Amazon Vendor Central vs. Seller Central: Making the Switch

Transcript

Liz: Happy Tuesday, everyone, and welcome to our webinar. I'm Liz Fickenscher from eComEngine. I've got Carina McLeod with me here today to talk about the transition from seller to vendor, it's going to be a really awesome presentation.

Liz: I want you to ask questions, absolutely ask questions. So in your GoToWebinar control panel, you'll see a little place for questions, just enter them in there. And we'll pause occasionally to get Carina to answer your questions and then we'll do Q&A at the end as well. So we're going to get started.

Liz: Like I said, my name is Liz, I'm the one on the left and Carina is the one on the right. I do business development for eComEngine, our tools are FeedbackFive, RestockPro and eComSpy. And we do these webinars pretty often actually, and it's always exciting to have one of our good friends like Carina, who has so much industry experience with us to tell you about the things she knows.

Liz: I'm going to quit yammering and turn it over to her, Carina. Why don't you introduce yourself and just take it away?

Carina: Great, thank you, Liz. Everybody should now all see my screen. Okay. And that was great introduction. As Liz said, I'm Carina and I have a number of years experience in this industry. I call myself let's say an Amazon retail specialist. And what that means is, I work with both sellers and vendors, helping them understand Amazon, the wonderful ways of working with Amazon, which can be quite complex.

Carina: I have over 12 years experience and the first seven years, I spent working as a vendor manager at Amazon in the UK. I've worked across multiple product categories from home and garden, sports and fitness, apparel, jewelry, watches, you name it, I've had some kind of involvement in that product category. And very much I focused on introducing new categories into the UK market.

Carina: I spent seven years working as a vendor manager at Amazon. And I also had a lot of involvement with the administration teams out in India as well, the vendor support teams, which gave me a good understanding, not only from the retail teams, but also the challenges that Amazon faced on their side.

Carina: And then in 2013, I launched my own consulting business, eCommerce Nurse. So then I stepped away from Amazon and started working with sellers and vendors on the other side, helping them understand with my expertise and knowledge internally of Amazon, helping them understand the business and the ways in which they can grow on Amazon, which has then just grown from strength to strength, as Amazon continues to evolve and become really the beast that is today.

Carina: And then in 2018, I launched Vendor Society. And Vendor Society is a project that I've spent the last year working on. I'm going to talk briefly a bit about Vendor Society, and then I'm going to jump into the webinar.

Carina: So what is Vendor Society? Vendor Society is basically, it's an exclusive membership website that focuses on providing support for Amazon vendors. And what that means is a vendor or a potential vendor that's going to be setting up a relationship with Amazon via Vendor Central will sign up and become an annual member. And with that annual membership, they would then get support in the form of a help desk and also lots of content available.

Carina: We have question library webinars, how to training, how to guides, as well as a vendor forum where vendors can ask questions and share experiences amongst themselves. And it's really about helping vendors have the tools and knowledge to help them reach their sales potential. Partly because on Amazon, on the vendor side, which most of you that are probably attending this webinar have already got that experience on the seller side, where Amazon expect you to be self-sufficient.

Carina: It's not that you've got somebody on the other side of the phone that can give you all the answers. They might be able to support you to some extent, but really the expectation of Amazon is that Seller Central or Vendor Central is a self-service tool. And it's about you as a seller or a vendor, being able to learn everything about that system and all the different strategies, so you can maximize your sales potential and be self-sufficient and not be dependent on Amazon.

Carina: And this basically focuses on supporting vendors that have Vendor Central accounts in North America and also in the EU. So that includes the UK, Spain, Germany, France and Italy. Now, of course, the website is all in English, but already we do have members from Italy, from Germany, from Spain as well that have been able to take advantage of this website.

Carina: And it's supported by ex-Amazonians as well. There's a number of us that have different types of experience working in the retail teams at Amazon, as well as myself, as I mentioned, with over 12 years of experience.

Carina: So that just gives you a bit of background about Vendor Society. But I know that you're all dying to understand more about the topic that I'm going to be talking about today, which is the transition from being a seller, moving over to being a vendor on Amazon. Now, what often happens with this transition is often you might find that you've been a seller, selling on Amazon for a number of years or even a shorter period of time. You've been successful, your sales are booming on Amazon and Amazon have knocked on the door and said, hey, we love your products. We're interested in selling your products. We would love to invite you to sell your products as a vendor on Amazon. And they then offer you an invite to be able to sell your products on Amazon as a vendor via Vendor Central.

Carina: Now, when that happens, it's exciting. Especially if you're a private label and you've been working extremely hard on maximizing your sales potential on Amazon and then Amazon turn around and say, wow, your products are doing exceptionally well. We're interested in selling them.

Carina: Often that excitement can lead to a few things. It can lead to first the fact that it's almost like great, I want to sign up with Amazon. This is amazing. They're interested in our products. We've been working hard for years. And then sellers sign up, but often they sign up with a limited understanding of what that transition actually means.

Carina: And then as a result, sometimes those expectations aren't necessarily set from the retail teams, because their understanding is retail. It's not necessarily seller. And then what can happen is sometimes businesses start facing issues, start facing issues where their sales are disrupted because traffic drops, conversion drops, there are issues with the content, products aren't available, et cetera.

Carina: So today, I'm going to be talking about all the different things that you as a seller need to take into consideration when you make that transition over to a vendor. It's not that there's going to be complete zero disruption to sales. Often with any transition in business, there's there's going to be a few hiccups. But the idea here is to minimize that as much as you can.

Carina: So in terms of the topics that I'm going to be talking about today, first off I'm going to talk about the vendor role on Amazon and how that does differ to the seller role. I'm then going to be talking about the product assortment. So effectively the range of products that then you're going to offer to Amazon on the vendor side. I'm then going to talk about the possible impact on traffic conversion and the different things that you need to take into consideration and what areas can be impacted.

Carina: How to avoid those dreaded chargebacks. So you've probably read a lot of articles before you've taken that plunge or you're considering moving over to the vendor side, and you read a lot of articles about chargebacks and how frustrating How frustrating they are. I want to make sure that we touch on that and talk about how you can eliminate them as much as possible.

Carina: And then talk about, really summarizing all the points that we've discussed, and putting together your plan for transition. So it's not just about jumping from seller to vendor, it's making sure that you do have that plan in place, when taking those steps.

Carina: So first off, let's talk about the vendor's role on Amazon. So as I said, most of you are going to have been sellers. So you know as a seller on Amazon, you have taken the role as a retailer. So you're selling direct to consumer and you're selling direct to consumer via the Amazon platform.

Carina: The role then changes when you become a vendor. You then become a wholesaler. So you're not selling direct to consumer anymore, effectively Amazon is now your customer. So the relationship has changed. The customers, Amazon will then be selling products directly to the consumer. And Amazon is the retailer in this scenario.

Carina: And as I mentioned at the start, what that means is the vendor's role, you are required to be self-sufficient. Now with vendors, typically you'll find that the top 20% or not necessarily a specific 20%, it's just to give you an idea, but the top brands let's say that have a large proportion of the market share in their industry and are doing millions of revenue, millions and millions of revenue, then they will possibly have dedicated resource from Amazon in the form of a vendor manager.

Carina: But what often happens and this is reducing a lot, is that less vendors do have that dedicated support from the vendor manager. And more and more, especially the small to medium sized businesses, don't have that support. So they are required to be self-sufficient. So it's good to bear that in mind that you were self-service and self-sufficient on the seller. It's more than likely that when you jump to the vendor side, you won't have the vendor manager supporting and holding your hand. So it's about keeping on track with being self-sufficient, and making sure that you're utilizing all the tools available to you in Vendor Central.

Carina: And what also happened is Amazon then own the listing and the pricing. Now what that means when I say own the listing is effectively they're in charge of the content, because they are then liable for the content if the content is incorrect when they're selling that item to the customer. So it's really important for them that they are reviewing that content when a vendor sets those products up, and they will make necessary edits if they don't feel that content is correct or if it doesn't adhere to any of their guidelines, which I will talk about very shortly.

Carina: And also, Amazon own the pricing. So on the seller side, you are able to set your own retails. The days of setting your own retails when you become a vendor are gone. Amazon is able to set a retail price as they choose, and the vendor has no influence over that. And again, we'll be talking about that shortly as well.

Carina: Also there's high touch versus low touch management. Now, when I talk about high touch versus low touch, what I'm talking about is typically how the relationship works on the seller side is that first off, you have a new product and you nurture that product. So let's say I've got an example here of an image of a flower or a plant, and that you plant that seed and you're going to water that plant, you're going to do everything that you can to help that grow.

Carina: And you'll be doing that with your new products, you'll probably be changing the retail prices, trying to decide what is the best retail price to set the product at. You'll be running promotions, you're probably going to be editing the title and playing around with the listing, doing some A/B testing to really see if you can master the art of maximizing that potential. But most importantly, increasing that sales velocity of that item and helping that item appear higher up the ranking, at the sales ranking. You'll be playing around with keywords, et cetera, as well as managing your sponsored ads.

Carina: And what will happen is, as you get more experience and more knowledge of what's working, your sales will continue to grow. And then there'll come a point where you don't need to be touching those products all the time, you don't need to be nurturing them as much. Because the wheel is going, they've already got that sales velocity, they are hopefully appearing higher up the sales ranking. And you don't need to be playing around so much with pricing, titles, et cetera, because the wheel is going round.

Carina: And it's possible that you've then got another new product that you've introduced and you then want to focus on that new product. And so effectively, that old product that you were nurturing is left to its own devices, because it's got that sales velocity and momentum going.

Carina: Now, the reason I talk about this, the high touch versus low touch is because when you have a relationship with Amazon on the vendor side, high touch isn't very easy to do, partly because you're unable to change the retail prices. Changing content is not like on the seller side, where it's real time. So if you want to make a quick edit to a title, it needs to be approved by the catalog team on the retail side. It's not like on the seller side that it will go live within, for example, the next 15 minutes.

Carina: So it's not a great tool for playing around and doing A/B testings and promotions. You can't just run a promotion the next day. You need to plan those promotions 21, 28 days in advance. So it's very different. There's a lot more planning that needs to be done on the vendor side.

Carina: So typically, this is when you have to think about your product assortment and the products that you offer, because products that you want to know nurture, that you've planted the seed and want to control and you might not have a solid understanding of the best retail price at which to set the product at. You might be thinking maybe it's too low, it's too high, et cetera. That's going to be a lot harder to do on Amazon, because you've already given Amazon a cost and Amazon have agreed to that cost. If they agreed to that cost.

Carina: And if they do, then to start changing cost prices, to start changing MSRPs a complete headache and can sometimes be... changes can happen, but they can take six months to a year and you really need a good justification to make those costs happen. Six months to a year is a bit extreme, but I've definitely been in a situation where it has taken a considerable amount of time to get any cost changes done.

Carina: So what that means is that really you need to think about whether or not you move all your products over from day one or if you keep some of those items close to you on the seller side, that are at effectively stage one. And then the items that are more suitable for the vendor side where you have that sales velocity, at stage five. And I'm talking about stages as in the last image here, where you can see the plant has grown and very much your sales velocity has grown as well.

Carina: So that leads me, and I'm already talking about, is product assortment. Now, with product assortment, as I mentioned, it's not just about mirroring the range that you have on Seller Central. And then taking all those lines that you have on Seller Central and then putting them on Vendor Central, because that's not necessarily going to work. Not all those lines will work on the vendor side for a number of reasons.

Carina: One, I've already mentioned and the reason I've already mentioned is if you want a high touch on an item and you want to nurture that item, you're going to have a tough time doing that on the vendor side. So it might be the case that you don't want to offer Amazon straightaway these items that have new products, effectively. You want to manage them on the seller side and only want to move them over when they become... you can start seeing that the sales velocity has increased.

