Strategic Product Catalogue Management for Amazon Vendors

Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today we're going to talk about how to navigate the unique challenges of managing your product portfolio and catalogue and driving profitability as really as an Amazon vendor. I've invited Jason Landro to join us today and share his valuable expertise and perspectives on how to exactly achieve this.

Let me introduce him to you. So Jason is the co-founder of Nectar, a digital marketing agency that helps establish brands scale their e-commerce sales by leveraging comprehensive strategies, data, and high quality content. His expertise is in positioning content marketing strategy and he also manages nectar's sales and marketing operations. He's a man who loves to solve complex problems and advice strategies to scale, which makes him the perfect fit. Talk to us and our specific topic, today. So great to have you on the show today. Jason. Thank you for joining us. 

Jason Landro
Yeah. Thank you for having me and sorry for jumping in there too early. 

Paul Sonneveld
No, no. It was my script. It was running, it was running a little bit sluggish, actually, so, thank you for that. I love it in the intro it says, A man who loves to solve complex problems because managing your product portfolio as an Amazon vendor, I think is certainly up there in terms of complexity. It's a question that I get asked very regularly. So really keen to dive into this topic. I know it's probably one of our, I know a lot of us are still on holidays, but it's certainly one of our most popular topics by registrations, anyway over summer. So great to have you Jason. Let's jump, straight in. When we talk about product catalogue, and portfolio and the like, how do we even think about this strategically? How do we kind of frame this up? How do we get out of the weeds and think about this, from a broader perspective? 

Jason Landro
Yeah. I encourage everyone to start with a macro level view. So, we obviously work with a lot of vendors and what we see with vendors, they tend to have more SKUs, more ASINs than sellers by and large are on average. And I think there's kind of three buckets that you want to focus on at the outset. 

So inventory, it's both allocation, so what you're dedicating to the channel and being able to manage it, as well as content optimizations and advertising spend slash promo funding. So those are kind of the three main buckets of kind of the work that goes into the catalogue, you know, managing your catalogue so to speak. And I would kind of bucket the day to day like the twistering of ASINs and taking care of minor issues into the content optimization category. So if you first think about it as those three categories and start from there. 

Paul Sonneveld
So let me just make sure I've got those categories. There are kind of, you know, your inventory, your content optimization and advertising spend and kind of promo funding. Right? 

Jason Landro
Yes. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Paul Sonneveld
No, no. No, you go ahead. Please clarify. 

Jason Landro
Yeah. Because advertising is obviously the biggest driver right now that you can leverage to grow your brand on Amazon or grow market share. There's no secret Amazon has placed an outsized emphasis on its advertising as a really a profit driver for its business as a whole. And I don't want to say it's become a pay to play marketplace entirely, but there's definitely an emphasis on it. And your content will dictate how well your performance or how well you can perform with your Ad spend and how far you can scale. And then you can't sell anything if you don't have inventory so, or if you don't have the buy box. So those are kind of the three main factors or drivers that you really have to be mindful of at the outset. 

Paul Sonneveld
Right. And so you mentioned that you work with a lot of vendors. When you are getting started with them, you've just taken on a new client, lots of ASINs as you say before, a lot of times more than you see on the 3P side. When it comes to this sort of the strategic framework here that you've just articulated, where do you find yourself having to do most education? Where do you feel your clients kind of lack understanding or maybe don't have that perspective? You sort of need to bring them up to a certain level?

Jason Landro
Yeah. I think that in general, a lot of brands fall in the trap of being impulsive. They want to tackle everything in a silo at once. So, hey, our content isn't where it needs to be. Let's just dive right in and start fixing the content. Well, no, let's take a step back and figure out what has the potential for the most revenue growth?

And that's based on inventory, the category product lifecycle, right? A brand new product, unless you're investing a lot outside of Amazon isn't going to perform well right away on Amazon. You have to generate reviews. Amazon, unless you're doing, Asset bulk buys up front. Amazon's algorithm has to learn how much you can sell. There's a, a scaling up process, right? So, you need to prioritize the products that you want to place your focus on. And that, what we do is we actually tier them into three groups. 

