional trust behind a brand name.
Eric: And so I'm going to share my screen here for just a second and show you a couple of things real quick. At Seller Rocket, there are a few different things that we say that we do. I circled in red the two things we're going to talk about today. We can help advocate for brands to get them featured into content that lives on amazon.com, search. These are editorials written by third-party publishers. I'm going to show you a few examples. Then we can also advocate to help get you featured into content that lives off of Google search results. These are articles that live on publisher websites.
Eric: I showed an example here from USA Today, I've got a few examples that I'll show you in a second. We have a lot publisher partners that have high-ranking Google search result content. Some of these articles are ranking for a keyword on first page, Google search already, which is pretty exciting. Those are the two things we're going to talk about today. And so let me pull up an example on Amazon, to let you see something live right now. I came out here and I searched for vacuum cleaner. Okay? And so as I'm scrolling down, I see different products. I see the highly rated section, the video ad, and then boom, right here, about 25% of the way down the page I see a number of different articles related to this search.
Eric: You can see different publishers like Gear Hungry, CNET, TechGearLab, This Old House, they've all written articles about vacuums. If I click on the one for This Old House, for instance, I can see that it will always have a publisher name who wrote the article. And then there's going to be details about the products that are in the article. And also there's going to be a link. Let's say after I read this article, I think, wow, this Dyson vacuum sounds great. I think I want to purchase this vacuum.
Eric: If I add this product to cart and purchase within 24 hours, this will be considered an attributable sale to this editorial. And so the publisher, which in this case was This Old House would get an affiliate commission from Amazon because Amazon really wants to keep that user on Amazon once they're there doing product research on vacuums. Amazon wants that person not to go to Google to do research. They want them to complete their research and their purchase on amazon.com. They're willing to help pay the publisher for that. So they would pay an affiliate commission here to This Old House.
Eric: Let me show you another example. This one is a little bit of a different view. Let's say I want to buy a basketball. I typed in basketball, scroll down, and a little bit farther down the page. This one's about 50% down, page one. Here I see a different view. This is also an editorial recommendation. If you remember the vacuum, when I typed in vacuum cleaner, I found five different articles. Here I've only found one article and it actually features three products. This was the traditional way that the editorials on Amazon always looked, until a few months ago Amazon started showing some different views like I showed you a second ago with multiple articles.
Eric: But here there are three basketballs shown. If I click the arrow to the right, there's an additional fourth product out to the right side. But this article was written by Verywell Fit, which if I click here on the full article, I get the same view I had on the Old House, online vacuum article, where now there's more detail on all the basketball success, etc. But if I decide, you know what, I don't want to read the full article or maybe I'm the user. I don't even see this link. I just am looking and say, oh, well, this editorial recommendation recommends that this Spalding basketball is the best overall pick.
Eric: I decide to click on it, add to cart, and purchase. In the same way as the Dyson vacuum cleaner was, that I showed a second ago, this would be an attributable sale to this editorial. And so the publisher, which in this case was Verywell Fit would receive an affiliate commission from Amazon. And so you can actually see when I just click back. Now it's actually shown a different view with multiple articles. Anyway, before I go into the off of Amazon examples, just a couple of things that I want to round up on from a summary point here. These articles exist in basically every category on Amazon.
Eric: And so there's almost no product category where you wouldn't be able to find editorial recommendations. The content is fully written by a publisher. It's not written by the brand. It's not written by Seller Rocket. It's not written by Amazon. It's written by a publisher. And if you ever have questions about this program, you can at any time go and look up details. It's called the Amazon Onsite Associates program. And you'll get basically a disclaimer from Amazon explaining how the program works. And that basically third party publish who are invited into this program to write about content, about products. And that Amazon does not write this content.