Carina: Other things that you need to take into consideration are things such as high margin products. Now, Amazon require a certain margin on their items. And often I get asked a question as in what is that margin? And unfortunately, that's not an easy answer. Amazon will look at competitors, they will have an idea as to what the average margin is for those products in that product category.

Carina: So if as a seller, you then offer those products for a much lower margin, they're going to know straight away, that that isn't an acceptable margin. And the Amazon systems will also, once those items start, if Amazon do accept those prices, Amazon systems, automated systems start taking effect. And they will start looking at the competition and they will start understanding what the price should be on that item.

Carina: And if that item becomes and I'm going to be covering this off in a bit more detail shortly. But if that item then is deemed as unprofitable, Amazon aren't going to purchase those items anymore. So what you want to make sure is that you're offering Amazon high margin products. And when I say high margin, that's enabling you as a vendor to have a sufficient amount of profitability, as well as Amazon as well. Because it needs to make economical sense for both parties.

Carina: Other things that you need to consider with product assortment is avoiding price sensitive products. And this is kind of what I was talking about new products, when you're not sure about, you haven't decided necessarily what the best price is. But it also might be that you've launched a new product, you're certain that you want to sell it, retail it at $50. You've done your research, you know that it's going to retail at that price.

Carina: You've sold it to a number of other retailers or other people are selling this item or you're selling it on your website, and you want it at $50, you don't want it at $30, you don't want it at $40, you want it at $50. And in those cases, then you have to question whether you sell that to Amazon. Because what that will mean is if you sell it on the seller side, you can sell it at $50. But if you sell it to Amazon, there's no way you can guarantee that Amazon will sell that item at $50. So if that is something that is your goal, is to focus on making sure that the industry is maintaining a certain level or MAP prices, then you need to also take that into consideration.

Carina: Multipacks as well, and I put multipacks on low value items. Now, low value items, let's say anything retailing under $10, becomes quite difficult for Amazon on the vendor side, for it to become profitable. Because once you take into account all the overheads, the free shipping that Amazon offers, Prime shipping, it then means that Amazon have very little margin in dollar profit at the end of it.

Carina: Sometimes low value items automatically become discontinued from the range, partly because they're just unprofitable before you've even started. They might have a high profit margin. But the actual dollar amount doesn't cover the cost of shipping and all the overheads, and therefore, Amazon won't list those. If they have listed them, they'll end up discontinuing them and won't end up purchasing anymore.

Carina: So if you have some very low value items, it's worth then considering selling those in multipacks, which you might already be doing on the seller side. You might already be selling some low retail items in a pack of three, in a pack of six already. So it's definitely worth considering that, because at the same time, those low value items might be really core to your range and something that the customers are looking for. So instead, you could consider that as a bundle or effectively a multipack.

Carina: And again, what you want to avoid is direct competition. So what you don't want is a scenario where you have all your range on the seller side. You list all those products on the vendor side, you keep those items on the seller side, which is okay if the vendor team are aware of that, that isn't an issue. But what is an issue is if you start dropping the retail prices, because you're going to end up in a price war with Amazon.

Carina: So what you don't want to do is start playing around with the prices that Amazon then have to drop their prices, in order to win the Buy Box and compete with you as a seller on winning the Buy Box. That will most likely end up in tears. And Amazon won't necessarily want to invest in your brand, if they're going to end up having to compete with you as a seller on price. So you do want to avoid that.

Carina: Now, there's no harm in having those items listed on the seller side still, partly down to let's say Amazon orders inventory on the vendor side and falls out of stock. There's a peak in demand. You know that your product is going to be advertised on TV or you've got some kind of PR happening in those scenarios. Then, you might want to have backup inventory on the seller side. And you can do that, but it's about not competing and not competing on price.

Carina: And there's lots of other things that you can take into consideration. These are just a few examples to get your mind thinking about how you can manage that range. And it's not just about taking what you have currently and just putting that in the vendor side and thinking, okay, it will just work. It's being a bit more strategic as to what are the best products?

Carina: And also you don't need to do everything in day one. You can do this gradually, You can have let's say the items that are doing really well, the more mature items that have a good sales velocity, moving them over. Then, leaving the new products on the seller side. Once those new products flourish and you get the sales velocity in a stage that they then become low touch, you can then move them over and then focus on another set of new products on the sell side. So then it's really taking a hybrid approach, in terms of how you strategically manage your assortment as well.

Carina: Now, once you've defined what your assortment is, and then you move products over to the vendor side, there are things that you need to take into consideration that could possibly impact your traffic levels, and also your conversion rate. And that comes down to a few things. That is your product listings, you might find might change. And I'm going to look at that in a bit more detail shortly.

Carina: Also, your campaign ads. As some of you may be familiar, vendors work off a different system for the ads called Amazon Marketing Services, AMS. So ads are then managed from a different system. Promotions, with promotions, what you'll find is there are different promotions available on the seller side than the actual vendor side. And again, I'm going to go into each of these in a bit more detail.

Carina: And inventory can also be impacted. So you lose control over inventory in the sense that you can no longer raise shipments to Amazon and say this is the amount of inventory we want to have available. It doesn't work like that on the vendor side. Amazon then start telling you as the vendor, we want X amount of stock. So if they don't order the right amount of stock, that can also put you in quite a bad position, in terms of risking losing sales, because you then become out of stock.

Carina: As well as pricing, which we've discussed, that you're not able to then manage your pricing and that is something that is owned by Amazon. Also, customer reviews, customer reviews can be impacted when you take that move over from vendor to seller.

Carina: I'm going to now look at each of these in a bit more detail. First off, we're going to talk about product listings. Now, with product listings, Amazon owns the content. And I already mentioned this slightly. And really what I mean is that because they then become the retailer, it is important for them that the content that they are showing on their website is exactly the product and there are no errors. Because the last thing they want are a high number of returns and a negative customer experience.

Carina: So Amazon are then in charge of the content. And what that means is that they can make edits as they please. So you might find that you submit a title to Amazon and then you receive... The item goes live, it's set up on Amazon, on the website. And then you look at the listing and you're like, that wasn't the title I created, and it's also overridden your title that you had optimized and mastered, let's say, on the seller side.

Carina: And you'll start reading through the bullet points perhaps and you'll say, hang on, these bullet points aren't the bullet points that we set up for Amazon. And that's what you might find, that Amazon have then edited the content. And there are different ways that you can manage that.

Carina: But often, why they've edited the content is down to a few things. And one of them is down to, Amazon have different character limits on the vendor side. So let's say the character limits are about the same on titles. There are 200 characters on the seller side and on the vendor side at the moment. But that also depends on the category, because the category, the system might allow 200 characters, but the category might have specific style guidelines that actually they don't want vendors submitting titles of 200 characters. And that can change and some product categories actually have set titles in a certain structure that they need to be, for example, clothing.

Carina: And what they do is they actually concatenate fields within the setup form. So they look at the brand name, the model number, what the item i, for example, a skirt, and then take the color and the size and they create a title based on that. So trying to then optimize that can then be a challenge, and that's often when sellers might find that their titles are then completely changed to the optimized one that they've had on the seller side. And also, as I mentioned, the vendor content sets precedence.

Carina: Now, sometimes you can get around that, as in you might find that you have set up the listings, the listings have completely changed, but then it's okay. You don't necessarily need to accept that that is the title forever. You can then go back and send a contact us via Vendor Central and then say please can you edit the titles to X, Y and Z?

Carina: Now, if that category is extremely strict on their style guidelines, they may turn around and say, no, we can't accept these, these don't adhere to our guidelines. But you may find that you might be able to add in a few more terms that might have been missed. So even on clothing, if it was a pleated skirt or if it was a certain... Amazon only set up the word as shirt and they didn't include short sleeve, if you wanted to start adding in terms like that, then it's more than likely they'll accept it.

Carina: If you want to start adding in additional keywords that you may have had as a seller, that aren't necessarily completely relevant to the product, it's a skirt for the gym, for yoga, for this, et cetera, then Amazon may turn around and say no. So there's certain things that they will edit if it makes sense for the product. And most importantly, if it makes sense for the customer experience, because that's what's the most important thing here with Amazon is it's not that Amazon are trying to be difficult. They want to make sure that the content and the titles are compelling for the customer, and also to ensure that the customer experience is consistent across all their different products in that particular category.

Carina: So you might find that a lot of the times your titles do change, but you can definitely get around that. But most importantly it's being aware of it. It's being aware also of those different character limits. So with bullet points on the seller side, you can have 500 bullet points. On the vendor side, you can have 250.

Carina: So before you even start setting those items up, you need to think about, okay, we've got this content, what's the compromise here? How can we create optimized content, but optimized content on the vendor side? Because if you're trying to do exactly what you've done on the seller side, it's not going to work on the vendor side. So you need to make sure that you're aware of their guidelines, you're aware of their character limits, you're aware of all their policies, et cetera, to ensure that you are adhering to that. So really, Amazon don't need to make any edits when those listings go live. And not all categories have certain style guidelines. You'll find some are available and those guidelines are available on Vendor Central, but not all.

Carina: Another thing also is images as well. So there are some categories that shoot their own product images, and those are categories such as luxury goods, jewelry, watches, luxury beauty items, where Amazon will take their own photography, as well as clothing. They have photography on models and footwear as well. But other products, you can then upload your own images.

Carina: What typically happens is because those images already exist in a catalog on the seller side, when you set those items up on the vendor side, those images will already appear. And what that often means is vendors think that, okay, there's already images on this listing. I don't need to upload these images in Vendor Central, because they're already appearing.

Carina: What happens is the vendor system is looking, they're not looking at the website and seeing those images. They're checking the system and they're seeing missing images. So what could happen is Amazon start loading and taking their own images in the photo studio, because they don't want to have missing images. So it's really important as a seller, even if the images are showing on the website from the seller, you still need to override them on the vendor side. Otherwise, that's often when Amazon can start uploading other images. And they start overriding the seller images, but they're different and not the ones that you want.

Carina: So it's almost like get in there first. That's not to say that those things won't happen. But we're talking really about reducing these kind of issues that could happen as well. So that's with product listings.

Carina: Now, another thing with product listings also is the enhanced brand content pages. So here, I've got a slide here of an example of an enhanced brand content and it's very much bye-bye EBC. And what happens is enhanced brand content are the pages that you've got on the seller side. On the vendor side, you have A+ content.

Carina: Now on the seller side, you can see here that the content appears as the product description. On the vendor side, an A+ content page appears from the manufacturer. And then you also have room to write your own product description.

Carina: Now, what typically happens is when you start listing your items on Vendor Central, the product descriptions that you write start overriding what is currently in the system. And you might then find that your EBC pages have then disappeared. And you've then got this standard paragraph now in place. So it's really important to take that into consideration. And as soon as you have got those items set up on the vendor side, go ahead and create A+ content.

Carina: Now, A+ content it's not that you can mirror exactly the graphics that you... you can mirror the graphics but the template designs are slightly different. So you may have to make a few different edits to the graphics that you have, in order for it to work on A+ content. But you don't need to reinvent the wheel, you don't need to completely create new graphics. It's just about amending them. Of course, if you want to create new graphics and you've already got it planned in your mind that you want to change then there's your chance. But really it's just about making those edits, so it fits the template in Vendor Central for A+ content.

Carina: Then you need to take into account the campaign ads. So as I mentioned with campaign ads, you'll have sponsored product ads probably running in Seller Central, you'll have headline search ads running in Seller Central. Now, when you move over to the vendor side, those sponsored product ads only run when you're winning the Buy Box. So what's going to happen when Amazon start listing the item is Amazon's going to start winning the Buy Box. So those sponsored ads will no longer be running.

Carina: So what you want to make sure is that when you're setting those items up, move those sponsored ads straight over to... and you can mirror those, if they're effective, you can mirror those sponsored ads into AMS. So as soon as Amazon have stock and they will start winning the Buy Box, those ads will start running.