So we stack rank. The products and then we say, hey, tier one, this is the most potential. Let's focus on these in the short term. In terms of the in-depth efforts, right? The major content overhauls, this is where a majority of our Ad spend should be by and large. This is where're going to make sure we're dedicating inventory to the channel, cutting off resellers, et cetera. And Tier two, tier three. Let's keep the wheels on the bus, so to speak.

For tier two, let's do a little bit more. Maybe, maybe we do some SEO or copy work, because it's a lower lift, it doesn't take as much work as graphic design. And then tier three, it's a what do, what's the bare minimum we need to do to keep this going right now. But it's really, let's put that comprehensive effort in tier one and we'll see that the most growth and then we can move through the rest of the catalogue over time. So not falling into the trap of, hey, let's just upload or update all the infographics, or let's redo A-Plus content on everything because that's not actually going to generate the highest return for you. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. So you're those three tiers, I mean, I guess it's a prioritization framework. Obviously very keen to get your insights in terms of how you do, practically speaking, work out. How does a product get to be into that top part in the tier one part? What do you look for? 

Jason Landro
Yeah, so that's a great question and it really depends a lot on the brand and the product lifecycle itself because we know that reviews are a huge driver on Amazon. But, brand recognition also counts for a lot. And you have the vendors are typically some of the bigger brands on Amazon, by and large. So that counts for something, right? If you're getting a lot of branded search off Amazon. 

But in general, we're looking for ASINs that are really driving revenue or have the potential to drive revenue in the category that they're in. And that there's more market share to take. So you looking at brand analytics, looking at sales trends, looking at conversion rates, and you know, is it growing over time? Is it getting worse? Looking at relative Ad spend and maybe we're not putting enough Ad dollars, behind top selling ASINs five through 10. And we're placing more on 20 through 25 and we need to reallocate that spend. 

And then it's also inventory. You know, sometimes your fifth bestselling product, you're going to be out of stock for six months or low stock, or you have requirements for other vendors that you get charged if you don't provide them with inventory where you don't get those charges from Amazon. So you have to make some tough choices, right? So that gets deprioritized due to inventory availability. So it's hard to say. We actually try to take all of those factors into account in our onboarding process and come up with a schedule for months out. But there's not an easy answer. And, and I would say if you haven't done it before, work with someone to help you prioritize and balance all those factors. But it's somewhat intuitive if you want to figure out what has the most opportunity to scale in the short term where you can support it, support that growth with inventory.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, sounds to me a little bit like pot science pot Art or experience and kind of part opportunity. So I'd love to just understand like what is it, and, there's no such thing as a typical scenario here, but are you able to just give us some rough number numbers, like, a vendor you've recently worked with, they had, I don't know, maybe a thousand ASINs, maybe 20,000, how many do fall into that tier one bucket? And then I've got a follow up question in terms of how you then space that out. Because I'm sure you can't do it all in a week, right? 

Jason Landro
Right. 

Paul Sonneveld
You can do, well, let's do all priority products in a week. Like how do you put some timelines around that and phasing?

Jason Landro
Yeah, that's a great question. It took, I can give you examples, but I actually think it's better to talk in generalities. A lot of it depends on how many variations you have and whether you need to create unique content for each variation. So for example, I see a mistake that a lot of apparel vendors make is that they don't do infographics. They just use lifestyle photos. And I think one of the reasons that is, is because they have so many different colors and they should just do black, white, and maybe one other popular color, make infographics for those three, and then use those infographics for all the other colors because it's better than nothing.

So you have to weight that a little bit. In general, we try to do I would say five to 20 pair ASINs a month, but that if you have 50 variations, that's like five ASINs in and of itself. So it, it can be, I don't want to give a one size fits all it. Part of it is your resource bandwidth. What can they act reasonably accomplish in a month or two months? And you do want to approach it like sprints, so that there's accountability and you can check in. So we actually, in our agency, do quarterly planning. So we do that tiering, after the onboarding phase, and then we essentially plan out for three months.

And then. We check in at the end of three months before we do the next three months, the planning for the next three months to make sure that we're on track or why did we get off track? How do we fix that moving forward? So you do want some recurring check-in that isn't too far, away so that there's accountability and you can, hey, you know, graphic design actually needs more time than we thought. Let's readjust this plan or the scope of how many products we're doing a month. 