Eric: The only thing Amazon does, they have final approval of the content, but the publisher is completely neutral from Amazon in the process. And so basically this is a way that a third-party publisher can put their trusted name behind potentially your product. And so you can think of Seller Rocket as an advocate on your behalf. So Seller Rocket has relationships with hundreds of publishers. Well, the on and off of Amazon. And so Seller Rocket can help advocate for your brand to these publishers and say, hey, I'm talking to a seller that also sells a basketball brand. I know that I've got numerous publishers that have already written about basketball content on Amazon. And so I can go and advocate on your behalf to say, hey, I've got another great basketball brand. Would you like to put this brand in your article?
Eric: And so this is basically a much more successful way to help you get into content like this. You as the seller can try to go directly to the publisher. You're very unlikely to get traction. There are so many requests that go to publishers and they have usually very small staffs that it's very unlikely that you're going to get success with getting them to pick you up directly. I'm seeing a lot of questions come in. Let me now go quickly to the off of Amazon examples. I want to show you this as well. Remember, 50% of users are likely looking for you off of Amazon. And so we want to make sure if they go out to Google and they're looking for your brand, that they can find you.
Eric: We work with a client today, for instance, that sells a self-tanning spray, a bronzing spray. And so if you go out to Google and you type in best bronzing spray. If you look right here, the very first article written by the L.A. Times, right under sponsored ads on Google. Well, this article right here. I opened it. And so you'll see that these articles are pretty similar to the content that you see on Amazon. There's usually a disclaimer on these websites that'll say, if you make a purchase through this article, that the publisher would get a commission. So you can see that, it talks about that here.
Eric: Let's say that I scrolled out, I read through the article and I decide, you know what, this Australian gold gel bronzing spray is the one that I really want. I'm going to go to Amazon. I'm going to purchase it. Now, if you notice, when I click the link, the URL up here on Amazon says bestcovery.com, which was this property from the LA Times. And so basically Amazon is putting breadcrumbs into the URL to know, okay, if I add to cart and I purchase this, Amazon's going to pay an affiliate commission to Bestcovery for driving that traffic that started on Google, to the Bestcovery article, to Amazon, to purchase. Amazon wants to pay for that traffic that comes from external sources.
Eric: I've got another example here, resistance training equipment, type that into Google. You'll see that the second listing here, or the second website on Google right below the ads is a Sports Illustrated article. This is another publisher partner that we work with. You can see similarly, there's a review of a number of different products, and same thing, it's going to drive you to Amazon to make a purchase. I add to cart and purchase. You can see here, same thing. There's Sports Illustrated, breadcrumbs up in the URL. And so basically what we at Seller Rocket want to do, we want to help advocate for your brand with not only the onsite publishers or the publishers writing on Amazon, we want to advocate for your brand off of Amazon as well.
Eric: If I'm doing product research and I start on Google, I can potentially find your brand. Or if I start on Amazon, I can potentially find your brand with a trusted publisher name behind it. And so I'm going to stop there and see, Becky if you had other questions you wanted me to go through, or if you wanted me to start taking audience questions. But that's a real quick overview of editorials and then what they look like and how they work both on and off of Amazon.
Becky: Great. I'll just pose these to you from the top. I'll throw them at you and you can answer.
Eric: Let's do it. All right. Sounds good.
Becky: All right. Tam asked, I reached out to these third-party publishers and none of them replied to me. I emailed them and reached out to them on their Instagram pages and it still didn't work. How can I reach out to them?
Eric: Yes. That's what I was mentioning earlier Tam. You're probably not going to get a response directly from any of them. That's just the way that most of those companies just don't have enough people there. They rely on a source like Seller Rocket to basically help filter requests for them. Our company was founded by a couple of folks who worked before at a publisher called Best Reviews. They realized that these publisher companies don't have the manpower necessary to go through all these requests directly. It's not efficient. And so they realize, hey, there's an inefficiency in this market. Somebody needs to advocate on behalf of sellers. They founded Seller Rocket.