Carina: Now there will be a period where those ads may take some time, because as you know if you've experienced that before, it takes a bit of a momentum for the system to start understanding the activity, the conversion rates, what's working, the keywords that are working, et cetera. And that's unfortunately something you can't avoid. But the main thing is just making sure that you've got those ads set up. So as soon as the item becomes available, those sponsored ads can start doing their magic.

Carina: And it might not be that you want to cancel your sponsored product ads on the seller side, because if you're not winning the Buy Box, they won't be running. So you're not going to be losing out money because they're going to be running in the background. But you've still got them there. So if Amazon falls out of stock and you want to rely on inventory on the seller side, those ads can then jump and take effect, if you start winning the Buy Box whilst Amazon is out of stock as well.

Carina: The other thing is headline search ads. So with headline search ads, you'll find that you don't necessarily need to switch them off and switch them on onto AMS. These will run, still run with the items that you have on the vendor side. It's more about taking a gradual step.

Carina: So really, the idea is that you want to be managing everything under one roof, otherwise it can get quite complicated. So it's about with headline search ads, gradually moving them over. As you create new ones, start creating them in AMS and no longer creating them in Seller Central.

Carina: And one bonus also is that then being a vendor and having access to Amazon Marketing Services, you also have access to an additional ad that isn't available in Seller Central, which are display ads. Which are the ads that appear on the product pages, for example here, underneath the Buy Box, which you can display on competitor listings, product listings that may complement your products, might be related items. Or, you can also put them on your own product pages, also known as defense ads, to avoid anyone else from promoting on your product listings as well. So that is a bonus and you get access to that.

Carina: With promotions, promotions then what happens is the promotions that you might have had running, buy one, get one free, it might be that you've got buy two, get 10% off, those promotions will no longer be effective. Those promotions aren't available in Vendor Central. Instead, you still have the promo code, so you can still run a promo code externally, but across social media.

Carina: You then have some additional promotions. You have lightning deal, which again is available on the seller side, but it's only available on the seller side as a recommendation. You don't need recommendations on the vendor side to submit a lightning deal, so that's a bonus. Also, you have access to best deals, which will appear on the today's deal page, as well as some price discounts, which are general discount offers off of the retail price.

Carina: Now with promotions, the difference is with the vendor side is often the promotions on the vendor side get more visibility. Partly because they appear on the today's deal page. So the best deals will appear on today's deals, which aren't available on the seller side. What you'll have found on the seller side is the promotions that you created are visible more when a customer comes on to the product page. So it helps with conversion, but it doesn't necessarily drive traffic to those product listings.

Carina: So the good thing on the vendor side is that the promotions that you can use here can not only improve conversion, but they are also a source for driving traffic to your product listings as well. And here is an example of the today's deals page.

Carina: Then moving on to inventory. So with inventory, now, Amazon decides on the vendor side how much to order. So as I mentioned earlier, you don't get to choose how much stock Amazon orders. Amazon will place an order, it may be on a weekly basis, bi weekly basis, depends on your setup, but in most cases it will be weekly. And they will place that order based on their automated pricing system. Automated ordering system, sorry.

Carina: And that means that the system looks at sales history, it looks at page views, it looks at conversion, it takes into account lead time. There's lots of different factors that the ordering system will look into, take into account before placing an order. And once it's decided how much inventory they need to order on that product, it will place that order.

Carina: Now, that automated ordering system isn't always accurate from day one, partly because they don't have a huge amount of sales history. Yes, they have some from the seller side. But I've seen even when there is data from the seller side, it's not necessarily meant that on the vendor side, they've ordered as much as you would have hoped.

Carina: Also, Amazon hold low weeks of cover. It is not that Amazon are there to have... It's not a warehouse, it's a fulfillment center. So effectively what goes in comes out, it's not that they want to have six months of inventory. They want to have as little inventory as possible. So the shorter lead time the vendors can agree to, the better for Amazon, because ideally if they can have two to three weeks cover, that's great for them, because it means that they're not taking up lots of space, they have room for other products. And also, it's better on cash flow as well.

Carina: But sometimes that can mean that there'll be peaks in demand and then all of a sudden, those items become out of stock. So the one thing with inventory and especially at the start is you can't guarantee availability. And a way to manage that is in network versus direct fulfillment. And in network is when you have inventory, which is where Amazon buy that inventory and hold it in their fulfillment center.

Carina: Direct fulfillment is effectively drop ship, where you receive an order from Amazon and you ship that product directly out to the customer. And direct fulfillment is great for situations like this, if you have the infrastructure, because if Amazon fall out of stock, you can then rely on direct fulfillment, because your products will be readily available. Because you don't need to ship inventory to Amazon, it's inventory in your warehouse. So as long as you have the inventory, your products can then be available to purchase. There'll be Prime eligible, the only thing is at first they'll be showing as a delivery message of three to five days, a little bit longer.

Carina: Alternatively, we spoke about the hybrid earlier. It might be that you just focus on in network. And if Amazon isn't ordering enough inventory, then you rely on the seller side of the business. You might have inventory still FBA, that come back that up if Amazon doesn't order enough. And then over time, you will find that Amazon systems will get more familiar, the forecasts should get more accurate. And then Amazon will start placing more accurate orders.

Carina: The other thing to consider is pricing. Now, with pricing, as I mentioned, Amazon controls the pricing. So you as the vendor can't tell Amazon what they need to sell the item at. And Amazon want to win that Buy Box, it's not that they want to lose that Buy Box to other sellers. So they're going to do all they can to win the Buy Box. And that means that to win the Buy Box, they need to make sure that they are competitive.

Carina: So they have their automated pricing system that will detect what other sellers are selling the items at. And then basically set retail prices on that, as well as looking at prices of competitors externally as well. So in terms of, you as a vendor can't control what Amazon sells at, that's correct. But you can ensure that, the resellers, you can have tighter controls, which is easier said than done. Tighter controls over your distribution channel. So you're not going to have Amazon having to compete to win the Buy Box with loads of other competitors.

Carina: Because effectively all your competitors are not discounting your items. If they're not discounting your items, it's more than likely that Amazon are going to set a higher retail. They're not going to start dropping the price. They're not in it to lose money. They're in it to make sure that they give the right customer experience and the right customer experience is making sure that that item is competitive.

Carina: And not only that is about being tighter on your distribution channel, it's also about, Amazon wants to be profitable as well. So what you'll find is if you do have loads of sellers selling the item for a lot less, there'll come a point where Amazon will no longer compete. Amazon aren't there to make money, the item will effectively be categorized as crap, can't realize any profit, and the item will no longer be available and Amazon won't be placing anymore orders either.

Carina: What this really highlights is, yes, you can't control Amazon, but you can have some level of control over your distribution channel. So if you're managing your distribution channel well, and you as a seller aren't competing with Amazon, then it's more than likely that you're going to see Amazon maintaining a much higher retail price point.

Carina: And lastly, it's about customer reviews. So with Amazon, Amazon's your customer now. So what that means is that you don't have that direct contact with the end consumer, so you can't email them, for example, via email solicitation, review solicitation email via FeedbackFive, for example. You can't do that because you don't have the customers' details.

Carina: What you can do is you can subscribe to the Vine program, which is Amazon's review program. That comes at a cost, it's around 2,500 to enroll a product. So that can sometimes make a lot of vendors not interested necessarily at the start, because that can be quite an investment for some of the smaller to medium sized businesses. But it is a trusted review program. And a great way, if an item is new or a product has very few items, to get that product started and to get some reviews on that item. Because as you know, reviews are extremely important when it comes to conversion and really influences sales, really can influence the customer's buying decision.

Carina: There are other ways that you can manage it, you can also interact with your audience. And by doing that, you can respond to customer reviews. And you can also respond to customer questions as well. Negative or positive, you can still interact. But really customer reviews can definitely be a challenge on the vendor side. So as much as you can do with interacting, if you are interested in the Vine program, that will definitely help, but you do lose that direct contact with the end consumer.

Carina: And then it's about chargebacks, and I'll briefly run through chargebacks. And really chargebacks are in place, and vendors have strict guidelines that they need to adhere to, because Amazon wants to ensure that their warehouse and the way they receive items and the items are shipped, is as efficient as possible. So the lead time is as short as possible, which means Amazon need to hold less inventory. And they don't risk the product being out of stock for a long period of time or out of stock at all, which then boosts the customer experience, because the customer experience, the products maintain availability. And also, Amazon doesn't have huge overheads, storing loads of products, that they can ensure that they can be more competitive on their pricing as well.

Carina: And that's the reason why Amazon is so strict. It's not that Amazon wants to charge vendors and make lots of money, it's that they want vendors to be efficient. So they're not making any missed promises to customers. Effectively, the vendors are shipping the items when they should ship the items, in the shipping material or packaged how it should be, sending the right documentation to Amazon to allow them to receive the product as smooth as possible so the item gets on the shelf, or in their picking slots as quick as possible.

Carina: So really, as long as you are familiar with all those requirements, you should find that you're not going to receive those chargebacks. The odd ones can happen. Yup, without a shadow of a doubt. But it's really important that you familiarize yourself with and also managing the right assortment, because of course, you don't want products that are always out of stock, because that's going to cause a complete headache. So you really want to offer Amazon products that have continual availability. And of course, make sure that you review the operational performance reports.

Carina: So just to wrap up on everything in the transition, I love to throw loads of content. So there's lots of information here I imagine for you to digest, but just to summarize that first off, with the transition, decide on your assortment, then it's about adapting that content for Amazon's requirements. So making sure you're aware of the different character limits, the different guidelines, because the last thing you want is letting Amazon make all those edits. It's better if you can make those edits before you send them over to Amazon.

Carina: Start creating those A+ graphics as soon as you can. Transition those campaigns over gradually, or more importantly, at least getting those sponsored ads over and then looking at gradually moving over the headline search ads. Having a backup plan for out of stocks, which could be the hybrid or it could be in network versus direct fulfillment, and then also just making sure that you have a solid understanding. And your logistics partners have a solid understanding of Amazon's shipping requirements.

Carina: So that's everything from me. I'm going to pass you back to Liz.

Liz: Thank you Carina. That was awesome information. I'm just going to talk for just a couple seconds and then we're going to dive into the questions. So if you have further questions, please put them in the question section, we are keeping track and we are going to get to those.

Liz: So like Carina said, you can't solicit product reviews if you're a vendor. But whether you're a seller, a brand owner, a vendor or some combination of the three, reviews are still critical to your success on Amazon. So I'm just going to talk to you a few minutes about that. And then we're going to have some special offers. And then like I said, we're going to have questions.

Liz: So as a vendor, you can't solicit product reviews, but you still should pay attention to them. You should learn if there are any quality compliance or safety concerns with your ASINs, you can gain insight into how buyers are reacting to your products. So that if anything is missing, that would be possible for you to adjust, that you would know right away.

Liz: And even as a brand owner, you might want to keep an eye on competitors' items. I was recently at a conference and I met a seller who sells a private label item. But other sellers sell similar items. So he noticed that his competition was lacking a key component that would make it easier for buyers to use the product. So he included that and now he's beating his competition. And he did that by looking at product reviews.

Liz: So FeedbackFive makes it easy for you to track, manage and analyze reviews for Amazon listings, whether you're a private label seller or a vendor or any kind of seller or vendor. We have an at a glance dashboard that allows you to see the product reviews that your items received to give you an actual actionable intelligence as to how to make your ASIN the best they can be.

Liz: So if you want to take it a step further, also, because you need to respond to those product reviews, you need to respond to, on Amazon itself, on Vendor Central, you can get text or email alerts on negative reviews with the pro plan and FeedbackFive.

Liz: And ASINs to your FeedbackFive account is super easy. So we created this neat little GIF, but we'll wait for it to start over. But you just log into your account and you go to my product reviews, and then you go to add or remove ASINs, put in your ASINs. And then, boom, you can see your product reviews for that. We go back 90 days I think it is, it depends on what you set your account.

Liz: So when you get started, we do import the last 90 days of product reviews for your ASINs and at the end of this, we're offering a 30 day free trial to everyone on this webinar, whether you're a seller or a vendor, so you can track and analyze your reviews at no cost with the free or light plan. You can't get the alerts if you're on the free or light plan, but you actually get two free ASINs that you can monitor all the time with FeedbackFive, but during your free trial, you can monitor up to 100 ASINs even with the free or light plan, but if you want to get those notifications, you need the Pro plan.

Liz: It's still worth it to monitor your seller reputation, even if you can't actively solicit, because you're still interacting with customers on the Amazon Marketplace. You're just not the seller anymore. Amazon's the seller, but you still need to pay attention to what's being said about your product.

Liz: So that's my spiel. We've got 30 day free trials for FeedbackFive and RestockPro with the coupon code vendor and 150 free credits for eComSpy and Carina, you're going to give a special offer too.

Carina: So for the Vendor Society's annual membership, if you sign up before May the 31st, you can get 10% off the first year subscription. Just type in a discount code ECOM0518 and the coupon will apply automatically to checkout, to take advantage of that discount and you just need to go to vendorsociety.com.

Liz: That's so great, thank you for doing that, Carina. And we are recording this and we will be emailing the recording to all registrants and that link will be in there with that information, so that you don't have to memorize it right now. But I am going to leave this screen up while we tackle a couple of questions that came in while Carina was presenting.

Liz: One of the early questions was, isn't Vendor Central going away shortly? I actually got several emails to that effect. And Carina I'll let you answer more in depth but it's Vendor Express that has gone away and Vendor Central is still going strong.

Carina: Yeah, so before, there was Vendor Central and Vendor Express and Vendor Express was the 100% self-service tool that was effectively almost a mirror. It wasn't a mirror in the sense of how it looks, but its overall goal, it was a self-service tool like you have with Seller Central but for vendors.

Carina: But what happened then is alongside Vendor Express being this self-service tool, Vendor Central then became more and more a self-service tool. I remember my days of Amazon of actually launching Vendor Central. And when we launched Vendor Central, it was just a tool to raise purchase orders at first and to manage shipments.

Carina: And as the years have gone by, we're talking a number of, going up to five to 10 years, I've seen Vendor Central basically evolve and it's becoming more self-service, more tools, you can create your own listings, you can edit your own listings, you can create promotions, you can create A+ pages, all these different things that you couldn't do. So really what it meant was it became, it was almost Vendor Express and Vendor Central were duplicated in their functionality. So Vendor Express was made retired, and it retired this month. So anybody that has a Vendor Express account will be familiar with the process and they're no longer going to be receiving purchase orders by the end of the month. But Vendor Central is still going strong and becoming more self-service by the day.

Liz: And I know we only technically have a minute left, but we only have a couple more questions. So let's just keep going if everybody's cool with that. Someone has asked how do I know or check if I received an invitation email to become a vendor? If not, are there ways that I can get that invitation? What can you do to have Amazon invite you? Or is it possible that Amazon has invited you and you don't know it?

Carina: Yeah, usually you'll receive an email and they'll invite you. And usually it's an email from, let's say the onboarding team that they've said we want to talk more about your products and they want to then invite you to sell on the platform. So it's not necessarily an automated email that you'll receive. It's usually a direct contact that you'll have from an associate at Amazon wanting to discuss and on board you as a vendor on the Vendor Central platform.

Carina: So you will be aware of this. In terms of how to get access, it is invitation only. You can log on to Vendor Central, send a contact, go into Vendor Central, the main home page, send a contact us message asking if you could open an account, but the chances are that that's not necessarily going to be your route to success. It can happen. But it's more a case as in Amazon will be aware of all the different accounts and how well they're doing. They're aware of all the different brands in their industry. And they will then approach those brands.

Carina: And when I mean aware, if you are a seller and you are performing exceptionally well as a seller, let's say you've got some top selling items in your category, you're going to appear on Amazon's radar. And most likely when you get to a certain level, Amazon are going to come knocking, because they're going to be like, hey, these guys are doing exceptionally well in the category. We want them to come to the vendor side, we want to have them on board. So really, if you make a lot of noise in terms of success as a seller, it's more than likely that your products will appear on the vendor side.

Carina: Also, there are vendor managers or associates at Amazon that often find brands at exhibitions as well. So it might be that you are exhibiting your products at a certain show within your industry and Amazon approach you there. I have heard that happen. A few of my clients have had that happen as well, where Amazon are quite active at shows.

Liz: Awesome. So just because someone had a Vendor Express account doesn't mean that they've got an in with Vendor Central.

Carina: Yeah, unfortunately not. And if you were doing exceptionally well on Vendor Express, you would most likely have heard from Amazon even before Amazon made the decision to retire. Because really, it was seen as if you were achieving a certain level and I can't necessarily quantify what that certain level is, but they deemed you for their category as successful on Vendor Express, more than likely they'd already requested that you move over to Vendor Central.

Carina: So unfortunately, it doesn't mean that you naturally get that step. So if you did have a Vendor Express account and unfortunately have not had a door open to you on Vendor Central, open up a seller account, make it happen, really push, get those products. Do all you can to get those items selling extremely well to make a lot of noise, and then the chances are that you might find that Amazon come knocking.

Liz: Great, so there is no trick to it, unfortunately. But on the product listing side, someone asked who will be responsible for exposure? How about campaign ads? Do we still pay for this?

Carina: Yes, so with campaign ads, they are run separately via Amazon Marketing Services, AMS and the mechanics work exactly how the ads are created in Seller Central. So that would be managed purely by yourself. The good thing with AMS, if you are hitting a certain level of sales or have quite a high budget, you might find that the AMS team reached out to you and you have an associate that is supporting you. If it's just for during the onboarding stage, for the first few months, they are quite active in providing support if you're doing a certain level of sales or you have a large budget.

Carina: In terms of product listings, how it works is you are responsible for setting those items up. And you have a new item setup sheet, similar to the setup sheets that you would have in Seller Central, or you can do that directly into their system. So you would set up all the data, just the same as a seller. But the difference is that instead of it going live straight away onto the website, as it would with Seller Central, it then goes to the retail, the catalog team.

Carina: And it can take about one to two weeks sitting with the catalog team, who then review that content and make sure that content is correct, adheres to their guidelines, et cetera, like I mentioned. And then they would process that and it would go live on site.

Carina: As soon as it does go live on site, you'll be notified via email, then it's about jumping straight on to those listings, checking them out and making sure that there's no dramatic edits. Because those are the times that you will see all of a sudden your content on the seller side overwritten. So you want to make sure that it's been overwritten correctly, and if it hasn't, jumping on straightaway and making sure that Amazon corrects any edits that might be incorrect.

Liz: Awesome. Someone asks if you could go more in depth on the Vine program. I don't know if we've got a whole lot of time to talk about that. But I think that there are probably some blog posts about Vine that we could share in the email.

Carina: Yeah, yeah, just briefly with the Vine program is it's Amazon's verified review program and Amazon basically have what they call Vine Voices. And they have a select number of reviewers. And they choose those reviewers based on, often it's their top reviewers. And basically those reviewers have been invited to join the Vine program. And what happens is if you want to enroll a product within that program for customer reviews, you would sign up to that program, you would send in a certain number of samples, and Amazon would then make those samples available for their top reviewers, these Vine Voices to then order the item and then receive it and then write a review.

Carina: Now, the great thing about the Vine review program is that Amazon is aware of all the different interests of each of their reviewers. So depending on the type of product, they will then make that product, they will then... they won't necessarily blast every single reviewer with all the different products. They start targeting certain reviewers for those products and those reviewers can then select whether they want to go ahead and review that item.

Carina: The process can take a while, it can take... it used to take up to about three months before the first review appeared. And that was partly because Amazon used to send out monthly emails. Amazon have changed the process slightly, making it a lot more that it's not dependent on a certain date within the month that Vine Voices are aware of the different reviews. It's as and when the items become available, which has shortened the lead time as well.

Carina: But it's around $2,500 or even $3,500 per product. There is a chance that you can try and even negotiate a few credits, but it's not that you can negotiate loads, you might be able to negotiate a couple during a time of negotiating your contract and initially setting up an account with Amazon.

Liz: Awesome. That is a great program. My friend asks what are some reasons a successful seller would decide to become a vendor? How do you recommend evaluating whether or not to switch from seller to vendor?

Carina: Great question and I could probably do a webinar on just this question. In terms of the best way to shorten it, it depends on your business setup a lot of the time, as in how you want to grow in the future. Are you looking to just have a direct to consumer relationship? And if you're looking just to have a direct to consumer relationship, then probably the vendor route isn't necessarily the route for you, because you need to take into consideration that the vendor route is a wholesale relationship with Amazon.

Carina: So often what you find is when sellers start moving over to the vendor side, it's because they've made a decision that they want to start... often what happens is they become a successful private Label, and they want to then start selling their products to other retailers and start widening their distribution. And once they start widening that distribution, they then start looking at building that relationship with Amazon on the vendor side. I've seen sellers can be just as successful on the vendor side, partly because there's more and more tools available to sellers to allow for that to happen, definitely helps.

Carina: But then it's also about this high touch versus low touch. I have a variety of clients and it's always interesting to see when they make that decision. They evaluate all the different types, the whole pros and cons of both sides and a lot of it comes to their setup, that sometimes businesses just go for the vendor route because they don't have the ability, whilst they can go FBA on the seller side, they still don't want to have to keep track of their inventory, sending in shipments, managing the inventory, still having to check their account for those buyer messages. Amazon managed most of those messages but there's still those buyer inquiries come, checking their seller feedback.

Carina: And there's lots of different things that they just don't want to have to jump in and manage and set their own retails. Or, some businesses don't actually want to be seen as a seller, partly because they don't want to be seen to be competing with some of their customers possibly, that are already selling on Amazon as a seller.

Carina: So they decide to take that vendor route, because really what it means on the vendor route is, yes, the tool is more self-service and you still have to create ads and you set up your own promotions. But at the same time, it's more Amazon will send orders. They'll send in those orders and tell you what they want to order. And the idea is that you're going to start receiving large orders from them and you start receiving volume orders from them as well.

Carina: So then you can start shipping in volume on a weekly basis, and then it's more low touch than on the seller side. Although sometimes it's not always... the volume doesn't necessarily always come from day one, partly because of the automated system. And that takes some time. So definitely you're not just going to receive a huge order from day one. It takes a bit of time for that to work and promotions and ads and what you can do to help increase that sales velocity.

Carina: But that's kind of a bit brief. It's definitely a long topic that could take an hour to really look into the detail, but hopefully that just gives you a bit of a brief overview.

Liz: So we had a question earlier about how a smaller brand might secure a Vendor Central invitation. I think that the answer to that is by really, really succeeding well on the seller side, right?

Carina: Yeah, exactly.

Liz: Sorry, I promised everybody it would be an hour, but you're so good and people have questions. So one other question is, I have an active Amazon Vendor Express but I haven't done anything with it. Is it too late to add a product there now?

Carina: That's the short answer. Unfortunately, yes, it is too late. If you haven't touched your Vendor Express account, make sure that you put all your energy and focus into Seller Central for now.

Liz: Awesome. Carina, you're great. We love having you here.

Carina: Thank you.

Liz: If anybody has further questions, you can go to vendorsociety.com or ecommercenurse.com and ask Carina your questions. We will be emailing this recording out tomorrow, along with our coupon codes. And we'll have Carina back really soon because we love her so much. But thanks everybody for participating and have a great day.

Carina: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.