Eric: Basically we advocate on your behalf to hundreds of publishers we have relationships with. Instead of you trying to go direct to Sports Illustrated for your one product and one publisher, we can take your one product to 200 publishers, and you have to worry about contracting with them, getting somebody to write you back, negotiating pricing, all that stuff. You work just with us, and we basically take care of all that for you. Hopefully, that helps answer your question.
Becky: Yeah. And then it looks like we've got a couple of questions about other Amazon marketplaces, specifically the UK, France, Germany. Is this available outside of the US?
Eric: Right now Seller Rocket supports the US, the UK, and Canada. We are slowly working our way into Germany. I think we've signed one publisher there, but it's not a widespread opportunity yet. But US, UK, Canada, yes. US, UK, Canada do have onsite editorial opportunities on Amazon today. We work with publishers in all three of those marketplaces. We have a lot of ASINs that we already support in those three markets.
Becky: Great. And then someone else is asking if there are any category restrictions, I.e. food supplements.
Eric: Yes. I knew this question would come in. We would work with sellers in virtually every category except a few. I'll name the exceptions because basically everything else we would support. We cannot work with adult theme products or products that are political or religious in nature, weapons. Now, those are all off the table for on or off Amazon content. Supplements are the one hippy area. Off of Amazon, offsite content, we have some amazing articles and we have a lot of supplement customers already. We have a number of articles that rank first page Google with great publishers like Sports Illustrated.
Eric: And so we already have great places to potentially advocate for high-ranking content on Google for supplements. On Amazon we've seen a couple of things happen back and forth. At one point in 2021, Amazon was approving hundreds of supplement articles on Amazon. And then in Q3, Amazon made a decision that they wanted to remove a lot of supplement articles. And so it's much more difficult to get them approved now, if Amazon thinks that in any way the supplement is trying to make a health claim, they see that as a big risk. And so we caution when folks bring supplements ASINs to us, we say that, hey, we will try. We'll do what we can to try to get an onsite Amazon Editorial approved for you and to get you into content with the publisher there, but we can't make a promise.
Eric: You would never pay us for anything unless an article goes live, but we can definitely get you into offsite off of Amazon content for supplements. Basically, every other category that I didn't just talk about, we already work with people in. If you search around on Amazon, off of Amazon, likely find all kinds of editorials already. You'll see that it's definitely, there's a plethora of content already out there.
Becky: Yup. For sure. Robert asked, do you believe that having editorial recommendations naturally boosts organic search ranking before users even convert? Obviously having more screen real estate is helpful, but I wonder if Amazon naturally promotes products that have editorial recommendations.
Eric: Great question, Robert. I'll say that we have done a few case studies where we've seen that happen. We've seen a few things improve, not just the sales lift from editorials, but we've seen BSR rank improve. We've seen organic keywords search rank improve. I will say though, that not in every case. Sometimes that depends on your category, keyword search volume, competitors that are also going after those keywords. There are some other factors, but we've seen some strong results there. And if you are potentially interested in editorials and you reach out to us, we can talk through in detail, a number of different case studies.
Eric: We have case studies across a number of different categories. We can talk to you a little bit more about what you might be able to expect for your category, not just from sales lift, but we can also do keyword consulting with you. We can look in Helium 10 at some of those keywords you're already wanting to target. Where your ASIN is on those keywords today and how editorials might be able to help with that. The one thing that is a little unique about the onsite Amazon Editorial from a keyword standpoint, the main thing that's different for editorials versus a sponsored ad.
Eric: If I'm doing an ad on Amazon and I'm doing PPC advertising, I know the keyword that I'm bidding on. I know what the keyword is. I know how much I'm paying for it and I get all kinds of data around that. The difference with an editorial, I don't know, Amazon does not publicize what keyword makes it render. There can be a number of keywords that can make it render, but not 100% of the time. And also Becky and I could search the same keyword. I might find an editorial. Becky might find none, or she might find a different editorial that I can't find. And so you have to know that Amazon's search algorithms are super complicated with this, and they've never publicized to Seller Rocket or anybody else, all the different factors that go into that.