Liz: Bye.

Carina: Great. Take care. Bye.

Transcript

Liz: Happy Tuesday, everyone, and welcome to our webinar. I'm Liz Fickenscher from eComEngine. I've got Carina McLeod with me here today to talk about the transition from seller to vendor, it's going to be a really awesome presentation.

Liz: I want you to ask questions, absolutely ask questions. So in your GoToWebinar control panel, you'll see a little place for questions, just enter them in there. And we'll pause occasionally to get Carina to answer your questions and then we'll do Q&A at the end as well. So we're going to get started.

Liz: Like I said, my name is Liz, I'm the one on the left and Carina is the one on the right. I do business development for eComEngine, our tools are FeedbackFive, RestockPro and eComSpy. And we do these webinars pretty often actually, and it's always exciting to have one of our good friends like Carina, who has so much industry experience with us to tell you about the things she knows.

Liz: I'm going to quit yammering and turn it over to her, Carina. Why don't you introduce yourself and just take it away?

Carina: Great, thank you, Liz. Everybody should now all see my screen. Okay. And that was great introduction. As Liz said, I'm Carina and I have a number of years experience in this industry. I call myself let's say an Amazon retail specialist. And what that means is, I work with both sellers and vendors, helping them understand Amazon, the wonderful ways of working with Amazon, which can be quite complex.

Carina: I have over 12 years experience and the first seven years, I spent working as a vendor manager at Amazon in the UK. I've worked across multiple product categories from home and garden, sports and fitness, apparel, jewelry, watches, you name it, I've had some kind of involvement in that product category. And very much I focused on introducing new categories into the UK market.

Carina: I spent seven years working as a vendor manager at Amazon. And I also had a lot of involvement with the administration teams out in India as well, the vendor support teams, which gave me a good understanding, not only from the retail teams, but also the challenges that Amazon faced on their side.

Carina: And then in 2013, I launched my own consulting business, eCommerce Nurse. So then I stepped away from Amazon and started working with sellers and vendors on the other side, helping them understand with my expertise and knowledge internally of Amazon, helping them understand the business and the ways in which they can grow on Amazon, which has then just grown from strength to strength, as Amazon continues to evolve and become really the beast that is today.

Carina: And then in 2018, I launched Vendor Society. And Vendor Society is a project that I've spent the last year working on. I'm going to talk briefly a bit about Vendor Society, and then I'm going to jump into the webinar.

Carina: So what is Vendor Society? Vendor Society is basically, it's an exclusive membership website that focuses on providing support for Amazon vendors. And what that means is a vendor or a potential vendor that's going to be setting up a relationship with Amazon via Vendor Central will sign up and become an annual member. And with that annual membership, they would then get support in the form of a help desk and also lots of content available.

Carina: We have question library webinars, how to training, how to guides, as well as a vendor forum where vendors can ask questions and share experiences amongst themselves. And it's really about helping vendors have the tools and knowledge to help them reach their sales potential. Partly because on Amazon, on the vendor side, which most of you that are probably attending this webinar have already got that experience on the seller side, where Amazon expect you to be self-sufficient.

Carina: It's not that you've got somebody on the other side of the phone that can give you all the answers. They might be able to support you to some extent, but really the expectation of Amazon is that Seller Central or Vendor Central is a self-service tool. And it's about you as a seller or a vendor, being able to learn everything about that system and all the different strategies, so you can maximize your sales potential and be self-sufficient and not be dependent on Amazon.

Carina: And this basically focuses on supporting vendors that have Vendor Central accounts in North America and also in the EU. So that includes the UK, Spain, Germany, France and Italy. Now, of course, the website is all in English, but already we do have members from Italy, from Germany, from Spain as well that have been able to take advantage of this website.

Carina: And it's supported by ex-Amazonians as well. There's a number of us that have different types of experience working in the retail teams at Amazon, as well as myself, as I mentioned, with over 12 years of experience.

Carina: So that just gives you a bit of background about Vendor Society. But I know that you're all dying to understand more about the topic that I'm going to be talking about today, which is the transition from being a seller, moving over to being a vendor on Amazon. Now, what often happens with this transition is often you might find that you've been a seller, selling on Amazon for a number of years or even a shorter period of time. You've been successful, your sales are booming on Amazon and Amazon have knocked on the door and said, hey, we love your products. We're interested in selling your products. We would love to invite you to sell your products as a vendor on Amazon. And they then offer you an invite to be able to sell your products on Amazon as a vendor via Vendor Central.

Carina: Now, when that happens, it's exciting. Especially if you're a private label and you've been working extremely hard on maximizing your sales potential on Amazon and then Amazon turn around and say, wow, your products are doing exceptionally well. We're interested in selling them.

Carina: Often that excitement can lead to a few things. It can lead to first the fact that it's almost like great, I want to sign up with Amazon. This is amazing. They're interested in our products. We've been working hard for years. And then sellers sign up, but often they sign up with a limited understanding of what that transition actually means.

Carina: And then as a result, sometimes those expectations aren't necessarily set from the retail teams, because their understanding is retail. It's not necessarily seller. And then what can happen is sometimes businesses start facing issues, start facing issues where their sales are disrupted because traffic drops, conversion drops, there are issues with the content, products aren't available, et cetera.

Carina: So today, I'm going to be talking about all the different things that you as a seller need to take into consideration when you make that transition over to a vendor. It's not that there's going to be complete zero disruption to sales. Often with any transition in business, there's there's going to be a few hiccups. But the idea here is to minimize that as much as you can.

Carina: So in terms of the topics that I'm going to be talking about today, first off I'm going to talk about the vendor role on Amazon and how that does differ to the seller role. I'm then going to be talking about the product assortment. So effectively the range of products that then you're going to offer to Amazon on the vendor side. I'm then going to talk about the possible impact on traffic conversion and the different things that you need to take into consideration and what areas can be impacted.

Carina: How to avoid those dreaded chargebacks. So you've probably read a lot of articles before you've taken that plunge or you're considering moving over to the vendor side, and you read a lot of articles about chargebacks and how frustrating How frustrating they are. I want to make sure that we touch on that and talk about how you can eliminate them as much as possible.

Carina: And then talk about, really summarizing all the points that we've discussed, and putting together your plan for transition. So it's not just about jumping from seller to vendor, it's making sure that you do have that plan in place, when taking those steps.

Carina: So first off, let's talk about the vendor's role on Amazon. So as I said, most of you are going to have been sellers. So you know as a seller on Amazon, you have taken the role as a retailer. So you're selling direct to consumer and you're selling direct to consumer via the Amazon platform.

Carina: The role then changes when you become a vendor. You then become a wholesaler. So you're not selling direct to consumer anymore, effectively Amazon is now your customer. So the relationship has changed. The customers, Amazon will then be selling products directly to the consumer. And Amazon is the retailer in this scenario.

Carina: And as I mentioned at the start, what that means is the vendor's role, you are required to be self-sufficient. Now with vendors, typically you'll find that the top 20% or not necessarily a specific 20%, it's just to give you an idea, but the top brands let's say that have a large proportion of the market share in their industry and are doing millions of revenue, millions and millions of revenue, then they will possibly have dedicated resource from Amazon in the form of a vendor manager.

Carina: But what often happens and this is reducing a lot, is that less vendors do have that dedicated support from the vendor manager. And more and more, especially the small to medium sized businesses, don't have that support. So they are required to be self-sufficient. So it's good to bear that in mind that you were self-service and self-sufficient on the seller. It's more than likely that when you jump to the vendor side, you won't have the vendor manager supporting and holding your hand. So it's about keeping on track with being self-sufficient, and making sure that you're utilizing all the tools available to you in Vendor Central.

Carina: And what also happened is Amazon then own the listing and the pricing. Now what that means when I say own the listing is effectively they're in charge of the content, because they are then liable for the content if the content is incorrect when they're selling that item to the customer. So it's really important for them that they are reviewing that content when a vendor sets those products up, and they will make necessary edits if they don't feel that content is correct or if it doesn't adhere to any of their guidelines, which I will talk about very shortly.

Carina: And also, Amazon own the pricing. So on the seller side, you are able to set your own retails. The days of setting your own retails when you become a vendor are gone. Amazon is able to set a retail price as they choose, and the vendor has no influence over that. And again, we'll be talking about that shortly as well.

Carina: Also there's high touch versus low touch management. Now, when I talk about high touch versus low touch, what I'm talking about is typically how the relationship works on the seller side is that first off, you have a new product and you nurture that product. So let's say I've got an example here of an image of a flower or a plant, and that you plant that seed and you're going to water that plant, you're going to do everything that you can to help that grow.

Carina: And you'll be doing that with your new products, you'll probably be changing the retail prices, trying to decide what is the best retail price to set the product at. You'll be running promotions, you're probably going to be editing the title and playing around with the listing, doing some A/B testing to really see if you can master the art of maximizing that potential. But most importantly, increasing that sales velocity of that item and helping that item appear higher up the ranking, at the sales ranking. You'll be playing around with keywords, et cetera, as well as managing your sponsored ads.

Carina: And what will happen is, as you get more experience and more knowledge of what's working, your sales will continue to grow. And then there'll come a point where you don't need to be touching those products all the time, you don't need to be nurturing them as much. Because the wheel is going, they've already got that sales velocity, they are hopefully appearing higher up the sales ranking. And you don't need to be playing around so much with pricing, titles, et cetera, because the wheel is going round.

Carina: And it's possible that you've then got another new product that you've introduced and you then want to focus on that new product. And so effectively, that old product that you were nurturing is left to its own devices, because it's got that sales velocity and momentum going.

Carina: Now, the reason I talk about this, the high touch versus low touch is because when you have a relationship with Amazon on the vendor side, high touch isn't very easy to do, partly because you're unable to change the retail prices. Changing content is not like on the seller side, where it's real time. So if you want to make a quick edit to a title, it needs to be approved by the catalog team on the retail side. It's not like on the seller side that it will go live within, for example, the next 15 minutes.

Carina: So it's not a great tool for playing around and doing A/B testings and promotions. You can't just run a promotion the next day. You need to plan those promotions 21, 28 days in advance. So it's very different. There's a lot more planning that needs to be done on the vendor side.

Carina: So typically, this is when you have to think about your product assortment and the products that you offer, because products that you want to know nurture, that you've planted the seed and want to control and you might not have a solid understanding of the best retail price at which to set the product at. You might be thinking maybe it's too low, it's too high, et cetera. That's going to be a lot harder to do on Amazon, because you've already given Amazon a cost and Amazon have agreed to that cost. If they agreed to that cost.

Carina: And if they do, then to start changing cost prices, to start changing MSRPs a complete headache and can sometimes be... changes can happen, but they can take six months to a year and you really need a good justification to make those costs happen. Six months to a year is a bit extreme, but I've definitely been in a situation where it has taken a considerable amount of time to get any cost changes done.

Carina: So what that means is that really you need to think about whether or not you move all your products over from day one or if you keep some of those items close to you on the seller side, that are at effectively stage one. And then the items that are more suitable for the vendor side where you have that sales velocity, at stage five. And I'm talking about stages as in the last image here, where you can see the plant has grown and very much your sales velocity has grown as well.

Carina: So that leads me, and I'm already talking about, is product assortment. Now, with product assortment, as I mentioned, it's not just about mirroring the range that you have on Seller Central. And then taking all those lines that you have on Seller Central and then putting them on Vendor Central, because that's not necessarily going to work. Not all those lines will work on the vendor side for a number of reasons.

Carina: One, I've already mentioned and the reason I've already mentioned is if you want a high touch on an item and you want to nurture that item, you're going to have a tough time doing that on the vendor side. So it might be the case that you don't want to offer Amazon straightaway these items that have new products, effectively. You want to manage them on the seller side and only want to move them over when they become... you can start seeing that the sales velocity has increased.

Carina: Other things that you need to take into consideration are things such as high margin products. Now, Amazon require a certain margin on their items. And often I get asked a question as in what is that margin? And unfortunately, that's not an easy answer. Amazon will look at competitors, they will have an idea as to what the average margin is for those products in that product category.

Carina: So if as a seller, you then offer those products for a much lower margin, they're going to know straight away, that that isn't an acceptable margin. And the Amazon systems will also, once those items start, if Amazon do accept those prices, Amazon systems, automated systems start taking effect. And they will start looking at the competition and they will start understanding what the price should be on that item.

Carina: And if that item becomes and I'm going to be covering this off in a bit more detail shortly. But if that item then is deemed as unprofitable, Amazon aren't going to purchase those items anymore. So what you want to make sure is that you're offering Amazon high margin products. And when I say high margin, that's enabling you as a vendor to have a sufficient amount of profitability, as well as Amazon as well. Because it needs to make economical sense for both parties.

Carina: Other things that you need to consider with product assortment is avoiding price sensitive products. And this is kind of what I was talking about new products, when you're not sure about, you haven't decided necessarily what the best price is. But it also might be that you've launched a new product, you're certain that you want to sell it, retail it at $50. You've done your research, you know that it's going to retail at that price.

Carina: You've sold it to a number of other retailers or other people are selling this item or you're selling it on your website, and you want it at $50, you don't want it at $30, you don't want it at $40, you want it at $50. And in those cases, then you have to question whether you sell that to Amazon. Because what that will mean is if you sell it on the seller side, you can sell it at $50. But if you sell it to Amazon, there's no way you can guarantee that Amazon will sell that item at $50. So if that is something that is your goal, is to focus on making sure that the industry is maintaining a certain level or MAP prices, then you need to also take that into consideration.

Carina: Multipacks as well, and I put multipacks on low value items. Now, low value items, let's say anything retailing under $10, becomes quite difficult for Amazon on the vendor side, for it to become profitable. Because once you take into account all the overheads, the free shipping that Amazon offers, Prime shipping, it then means that Amazon have very little margin in dollar profit at the end of it.

Carina: Sometimes low value items automatically become discontinued from the range, partly because they're just unprofitable before you've even started. They might have a high profit margin. But the actual dollar amount doesn't cover the cost of shipping and all the overheads, and therefore, Amazon won't list those. If they have listed them, they'll end up discontinuing them and won't end up purchasing anymore.

Carina: So if you have some very low value items, it's worth then considering selling those in multipacks, which you might already be doing on the seller side. You might already be selling some low retail items in a pack of three, in a pack of six already. So it's definitely worth considering that, because at the same time, those low value items might be really core to your range and something that the customers are looking for. So instead, you could consider that as a bundle or effectively a multipack.

Carina: And again, what you want to avoid is direct competition. So what you don't want is a scenario where you have all your range on the seller side. You list all those products on the vendor side, you keep those items on the seller side, which is okay if the vendor team are aware of that, that isn't an issue. But what is an issue is if you start dropping the retail prices, because you're going to end up in a price war with Amazon.

Carina: So what you don't want to do is start playing around with the prices that Amazon then have to drop their prices, in order to win the buy box and compete with you as a seller on winning the buy box. That will most likely end up in tears. And Amazon won't necessarily want to invest in your brand, if they're going to end up having to compete with you as a seller on price. So you do want to avoid that.

Carina: Now, there's no harm in having those items listed on the seller side still, partly down to let's say Amazon orders inventory on the vendor side and falls out of stock. There's a peak in demand. You know that your product is going to be advertised on TV or you've got some kind of PR happening in those scenarios. Then, you might want to have backup inventory on the seller side. And you can do that, but it's about not competing and not competing on price.

Carina: And there's lots of other things that you can take into consideration. These are just a few examples to get your mind thinking about how you can manage that range. And it's not just about taking what you have currently and just putting that in the vendor side and thinking, okay, it will just work. It's being a bit more strategic as to what are the best products?

Carina: And also you don't need to do everything in day one. You can do this gradually, You can have let's say the items that are doing really well, the more mature items that have a good sales velocity, moving them over. Then, leaving the new products on the seller side. Once those new products flourish and you get the sales velocity in a stage that they then become low touch, you can then move them over and then focus on another set of new products on the sell side. So then it's really taking a hybrid approach, in terms of how you strategically manage your assortment as well.

Carina: Now, once you've defined what your assortment is, and then you move products over to the vendor side, there are things that you need to take into consideration that could possibly impact your traffic levels, and also your conversion rate. And that comes down to a few things. That is your product listings, you might find might change. And I'm going to look at that in a bit more detail shortly.

Carina: Also, your campaign ads. As some of you may be familiar, vendors work off a different system for the ads called Amazon Marketing Services, AMS. So ads are then managed from a different system. Promotions, with promotions, what you'll find is there are different promotions available on the seller side than the actual vendor side. And again, I'm going to go into each of these in a bit more detail.

Carina: And inventory can also be impacted. So you lose control over inventory in the sense that you can no longer raise shipments to Amazon and say this is the amount of inventory we want to have available. It doesn't work like that on the vendor side. Amazon then start telling you as the vendor, we want X amount of stock. So if they don't order the right amount of stock, that can also put you in quite a bad position, in terms of risking losing sales, because you then become out of stock.

Carina: As well as pricing, which we've discussed, that you're not able to then manage your pricing and that is something that is owned by Amazon. Also, customer reviews, customer reviews can be impacted when you take that move over from vendor to seller.

Carina: I'm going to now look at each of these in a bit more detail. First off, we're going to talk about product listings. Now, with product listings, Amazon owns the content. And I already mentioned this slightly. And really what I mean is that because they then become the retailer, it is important for them that the content that they are showing on their website is exactly the product and there are no errors. Because the last thing they want are a high number of returns and a negative customer experience.

Carina: So Amazon are then in charge of the content. And what that means is that they can make edits as they please. So you might find that you submit a title to Amazon and then you receive... The item goes live, it's set up on Amazon, on the website. And then you look at the listing and you're like, that wasn't the title I created, and it's also overridden your title that you had optimized and mastered, let's say, on the seller side.

Carina: And you'll start reading through the bullet points perhaps and you'll say, hang on, these bullet points aren't the bullet points that we set up for Amazon. And that's what you might find, that Amazon have then edited the content. And there are different ways that you can manage that.

Carina: But often, why they've edited the content is down to a few things. And one of them is down to, Amazon have different character limits on the vendor side. So let's say the character limits are about the same on titles. There are 200 characters on the seller side and on the vendor side at the moment. But that also depends on the category, because the category, the system might allow 200 characters, but the category might have specific style guidelines that actually they don't want vendors submitting titles of 200 characters. And that can change and some product categories actually have set titles in a certain structure that they need to be, for example, clothing.

Carina: And what they do is they actually concatenate fields within the setup form. So they look at the brand name, the model number, what the item i, for example, a skirt, and then take the color and the size and they create a title based on that. So trying to then optimize that can then be a challenge, and that's often when sellers might find that their titles are then completely changed to the optimized one that they've had on the seller side. And also, as I mentioned, the vendor content sets precedence.

Carina: Now, sometimes you can get around that, as in you might find that you have set up the listings, the listings have completely changed, but then it's okay. You don't necessarily need to accept that that is the title forever. You can then go back and send a contact us via Vendor Central and then say please can you edit the titles to X, Y and Z?

Carina: Now, if that category is extremely strict on their style guidelines, they may turn around and say, no, we can't accept these, these don't adhere to our guidelines. But you may find that you might be able to add in a few more terms that might have been missed. So even on clothing, if it was a pleated skirt or if it was a certain... Amazon only set up the word as shirt and they didn't include short sleeve, if you wanted to start adding in terms like that, then it's more than likely they'll accept it.

Carina: If you want to start adding in additional keywords that you may have had as a seller, that aren't necessarily completely relevant to the product, it's a skirt for the gym, for yoga, for this, et cetera, then Amazon may turn around and say no. So there's certain things that they will edit if it makes sense for the product. And most importantly, if it makes sense for the customer experience, because that's what's the most important thing here with Amazon is it's not that Amazon are trying to be difficult. They want to make sure that the content and the titles are compelling for the customer, and also to ensure that the customer experience is consistent across all their different products in that particular category.

Carina: So you might find that a lot of the times your titles do change, but you can definitely get around that. But most importantly it's being aware of it. It's being aware also of those different character limits. So with bullet points on the seller side, you can have 500 bullet points. On the vendor side, you can have 250.

Carina: So before you even start setting those items up, you need to think about, okay, we've got this content, what's the compromise here? How can we create optimized content, but optimized content on the vendor side? Because if you're trying to do exactly what you've done on the seller side, it's not going to work on the vendor side. So you need to make sure that you're aware of their guidelines, you're aware of their character limits, you're aware of all their policies, et cetera, to ensure that you are adhering to that. So really, Amazon don't need to make any edits when those listings go live. And not all categories have certain style guidelines. You'll find some are available and those guidelines are available on Vendor Central, but not all.

Carina: Another thing also is images as well. So there are some categories that shoot their own product images, and those are categories such as luxury goods, jewelry, watches, luxury beauty items, where Amazon will take their own photography, as well as clothing. They have photography on models and footwear as well. But other products, you can then upload your own images.

Carina: What typically happens is because those images already exist in a catalog on the seller side, when you set those items up on the vendor side, those images will already appear. And what that often means is vendors think that, okay, there's already images on this listing. I don't need to upload these images in Vendor Central, because they're already appearing.

Carina: What happens is the vendor system is looking, they're not looking at the website and seeing those images. They're checking the system and they're seeing missing images. So what could happen is Amazon start loading and taking their own images in the photo studio, because they don't want to have missing images. So it's really important as a seller, even if the images are showing on the website from the seller, you still need to override them on the vendor side. Otherwise, that's often when Amazon can start uploading other images. And they start overriding the seller images, but they're different and not the ones that you want.

Carina: So it's almost like get in there first. That's not to say that those things won't happen. But we're talking really about reducing these kind of issues that could happen as well. So that's with product listings.

Carina: Now, another thing with product listings also is the enhanced brand content pages. So here, I've got a slide here of an example of an enhanced brand content and it's very much bye-bye EBC. And what happens is enhanced brand content are the pages that you've got on the seller side. On the vendor side, you have A+ content.

Carina: Now on the seller side, you can see here that the content appears as the product description. On the vendor side, an A+ content page appears from the manufacturer. And then you also have room to write your own product description.

Carina: Now, what typically happens is when you start listing your items on Vendor Central, the product descriptions that you write start overriding what is currently in the system. And you might then find that your EBC pages have then disappeared. And you've then got this standard paragraph now in place. So it's really important to take that into consideration. And as soon as you have got those items set up on the vendor side, go ahead and create A+ content.

Carina: Now, A+ content it's not that you can mirror exactly the graphics that you... you can mirror the graphics but the template designs are slightly different. So you may have to make a few different edits to the graphics that you have, in order for it to work on A+ content. But you don't need to reinvent the wheel, you don't need to completely create new graphics. It's just about amending them. Of course, if you want to create new graphics and you've already got it planned in your mind that you want to change then there's your chance. But really it's just about making those edits, so it fits the template in Vendor Central for A+ content.

Carina: Then you need to take into account the campaign ads. So as I mentioned with campaign ads, you'll have sponsored product ads probably running in Seller Central, you'll have headline search ads running in Seller Central. Now, when you move over to the vendor side, those sponsored product ads only run when you're winning the buy box. So what's going to happen when Amazon start listing the item is Amazon's going to start winning the buy box. So those sponsored ads will no longer be running.

Carina: So what you want to make sure is that when you're setting those items up, move those sponsored ads straight over to... and you can mirror those, if they're effective, you can mirror those sponsored ads into AMS. So as soon as Amazon have stock and they will start winning the buy box, those ads will start running.