Eric: The things that we think go into it, definitely keyword, search volume and search rank or organic rank on the keyword. We think sales velocity of the products in the article have a play in it. We think a click-through rate on the products in the article have a play in it as well. But also your search history as a user on Amazon, we think plays into it as well. Like, what Amazon think they need to show you to make it more likely for you to convert? These are some of the things that make it different than PPC advertising. And so just know that the keyword is only one piece of the puzzle. Sorry if I went in a number of different directions there, but I wanted to give you additional context.
Becky: Great. Tony had asked if you could repeat the name of the program. I think it might have been the onsite publishing when you were talking about that.
Eric: It's the Amazon Onsite Associates program. The basketball article that I had, I would've to research to try and find it again because the keyword is now rendering multiple articles. But if you see the editorial that's showing three products in it. So it's not multiple articles, just the one article with three products at the top, above the first product, you'll see a link that says earns commissions. If you click on that link, that will take you to the description of the Onsite Associates program, where it'll talk about what the program is, that Amazon doesn't write the content, it's written solely by publishers who are invited for an invitation-only program. It gives all those details that I was talking through.
Becky: Great. Matt asked, what is the sales increase expected from being featured in an editorial?
Eric: Matt, this is also quite variable based on a number of different factors, principally the category you're selling in, how competitive it is, and your product against who else you're competing against. Also, some other things factor into this. What's your organic rank? What's your PPC strategy already? Is the only place somebody's seen your product in the editorial because your organic rank and you and your sponsor bank are not strong enough to see your first page? Some of these other things factor in as well. Because what we do see is, we call this the halo effect. I didn't pull up an example of this, but we have a few clients that have done this well.
Eric: Let's say I have a product, an ASIN that shows up because my sponsor rank is high. I see the product and sponsored ads on page one. Organic rank is high, so I scroll a little further down. I see the product for a second time now, organically. And then now I see it for the third time on page one in an editorial. Now, we find actually the majority of the sales in that situation will go through the organic or the sponsored placement. But we know that the editorial plays a factor in that. Now, Seller Rocket through our dashboard, we will be able to show you all the sales that were attributed to the editorial.
Eric: Anybody who clicked on the editorial, then purchase your product through it, we would get that data and be able to show you that. What we can't show you is if somebody sees you three times and then scrolls back up and clicks through your sponsored placement or clicks through your organic placement and purchases, we would not see that data, but we have partnered with a number of clients to have them tell us their entire sales for a case study. So we could see what is the halo effect that we're helping drive. And so what I would prefer to do rather than quoting percentages would be to have you contact us, launch@sellerrocket.io.
Eric: We would love to look at your catalog, the products you sell, and then we can give you some case studies that would apply well to your category. But we definitely do find that it has an effect. We've seen some significant sales growth, well above baseline for certain categories, and then others we've seen more measured results. Some of it just depends on these other factors. We would love to talk with you more and see, dig into your situation and come up with a custom answer for you based on what you sell.
Becky: Makes sense. I see that Kev is asking about, he said Amazon used to allow new sellers to buy reviews. Is that no longer available? Kev, I think you might be talking about the Amazon Early Reviewer program. And that was sunsetted, I think a couple of years ago now. Amazon used to have this program where if you were launching a product, you could actually pay a fee. I think it was $60 per ASIN to enroll. And then Amazon would send a small reward to reviewers after they reviewed. They didn't know that they were going to get that incentive. Way back when I started here, you were actually able to send free products in exchange for a review.
Becky: That's been out of practice since I think 2016. Definitely not okay. You can't incentivize reviews in any way. And if you have questions, I see that you were also saying that reviews seem to be a major hurdle. If you're not already using FeedbackFive, I'd definitely recommend giving a trial, a shot. Our customer success team, everyone on our team can help you. We actually do free product review consultation calls. So we can just do a 15 minute call with you, go through your products, go through your review strategy.
Becky: And then if you are a customer and you haven't taken advantage of our one-on-one onboarding, I would recommend just reaching out to customer success. They'd be more than happy to help you. So definitely check that out. And then let's see, back to Eric. Haley asked, maybe I missed this, but what are the ASIN requirements to qualify for editorials, i.e. four-star review?
Eric: Yes. Great. Good question. For onsite editorials that live on Amazon, this is not a hard and fast rule. This is more of a rule of thumb that we use based on submitting thousands and thousands of requests to publishers in the last couple of years. But we use a rule of thumb of a four-star rating and at least 100 reviews on Amazon. If you don't have that yet, we suggest you talk to our friends at eComEngine to help figure out your strategy to get there. But there are a couple of exceptions to the 100 reviews and four stars. If you're really, really close, let's say you have four stars and 90 reviews, and it's a strong product. We look at your search volume rank organically, and we feel like, okay, this one is probably fine. We'll put it forward.
Eric: What we won't do is if a product is brand new, has three reviews and two stars, we can't put that forward for a couple of reasons. One, our entire business is built on the publisher relationships that we have, because Seller Rocket, we're not writing any of the content. Our whole secret sauce is in helping advocate for you to all these publisher relationships we have. Because you can try to go direct to them, but as Nam said earlier, you're likely never going to get a response. Our whole secret sauce is on the relationships we've built.
Eric: And so what we don't want to do is put the publishers in a difficult spot by saying, write about this product that doesn't have good reviews or strong enough rating. Say they write about it and they submit it to Amazon. It gets rejected or Amazon comes back to the publisher and says, hey, what kind of research did you do about this product? Because we don't think you should be writing about this and recommending this product. We don't want to go down that path. We try to protect that relationship and filter those out before we had ever submit them to the publisher.
Eric: That's why we have that. We're not trying to be super difficult or make this more challenging for you. But what we can do, if you don't yet have four stars and 100 reviews on Amazon, we can definitely advocate for you to get into offsite content. Off of Amazon content, we don't have the same requirement there because Amazon plays no part in the approval process. This is a great place that we can help put brand new products. We love to put every product in both places, but if we have a new product that we can't get on Amazon yet for onsite editorials, we love to put it into offsite content, help that drive traffic to your PDP, get more reviews, more conversions, get over the four-star rating requirement.
Eric: Then we can advocate to put you into onsite content second. That's a strategy we've used before for new product launches
Becky: Makes sense. Let's see, Clark is asking, do we get sales attribution for any editorials that get featured? I think you touched on that earlier when you were talking about how, depending on how people see it and where they click on it.
Eric: Yes. Clark, we do. It's in our Seller Rocket dashboard, that if you're a client of ours, you would get access to this. You'd be able to see all those transactions that came through the editorials both on or off of Amazon. And so for the onsite editorials, the majority of those transactions show up throughout the month. You'd be able to see those basically in real-time. We do not get a transaction ID. We only get a few things that Amazon provides to the publishers. We get a retail price, whether somebody purchased via a mobile device or desktop device. And then we also get the ASIN number and then we get the ship date of the product.
Eric: We don't get a transaction ID. We get that a lot. We also don't get any data about impressions from Amazon. We don't know how often the editorial rendered or how many times it rendered. We only get those conversions. But what I would love to do though Clark is, if you sign up with us, we would love to see and understand how many additional sales are you seeing that don't even go through the editorial. As I said before, you're likely going to see more conversions through organic and PPC placements than you are the editorial itself.
Eric: We like to use this analogy that a rising tide lifts all boats, and that's really what the editorial is going to do. It's going to help the campaigns you're already running to be more successful for you. And so those are not things you'll see in our dashboard. You'll only see what came directly through the editorial, but we have seen a number of clients have significant growth through those other channels, organic and PPC placements.