Carina: Now there will be a period where those ads may take some time, because as you know if you've experienced that before, it takes a bit of a momentum for the system to start understanding the activity, the conversion rates, what's working, the keywords that are working, et cetera. And that's unfortunately something you can't avoid. But the main thing is just making sure that you've got those ads set up. So as soon as the item becomes available, those sponsored ads can start doing their magic.

Carina: And it might not be that you want to cancel your sponsored product ads on the seller side, because if you're not winning the buy box, they won't be running. So you're not going to be losing out money because they're going to be running in the background. But you've still got them there. So if Amazon falls out of stock and you want to rely on inventory on the seller side, those ads can then jump and take effect, if you start winning the buy box whilst Amazon is out of stock as well.

Carina: The other thing is headline search ads. So with headline search ads, you'll find that you don't necessarily need to switch them off and switch them on onto AMS. These will run, still run with the items that you have on the vendor side. It's more about taking a gradual step.

Carina: So really, the idea is that you want to be managing everything under one roof, otherwise it can get quite complicated. So it's about with headline search ads, gradually moving them over. As you create new ones, start creating them in AMS and no longer creating them in Seller Central.

Carina: And one bonus also is that then being a vendor and having access to Amazon Marketing Services, you also have access to an additional ad that isn't available in Seller Central, which are display ads. Which are the ads that appear on the product pages, for example here, underneath the buy box, which you can display on competitor listings, product listings that may complement your products, might be related items. Or, you can also put them on your own product pages, also known as defense ads, to avoid anyone else from promoting on your product listings as well. So that is a bonus and you get access to that.

Carina: With promotions, promotions then what happens is the promotions that you might have had running, buy one, get one free, it might be that you've got buy two, get 10% off, those promotions will no longer be effective. Those promotions aren't available in Vendor Central. Instead, you still have the promo code, so you can still run a promo code externally, but across social media.

Carina: You then have some additional promotions. You have lightning deal, which again is available on the seller side, but it's only available on the seller side as a recommendation. You don't need recommendations on the vendor side to submit a lightning deal, so that's a bonus. Also, you have access to best deals, which will appear on the today's deal page, as well as some price discounts, which are general discount offers off of the retail price.

Carina: Now with promotions, the difference is with the vendor side is often the promotions on the vendor side get more visibility. Partly because they appear on the today's deal page. So the best deals will appear on today's deals, which aren't available on the seller side. What you'll have found on the seller side is the promotions that you created are visible more when a customer comes on to the product page. So it helps with conversion, but it doesn't necessarily drive traffic to those product listings.

Carina: So the good thing on the vendor side is that the promotions that you can use here can not only improve conversion, but they are also a source for driving traffic to your product listings as well. And here is an example of the today's deals page.

Carina: Then moving on to inventory. So with inventory, now, Amazon decides on the vendor side how much to order. So as I mentioned earlier, you don't get to choose how much stock Amazon orders. Amazon will place an order, it may be on a weekly basis, bi weekly basis, depends on your setup, but in most cases it will be weekly. And they will place that order based on their automated pricing system. Automated ordering system, sorry.

Carina: And that means that the system looks at sales history, it looks at page views, it looks at conversion, it takes into account lead time. There's lots of different factors that the ordering system will look into, take into account before placing an order. And once it's decided how much inventory they need to order on that product, it will place that order.

Carina: Now, that automated ordering system isn't always accurate from day one, partly because they don't have a huge amount of sales history. Yes, they have some from the seller side. But I've seen even when there is data from the seller side, it's not necessarily meant that on the vendor side, they've ordered as much as you would have hoped.

Carina: Also, Amazon hold low weeks of cover. It is not that Amazon are there to have... It's not a warehouse, it's a fulfillment center. So effectively what goes in comes out, it's not that they want to have six months of inventory. They want to have as little inventory as possible. So the shorter lead time the vendors can agree to, the better for Amazon, because ideally if they can have two to three weeks cover, that's great for them, because it means that they're not taking up lots of space, they have room for other products. And also, it's better on cash flow as well.

Carina: But sometimes that can mean that there'll be peaks in demand and then all of a sudden, those items become out of stock. So the one thing with inventory and especially at the start is you can't guarantee availability. And a way to manage that is in network versus direct fulfillment. And in network is when you have inventory, which is where Amazon buy that inventory and hold it in their fulfillment center.

Carina: Direct fulfillment is effectively drop ship, where you receive an order from Amazon and you ship that product directly out to the customer. And direct fulfillment is great for situations like this, if you have the infrastructure, because if Amazon fall out of stock, you can then rely on direct fulfillment, because your products will be readily available. Because you don't need to ship inventory to Amazon, it's inventory in your warehouse. So as long as you have the inventory, your products can then be available to purchase. There'll be Prime eligible, the only thing is at first they'll be showing as a delivery message of three to five days, a little bit longer.

Carina: Alternatively, we spoke about the hybrid earlier. It might be that you just focus on in network. And if Amazon isn't ordering enough inventory, then you rely on the seller side of the business. You might have inventory still FBA, that come back that up if Amazon doesn't order enough. And then over time, you will find that Amazon systems will get more familiar, the forecasts should get more accurate. And then Amazon will start placing more accurate orders.

Carina: The other thing to consider is pricing. Now, with pricing, as I mentioned, Amazon controls the pricing. So you as the vendor can't tell Amazon what they need to sell the item at. And Amazon want to win that buy box, it's not that they want to lose that buy box to other sellers. So they're going to do all they can to win the buy box. And that means that to win the buy box, they need to make sure that they are competitive.

Carina: So they have their automated pricing system that will detect what other sellers are selling the items at. And then basically set retail prices on that, as well as looking at prices of competitors externally as well. So in terms of, you as a vendor can't control what Amazon sells at, that's correct. But you can ensure that, the resellers, you can have tighter controls, which is easier said than done. Tighter controls over your distribution channel. So you're not going to have Amazon having to compete to win the buy box with loads of other competitors.

Carina: Because effectively all your competitors are not discounting your items. If they're not discounting your items, it's more than likely that Amazon are going to set a higher retail. They're not going to start dropping the price. They're not in it to lose money. They're in it to make sure that they give the right customer experience and the right customer experience is making sure that that item is competitive.

Carina: And not only that is about being tighter on your distribution channel, it's also about, Amazon wants to be profitable as well. So what you'll find is if you do have loads of sellers selling the item for a lot less, there'll come a point where Amazon will no longer compete. Amazon aren't there to make money, the item will effectively be categorized as crap, can't realize any profit, and the item will no longer be available and Amazon won't be placing anymore orders either.

Carina: What this really highlights is, yes, you can't control Amazon, but you can have some level of control over your distribution channel. So if you're managing your distribution channel well, and you as a seller aren't competing with Amazon, then it's more than likely that you're going to see Amazon maintaining a much higher retail price point.

Carina: And lastly, it's about customer reviews. So with Amazon, Amazon's your customer now. So what that means is that you don't have that direct contact with the end consumer, so you can't email them, for example, via email solicitation, review solicitation email via FeedbackFive, for example. You can't do that because you don't have the customers' details.

Carina: What you can do is you can subscribe to the Vine program, which is Amazon's review program. That comes at a cost, it's around 2,500 to enroll a product. So that can sometimes make a lot of vendors not interested necessarily at the start, because that can be quite an investment for some of the smaller to medium sized businesses. But it is a trusted review program. And a great way, if an item is new or a product has very few items, to get that product started and to get some reviews on that item. Because as you know, reviews are extremely important when it comes to conversion and really influences sales, really can influence the customer's buying decision.

Carina: There are other ways that you can manage it, you can also interact with your audience. And by doing that, you can respond to customer reviews. And you can also respond to customer questions as well. Negative or positive, you can still interact. But really customer reviews can definitely be a challenge on the vendor side. So as much as you can do with interacting, if you are interested in the Vine program, that will definitely help, but you do lose that direct contact with the end consumer.

Carina: And then it's about chargebacks, and I'll briefly run through chargebacks. And really chargebacks are in place, and vendors have strict guidelines that they need to adhere to, because Amazon wants to ensure that their warehouse and the way they receive items and the items are shipped, is as efficient as possible. So the lead time is as short as possible, which means Amazon need to hold less inventory. And they don't risk the product being out of stock for a long period of time or out of stock at all, which then boosts the customer experience, because the customer experience, the products maintain availability. And also, Amazon doesn't have huge overheads, storing loads of products, that they can ensure that they can be more competitive on their pricing as well.

Carina: And that's the reason why Amazon is so strict. It's not that Amazon wants to charge vendors and make lots of money, it's that they want vendors to be efficient. So they're not making any missed promises to customers. Effectively, the vendors are shipping the items when they should ship the items, in the shipping material or packaged how it should be, sending the right documentation to Amazon to allow them to receive the product as smooth as possible so the item gets on the shelf, or in their picking slots as quick as possible.

Carina: So really, as long as you are familiar with all those requirements, you should find that you're not going to receive those chargebacks. The odd ones can happen. Yup, without a shadow of a doubt. But it's really important that you familiarize yourself with and also managing the right assortment, because of course, you don't want products that are always out of stock, because that's going to cause a complete headache. So you really want to offer Amazon products that have continual availability. And of course, make sure that you review the operational performance reports.

Carina: So just to wrap up on everything in the transition, I love to throw loads of content. So there's lots of information here I imagine for you to digest, but just to summarize that first off, with the transition, decide on your assortment, then it's about adapting that content for Amazon's requirements. So making sure you're aware of the different character limits, the different guidelines, because the last thing you want is letting Amazon make all those edits. It's better if you can make those edits before you send them over to Amazon.

Carina: Start creating those A+ graphics as soon as you can. Transition those campaigns over gradually, or more importantly, at least getting those sponsored ads over and then looking at gradually moving over the headline search ads. Having a backup plan for out of stocks, which could be the hybrid or it could be in network versus direct fulfillment, and then also just making sure that you have a solid understanding. And your logistics partners have a solid understanding of Amazon's shipping requirements.

Carina: So that's everything from me. I'm going to pass you back to Liz.

Liz: Thank you Carina. That was awesome information. I'm just going to talk for just a couple seconds and then we're going to dive into the questions. So if you have further questions, please put them in the question section, we are keeping track and we are going to get to those.

Liz: So like Carina said, you can't solicit product reviews if you're a vendor. But whether you're a seller, a brand owner, a vendor or some combination of the three, reviews are still critical to your success on Amazon. So I'm just going to talk to you a few minutes about that. And then we're going to have some special offers. And then like I said, we're going to have questions.

Liz: So as a vendor, you can't solicit product reviews, but you still should pay attention to them. You should learn if there are any quality compliance or safety concerns with your ASINs, you can gain insight into how buyers are reacting to your products. So that if anything is missing, that would be possible for you to adjust, that you would know right away.

Liz: And even as a brand owner, you might want to keep an eye on competitors' items. I was recently at a conference and I met a seller who sells a private label item. But other sellers sell similar items. So he noticed that his competition was lacking a key component that would make it easier for buyers to use the product. So he included that and now he's beating his competition. And he did that by looking at product reviews.

Liz: So FeedbackFive makes it easy for you to track, manage and analyze reviews for Amazon listings, whether you're a private label seller or a vendor or any kind of seller or vendor. We have an at a glance dashboard that allows you to see the product reviews that your items received to give you an actual actionable intelligence as to how to make your ASIN the best they can be.

Liz: So if you want to take it a step further, also, because you need to respond to those product reviews, you need to respond to, on Amazon itself, on Vendor Central, you can get text or email alerts on negative reviews with the pro plan and FeedbackFive.

Liz: And ASINs to your FeedbackFive account is super easy. So we created this neat little GIF, but we'll wait for it to start over. But you just log into your account and you go to my product reviews, and then you go to add or remove ASINs, put in your ASINs. And then, boom, you can see your product reviews for that. We go back 90 days I think it is, it depends on what you set your account.