Becky: Awesome. Robert said, I sell printer ink that requires a printer for an editorial to be able to be written. Office products, category. Are editorials even possible for that type of product since it requires a test printer? I don't know how often that comes up with your publishers if they have any requirements for the products that they'll accept.
Eric: Okay. I don't think I understood the question at first. Is he saying that, will the publisher not write about it if they have a hard time testing my printer ink?
Becky: Yeah.
Eric: Is that what he means?
Becky: I think that's it. Yeah.
Eric: Okay. Printer ink is one that I have never searched for, but I bet if you gave me five minutes, I could probably find editorials on it. What I would challenge you to do is go on right now on Amazon. I know you'll find them on Google. But if you go on Amazon and type in a variance of different keywords, best printer ink, printer ink, printer ink cartridges, try a number of different things. I bet you'll start to find editorials that exist, whether they're in the single editorial with multiple products featured or you'll find the other look which is multiple articles. I bet you'll find them. They basically exist on everything.
Eric: Even earlier today, I was trying to buy some construction paper for one of my daughters and I found an article about best construction paper. I thought, well, this is not one that I really needed to do research on, but there it was. There are editorials just about everything that you can buy.
Becky: Right. And then we've got a couple of questions about how editorial reviews include competitor products as well. Competitors are being promoted with the seller's budget. Is that how it works?
Eric: Yeah. This is an area where this is just part of the way the editorial works. The publisher knows that they can make money by getting an affiliate commission from Amazon. So if they can feature products in their editorial, whether it's off of Amazon or on Amazon, and that they can get traffic that converts, they're going to get affiliate commissions. They're putting products in there that they think are the best products most likely to drive conversion. Now, they can do that without you proactively going to somebody like Seller Rocket and advocating for your brand. You can rely on happenstance or random chance that maybe going to pick you up, but then also they may decide to pull you out at any time.
Eric: If you work with Seller Rocket, and we advocate for, you're much less likely to be pulled out of the article, especially the offsite articles that live off of Amazon. If we help advocate to get you into a published article, you're likely to be there in perpetuity. Unless you terminate your relationship with Seller Rocket, you're likely going to be there in that article forever. On Amazon, every so often Amazon will pull content down or ask publishers to refresh the content, but you're still likely going to be for a while, a number of months.
Eric: What Seller Rocket cannot control, we cannot dictate to a publisher, hey, put this printer ink brand in the article and then don't put these two brands in the article. We can't do that. Because then it's basically just an ad. What we're doing instead, we're going to the publisher and saying, hey, we've got a great printer ink brand that we are talking to. Here it is. Would you like to write about it? And then the publisher will decide if they want to write about it. We have more than an 80% success rate with this, off of Amazon it's even higher. But for on Amazon, we have about an 80% success rate, that if somebody has 100 reviews and four stars and is in one of the categories we support, that if we advocate, we can help get them featured in an article somewhere.
Eric: Sometimes publishers will pick you up in multiple articles. If you have a really good product. For instance, we worked with a well-known women's yoga pant brand, for instance. When we were able to bring this brand to publishers, we had a lot of interest. We had numerous publishers wanting to write about the product. And so it was picked up in numerous articles. Sometimes we may have a brand that is not as interesting to publishers. And so we struggle to get a lot of them interested in it, but you would never pay Seller Rocket anything unless we get you into an article. But we cannot dictate the brands in it. We also can't dictate, we can't give a paragraph to the publisher and say, write exactly this about the product.
Eric: The publisher will do some research. They'll look at your PDP. They'll look at reviews about the product. They may search around on Google, see what else they can find about your product. And they'll write a really short snippet. I mean, you saw it's just a couple of sentences. We find very few people even read these real closely, but the publisher's going to write the content. We cannot give them something to copy and paste into the article. They're going to write it themselves.
Eric: But what we can do, we can take a random happenstance strategy of getting into an editorial and transform that into a proactive approach to say, no, I have this brand. I really want to be featured in editorial content to add additional trust to my brand. I'm going to work with Seller Rocket and they can advocate for me to hundreds of publishers and try and get me featured in content that's going to help increase my sales.
Becky: Makes sense. Clark asked, do you offer incentives to the publisher in terms of a sales bonus or flat fee?
Eric: No, we don't pay the publisher anything. The only way the publisher makes money from this is from the affiliate commissions on Amazon. Their whole reason for wanting to work with somebody like Seller Rocket is they know that we're doing some research on our end to bring them good brands that they can write about. And if those articles drive conversions, the publisher gets affiliate commissions from those. That's how the publisher makes money in this. The only thing that we are doing is basically taking lists of ASINs to publishers and saying, hey, here are all the ASINs that we've gotten from customers. Are you interested in these? That's basically what we're doing.
Becky: And then Hannah asked, what if Amazon declines the article? Does that happen often?
Eric: Sometimes. We've done this enough now that we try to avoid the pitfalls that would potentially end in a rejection by Amazon. The most often rejection right now is for supplement brands where Amazon thinks that the product is somehow making a health claim. And even sometimes we look through and we read the content the publisher wrote, and we don't feel it's a health claim at all, but Amazon just is I think a little skittish about supplement content. But for the most part outside of that, there aren't very many rejections because we work ahead of time with the publisher to ensure that we're bringing them good products that have good reviews already, 100 reviews, four stars, and good keyword rank organically.
Eric: And so we're trying to ensure that we choose and make good recommendations, so that if we go through all the work, advocate for you to the publisher, the publisher writes about you, the publisher is basically spending time and resources to write about your product. We want it to then get approved by Amazon, so it goes out online. Offsite, off of Amazon, some publishers have their own internal approval processes, but it's much simpler and quicker to get stuff up on a publisher website than it is on Amazon.
Becky: Okay. And then Cassandra said, would you take on more narrow categories such as diaper bags?
Eric: Yeah. I think I've actually seen diaper bag articles before. Yeah, absolutely, we would. Baby products are one category that a ton of research is done about baby products. We've got a number of clients that we work with already that sell kids toys, babies toys, we work with some diaper brands. That's a very research heavy category. So yes, that's a great one.
Becky: And then Jocelyn just asked, how long is the turnaround from when we provide the list of ASINs until we see an editorial piece both on and offsite?
Eric: Yeah. Great question, Jocelyn. It depends a little bit on a few factors, but we usually say that for offsite content, about four weeks or less, that you can see stuff live. And then onsite content, anywhere from eight to 12 weeks. It can take a little bit longer. One of the first things that our team will do, we have a separate team that works more closely with the publishers. They will work, they'll do some searches and determine what content that our publishers have, already exists in your category. Are there already diaper bag articles written? And if so, would your product be potentially a good fit for those?
Eric: We can basically make a targeted request to the publisher and say, hey, I know you already have seven diaper bag articles. Would you potentially want this brand to go into one of these? Or, hey, I know you already have a basketball article on Sports Illustrated. We now have a new brand that sells a basketball. We'd love to see if they could be in here. Our publisher team does that, not the Seller Rocket team. That's one thing that we're going to be doing. And so if the team can match you into an existing article, the turn time is a little faster. If the publisher has to write a completely new article and pick numerous brands and write all the content, then it can take a little longer, but eight to 12 weeks onsite, three to four weeks offsite is usually what we quote.
Becky: Okay. And then she followed up and said, does it matter if our products are FBA or seller fulfilled?
Eric: It doesn't, no. No. Whatever you prefer, that doesn't make a difference for us.
Becky: Okay. Isabella said, is it a problem that our product is already published in some articles? We would like to be a part of additional editorials.