Liz: So when you get started, we do import the last 90 days of product reviews for your ASINs and at the end of this, we're offering a 30 day free trial to everyone on this webinar, whether you're a seller or a vendor, so you can track and analyze your reviews at no cost with the free or light plan. You can't get the alerts if you're on the free or light plan, but you actually get two free ASINs that you can monitor all the time with FeedbackFive, but during your free trial, you can monitor up to 100 ASINs even with the free or light plan, but if you want to get those notifications, you need the pro plan.

Liz: It's still worth it to monitor your seller reputation, even if you can't actively solicit, because you're still interacting with customers on the Amazon Marketplace. You're just not the seller anymore. Amazon's the seller, but you still need to pay attention to what's being said about your product.

Liz: So that's my spiel. We've got 30 day free trials for FeedbackFive and RestockPro with the coupon code vendor and 150 free credits for eComSpy and Carina, you're going to give a special offer too.

Carina: So for the Vendor Society's annual membership, if you sign up before May the 31st, you can get 10% off the first year subscription. Just type in a discount code ECOM0518 and the coupon will apply automatically to checkout, to take advantage of that discount and you just need to go to vendorsociety.com.

Liz: That's so great, thank you for doing that, Carina. And we are recording this and we will be emailing the recording to all registrants and that link will be in there with that information, so that you don't have to memorize it right now. But I am going to leave this screen up while we tackle a couple of questions that came in while Carina was presenting.

Liz: One of the early questions was, isn't Vendor Central going away shortly? I actually got several emails to that effect. And Carina I'll let you answer more in depth but it's Vendor Express that has gone away and Vendor Central is still going strong.

Carina: Yeah, so before, there was Vendor Central and Vendor Express and Vendor Express was the 100% self-service tool that was effectively almost a mirror. It wasn't a mirror in the sense of how it looks, but its overall goal, it was a self-service tool like you have with Seller Central but for vendors.

Carina: But what happened then is alongside Vendor Express being this self-service tool, Vendor Central then became more and more a self-service tool. I remember my days of Amazon of actually launching Vendor Central. And when we launched Vendor Central, it was just a tool to raise purchase orders at first and to manage shipments.

Carina: And as the years have gone by, we're talking a number of, going up to five to 10 years, I've seen Vendor Central basically evolve and it's becoming more self-service, more tools, you can create your own listings, you can edit your own listings, you can create promotions, you can create A+ pages, all these different things that you couldn't do. So really what it meant was it became, it was almost Vendor Express and Vendor Central were duplicated in their functionality. So Vendor Express was made retired, and it retired this month. So anybody that has a Vendor Express account will be familiar with the process and they're no longer going to be receiving purchase orders by the end of the month. But Vendor Central is still going strong and becoming more self-service by the day.

Liz: And I know we only technically have a minute left, but we only have a couple more questions. So let's just keep going if everybody's cool with that. Someone has asked how do I know or check if I received an invitation email to become a vendor? If not, are there ways that I can get that invitation? What can you do to have Amazon invite you? Or is it possible that Amazon has invited you and you don't know it?

Carina: Yeah, usually you'll receive an email and they'll invite you. And usually it's an email from, let's say the onboarding team that they've said we want to talk more about your products and they want to then invite you to sell on the platform. So it's not necessarily an automated email that you'll receive. It's usually a direct contact that you'll have from an associate at Amazon wanting to discuss and on board you as a vendor on the Vendor Central platform.

Carina: So you will be aware of this. In terms of how to get access, it is invitation only. You can log on to Vendor Central, send a contact, go into Vendor Central, the main home page, send a contact us message asking if you could open an account, but the chances are that that's not necessarily going to be your route to success. It can happen. But it's more a case as in Amazon will be aware of all the different accounts and how well they're doing. They're aware of all the different brands in their industry. And they will then approach those brands.

Carina: And when I mean aware, if you are a seller and you are performing exceptionally well as a seller, let's say you've got some top selling items in your category, you're going to appear on Amazon's radar. And most likely when you get to a certain level, Amazon are going to come knocking, because they're going to be like, hey, these guys are doing exceptionally well in the category. We want them to come to the vendor side, we want to have them on board. So really, if you make a lot of noise in terms of success as a seller, it's more than likely that your products will appear on the vendor side.

Carina: Also, there are vendor managers or associates at Amazon that often find brands at exhibitions as well. So it might be that you are exhibiting your products at a certain show within your industry and Amazon approach you there. I have heard that happen. A few of my clients have had that happen as well, where Amazon are quite active at shows.

Liz: Awesome. So just because someone had a Vendor Express account doesn't mean that they've got an in with Vendor Central.

Carina: Yeah, unfortunately not. And if you were doing exceptionally well on Vendor Express, you would most likely have heard from Amazon even before Amazon made the decision to retire. Because really, it was seen as if you were achieving a certain level and I can't necessarily quantify what that certain level is, but they deemed you for their category as successful on Vendor Express, more than likely they'd already requested that you move over to Vendor Central.

Carina: So unfortunately, it doesn't mean that you naturally get that step. So if you did have a Vendor Express account and unfortunately have not had a door open to you on Vendor Central, open up a seller account, make it happen, really push, get those products. Do all you can to get those items selling extremely well to make a lot of noise, and then the chances are that you might find that Amazon come knocking.

Liz: Great, so there is no trick to it, unfortunately. But on the product listing side, someone asked who will be responsible for exposure? How about campaign ads? Do we still pay for this?

Carina: Yes, so with campaign ads, they are run separately via Amazon Marketing Services, AMS and the mechanics work exactly how the ads are created in Seller Central. So that would be managed purely by yourself. The good thing with AMS, if you are hitting a certain level of sales or have quite a high budget, you might find that the AMS team reached out to you and you have an associate that is supporting you. If it's just for during the onboarding stage, for the first few months, they are quite active in providing support if you're doing a certain level of sales or you have a large budget.

Carina: In terms of product listings, how it works is you are responsible for setting those items up. And you have a new item setup sheet, similar to the setup sheets that you would have in Seller Central, or you can do that directly into their system. So you would set up all the data, just the same as a seller. But the difference is that instead of it going live straight away onto the website, as it would with Seller Central, it then goes to the retail, the catalog team.

Carina: And it can take about one to two weeks sitting with the catalog team, who then review that content and make sure that content is correct, adheres to their guidelines, et cetera, like I mentioned. And then they would process that and it would go live on site.

Carina: As soon as it does go live on site, you'll be notified via email, then it's about jumping straight on to those listings, checking them out and making sure that there's no dramatic edits. Because those are the times that you will see all of a sudden your content on the seller side overwritten. So you want to make sure that it's been overwritten correctly, and if it hasn't, jumping on straightaway and making sure that Amazon corrects any edits that might be incorrect.

Liz: Awesome. Someone asks if you could go more in depth on the Vine program. I don't know if we've got a whole lot of time to talk about that. But I think that there are probably some blog posts about Vine that we could share in the email.

Carina: Yeah, yeah, just briefly with the Vine program is it's Amazon's verified review program and Amazon basically have what they call Vine Voices. And they have a select number of reviewers. And they choose those reviewers based on, often it's their top reviewers. And basically those reviewers have been invited to join the Vine program. And what happens is if you want to enroll a product within that program for customer reviews, you would sign up to that program, you would send in a certain number of samples, and Amazon would then make those samples available for their top reviewers, these Vine Voices to then order the item and then receive it and then write a review.

Carina: Now, the great thing about the Vine review program is that Amazon is aware of all the different interests of each of their reviewers. So depending on the type of product, they will then make that product, they will then... they won't necessarily blast every single reviewer with all the different products. They start targeting certain reviewers for those products and those reviewers can then select whether they want to go ahead and review that item.

Carina: The process can take a while, it can take... it used to take up to about three months before the first review appeared. And that was partly because Amazon used to send out monthly emails. Amazon have changed the process slightly, making it a lot more that it's not dependent on a certain date within the month that Vine Voices are aware of the different reviews. It's as and when the items become available, which has shortened the lead time as well.

Carina: But it's around $2,500 or even $3,500 per product. There is a chance that you can try and even negotiate a few credits, but it's not that you can negotiate loads, you might be able to negotiate a couple during a time of negotiating your contract and initially setting up an account with Amazon.

Liz: Awesome. That is a great program. My friend asks what are some reasons a successful seller would decide to become a vendor? How do you recommend evaluating whether or not to switch from seller to vendor?

Carina: Great question and I could probably do a webinar on just this question. In terms of the best way to shorten it, it depends on your business setup a lot of the time, as in how you want to grow in the future. Are you looking to just have a direct to consumer relationship? And if you're looking just to have a direct to consumer relationship, then probably the vendor route isn't necessarily the route for you, because you need to take into consideration that the vendor route is a wholesale relationship with Amazon.

Carina: So often what you find is when sellers start moving over to the vendor side, it's because they've made a decision that they want to start... often what happens is they become a successful private Label, and they want to then start selling their products to other retailers and start widening their distribution. And once they start widening that distribution, they then start looking at building that relationship with Amazon on the vendor side. I've seen sellers can be just as successful on the vendor side, partly because there's more and more tools available to sellers to allow for that to happen, definitely helps.

Carina: But then it's also about this high touch versus low touch. I have a variety of clients and it's always interesting to see when they make that decision. They evaluate all the different types, the whole pros and cons of both sides and a lot of it comes to their setup, that sometimes businesses just go for the vendor route because they don't have the ability, whilst they can go FBA on the seller side, they still don't want to have to keep track of their inventory, sending in shipments, managing the inventory, still having to check their account for those buyer messages. Amazon managed most of those messages but there's still those buyer inquiries come, checking their seller feedback.

Carina: And there's lots of different things that they just don't want to have to jump in and manage and set their own retails. Or, some businesses don't actually want to be seen as a seller, partly because they don't want to be seen to be competing with some of their customers possibly, that are already selling on Amazon as a seller.

Carina: So they decide to take that vendor route, because really what it means on the vendor route is, yes, the tool is more self-service and you still have to create ads and you set up your own promotions. But at the same time, it's more Amazon will send orders. They'll send in those orders and tell you what they want to order. And the idea is that you're going to start receiving large orders from them and you start receiving volume orders from them as well.

Carina: So then you can start shipping in volume on a weekly basis, and then it's more low touch than on the seller side. Although sometimes it's not always... the volume doesn't necessarily always come from day one, partly because of the automated system. And that takes some time. So definitely you're not just going to receive a huge order from day one. It takes a bit of time for that to work and promotions and ads and what you can do to help increase that sales velocity.

Carina: But that's kind of a bit brief. It's definitely a long topic that could take an hour to really look into the detail, but hopefully that just gives you a bit of a brief overview.

Liz: So we had a question earlier about how a smaller brand might secure a Vendor Central invitation. I think that the answer to that is by really, really succeeding well on the seller side, right?

Carina: Yeah, exactly.

Liz: Sorry, I promised everybody it would be an hour, but you're so good and people have questions. So one other question is, I have an active Amazon Vendor Express but I haven't done anything with it. Is it too late to add a product there now?

Carina: That's the short answer. Unfortunately, yes, it is too late. If you haven't touched your Vendor Express account, make sure that you put all your energy and focus into Seller Central for now.

Liz: Awesome. Carina, you're great. We love having you here.

Carina: Thank you.

Liz: If anybody has further questions, you can go to vendorsociety.com or ecommercenurse.com and ask Carina your questions. We will be emailing this recording out tomorrow, along with our coupon codes. And we'll have Carina back really soon because we love her so much. But thanks everybody for participating and have a great day.

Carina: Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.

Liz: Bye.

Carina: Great. Take care. Bye.

Liz: Bye.