Eric: Not a problem. Not a problem at all. That's something that we see consistently. Like I mentioned before, if I am a seller, I don't want to leave this up to completely random chance as to what I show up in, who wrote about me, what they said. I would want somebody advocating and influencing on my behalf, that has relationships everywhere. So yes, you could potentially show up in some stuff organically. You could much more easily also be pulled out of it at any time. We want, if I was you, I would want somebody to advocate on my behalf to get me into more content and to keep me there. And so that's where Seller Rocket could help you out.
Becky: All right. And now the big one, because I'm sure you know, we've gotten a lot of questions about pricing. We got a couple that are related and I'm just going to throw them all at you at the same time, because I think they all relate. We have one asking about how Seller Rocket is different from other providers in the Amazon Onsite Associates program. And one about how many publishers you would advocate for one brand and how much it would cost. And then a lot about, is this a subscription or is it per product? I can repeat that if you need me to.
Eric: No, that's okay. Let me dive into the way this works pricing wise. The easiest thing you can do is reach out to us at launch@sellerrocket.io. We'll do a custom pitch and demo for you. We'll look at your catalog and make recommendations to you on what would be the best for our program. But the way our pricing model works, we have three elements to it. There's an initiation fee that's only charged when an article goes live. If we can't get you in an article for your products, you're never charged a penny by Seller Rocket. And then the other two fees, the recurring fee and the percent of attributable sales, those are charged once transactions begin, a month after the article is live.
Eric: If you start, if you talk to us today and we get you in an article in April, you would be charged an initiation fee then. And then starting in May, if there are transactions flowing, you'd be charged a recurring fee and a percent of attributable sales. We would have an account executive go through all of that with you, make you completely comfortable in the pricing model. Make sure you understand. Everything is charged per parent ASIN as well. It's not a per article fee. If you give us a parent ASIN that seven publishers want to write about and you get seven articles, you only pay the initiation fee one time. You'd also only pay the recurring fee once a month. You wouldn't pay it seven times for all seven articles.
Eric: We do that on purpose because we don't want a negative consequence for brands that have a really good product. If you have a really good product and a lot of publishers want to write about it, we don't want to bill you more. We want to make you excited to give us your best ASINs and your best products, because lots of publishers want to write about them, but we don't want you to have to pay a per article fee. Hopefully that clears that up. But like I said, easiest thing, reach out to us, launch@sellerrocket.io, and we'll do a full pitch and demo and go through all the pricing questions with you.
Becky: Okay. And then Tim asked if there's a contract.
Eric: Yes. We would do a contract with you after we do a pitch and a demo and get all your questions answered. So yes, there would be.
Becky: Okay. Great. Well, thank you so much, Eric. This has been awesome. I'll go ahead and share my screen. Bear with me. We're doing a special offer for FeedbackFive. We're offering a 60 day free trial with coupon code Q1-2022. And if you need any help using that, just feel free to reach out and contact us. We're always here and happy to help. And then Eric, as he just mentioned, is offering a free consultation. If you have questions about the pricing, if you want to see if editorial recommendations are a good fit for your product, you can email that launch@sellerrocket.io. Is there anything else you'd like to say about that, Eric?
Eric: Just to say, thanks again to eComEngine for letting us participate in this webinar today, and thanks for your attention. We know that editorials can be very confusing. This is a unique space. We have found the easiest way to work through all your questions and to get you fully comfortable in it, is doing a demo with you. We can pull up examples from your product category. We can show you exactly how it would work, go through all the pricing. Please reach out to us and we'll make sure you're fully comfortable because this is a different space.
Eric: People are usually pretty familiar with reviews. Maybe they're familiar with PPC, ad campaigns, but this is like a black box to a lot of people, and they're very confused. Please reach out to us, we'll work with you and make sure that you are completely comfortable before you move forward.
Becky: Great. Love that. One-on-one service.
Eric: Yeah, exactly.
Becky: Well, thank you all for joining us today. Like I said, we'll be sending out the recording, the transcript, and the recap will be up soon on our webinars blog. So be sure to check that out. Thank you to Seller Rocket for participating today. I hope y'all have a great day. Thanks.
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