Paul Sonneveld
Right. Yeah. And I think you partly answered my next question, but I just want to see if you've got anything to add there, which is around content, particularly for vendors. I've seen a lot of vendor accounts and the content is fairly minimal, often a result of just loading content from other channels or other retailers onto Amazon. So this can be an enormous heavy lift. Right. So I think part of your answer is break it down, prioritize, break it down. Have a plan, have accountability, but also, it can be pretty overwhelming, right? Should we just stop everything else before and actually focus the content? or how do we balance everything else that needs to happen around driving Amazon vendor performance while we're still working on that journey of improving the content?

Jason Landro
Yeah, that's a great point. And I think it's, the historically, the attitude that vendors have had with respect to Amazon is it's just another sales channel, and we treat the process like any other retailer. And whether the account grows is dictated by performance and product placement. But that's not how Amazon works, right? It doesn't matter where you are in the physically, in the store, in the location, the shelf placement, or do you have an end cap, right? What matters is, are you getting in front of customers, the right customers, for the right search queries? And is your content good enough and your price good enough to convince them to buy? And you can really influence that in a way that you can't in store with content that is. 

So, what I would recommend the vendors do is really identify those top products, make an effort to optimize them head to toe as opposed to so really going deep for each product. So getting nice photography, your infographic set, optimizing your copy and SEO so that you're indexing and more relevant searches update your A plus and do that for five to 10 ASINs. Measure the result. Because what you'll find is that what you should find is that there's a meaningful lift that provides a business case to make an investment, to optimize everything else, or at least to allocate funds for more resources to optimize things faster instead of treating it like a traditional retail sales channel where it's like, Hey, they're buying these POs. It's pretty steady. We're just going to make sure we put the inventory in and do the bare minimum, because putting in that extra effort can lead to compounding returns, unlike traditional brick and mortar retail.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah. And. I guess Amazon is different in that it gives you a whole set of data to actually come up with a very precise and specific and tailored strategy. That many obviously is completely inaccessible for a lot of other retailers. As you think sort of, you know, probably a lower level question, but I'm curious, as you work through kind of the content optimization, you're obviously going to provide an estimate of what the uplift is going to be. At the early stages, do you find yourself focusing more on search ranking and page views, or is it much more around conversion and bringing like the on the performers up to, I don't know, the category average? What's the largest lever you go for or do you do both? Do you have a separate process?

Jason Landro
Yeah, so we really try to look at both. We look at the conversion rates, we look at the traffic, so the glance views. Is there an opportunity to get more traffic? How is it trended over time? I'm not a huge fan of category averages. I actually had this conversation with a company the other week because it's really, really price dependent.

You see wildly different conversion rates based on price. So, you know, products over a hundred dollars are dramatically different than products under $25 and they can be in the same category. But we really do try to weight it. And then, Yeah, but the search, brand analytics is a great indicator of is there opportunity to grow your market share for these group of searches. So if we're sticking with apparel, right? So we could type in something like running shoes and you'll get a list of 10 keywords, and you'll see in the top three terms is their good distribution. So in click share and conversion share, there's one brand dominating all these relevant searches. Well if it's the latter, it's going to be tough to penetrate that particular vertical. Whereas if it's distributed, there's an opportunity to grow market share. 

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. So it's a little bit dependent, obviously. I like your point about category average. I think that's really insightful and it's probably something I'm guilty of. As I do in my sales pitch, it's easy to compare to the category average. But what you really want to do is benchmarking against, you know, like products, similar price points, similar brand strength, and the like. That makes sense.

Jason Landro
Which is hard because that data doesn't really exist publicly. And I'm a proponent of really benchmarking against yourself and are you improving over time as you send more traffic? Which is difficult because your Ad strategies play into that. Because if you're sending a lot of poor traffic, it's really going to tank things, or tank conversion rate. But yeah, you really want to be improving over time and to the extent there are more levers that you can improve, you should try to keep tinkering with them, like infographics or copy SEO or testing your main image to affect all of those things and improve your conversion rate.

Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. So we've spoken about sort of how you plan it, how you evaluate it, how you prioritize and spoken about sprints. What about measuring results? How do you know if you're a vendor and you've just invested a lot of time and energy into this, how do you know you're on track and things are working, you know, what does success look like?

Jason Landro
Yeah. And that's, it's a little bit different for everyone. I mean, in general, you want to see that sales are increasing in a meaningful way. Right. I think it definitely starts with what are your macro goals? What's your annual forecast and how are you going to get there? I always analogize to losing weight if you want to lose 20 pounds or stones to your European listeners, you don't just say, I'm going to eat better and exercise. You come up with a plan for the first three to five, and then, you know, once you've accomplished that, you adjust your plan accordingly. You keep on having to make adjustments and you check in and it's no different with e-commerce and Amazon.

So you want to set goals at the outset that you're looking to achieve that justify the resource investments you're going to make. Whether that's photography costs or videos or graphic design or SEO and copywriting or more Ad dollars or promos behind it. And you want to make sure that those goals are achievable. So, evaluating the market, are there brands selling similar products at a similar price that are at the level that you want to get to? And can you take market share from them? Or can you reasonably expect to take market share from them? So then you set those goals and you track those goals. And that's why you need to have a check-in period and a framework where you're analyzing that data, where you're kind of downloading that data, putting a pin in it. And then coming back to it, whether that's, you know, 45 days, 90 days later and evaluating higher performance. So you need some type of framework to implement at the outset to make sure you're ready to measure the results of your efforts.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, yeah. In terms of practical kind of considerations there, is there a specific framework that you use at Nectar to do that? Is it customized analysis for every client, or do you have a framework for doing that systematically. And just to give you an example, you know, I'm talking about like, you know, pre post measurement versus a control group looking at uplift or conversion improvements. Is there something that has really worked for you or perhaps a subset of clients? Again, different clients, different needs, different situations. But practically speaking, is there a framework that you quite like to use externally? 

Jason Landro
Yeah. Yeah. We, we really look at historical sales and convert sales traffic and conversion data and then use the data surrounding that to see how it's influenced those. That's what we're really the core of what we're benchmarking against. So I did traffic go up? Okay, well how did advertising dollars play into that? And then, What does our market share look like on the other side as a result of those investments? Or, Hey, we only spent a little bit, but we got a lot more traffic. Was that off Amazon advertising? Was it other investments we made? So kind of coming back to those core very simple KPIs and looking at how everything around that influenced those KPIs and our sales increasing? Is conversion increasing? or do we need to readjust because we've sent a lot more traffic, but the conversion rate is stayed flat.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I want to go back up couple of levels and there might be vendors or even some sellers watching this. Because I think some of this content is equally as relevant for sellers as well. I'm only looking and going, well actually I'm not working, maybe I don't have the budget or I'm not working with an agency. 

This is something I need to tackle. Maybe I'm giving directives I need to tackle. I'm the person that needs to tackle this internally. What and it feels like a heavy lift, right? Content is always a heavy lift. Because it's not just changing it, even just getting it into Amazon and getting Amazon to accept it and reflect on the front end. You know, we haven't even, you know, this whole separate session on that heavy lift. How do you get started? Like what advice would you give to those that are tuning in today? 

Jason Landro
Yeah. So again, if you're going to do it yourself, start small. You don't have to tackle everything at once. You could literally start with one product. But you also again, want to keep in mind what is the future? Is Amazon making money on this product? Right? Because the last thing you want to do is have, have a product that's borderline profitable. The Net PPM is poor, right? And all of a sudden it turns into a CRAP product and you can't advertise it.

So you, you need to can be sensible about it. But start small. I would say if you don't have anyone in your organization who has done this type of planning before, it would be able to get outside help in some way, whether that's a consultant, an agency, whatever. But if you do, I would say take a stab at it, see how it goes, which you might realize is you want to pour fuel on the fire and do this more aggressively and be more strategic about how you are, managing in your catalogue.

And I think what you'll find is that you ultimately end up having better resource allocation so that you're not spending time on items that are borderline profitable. Or you identify that hey, we need to work long term on changing our packaging for some of these items. Because they could be really, really competitive if we could get a few dollars back by changing our packaging, which is doable or and we would then be able to make more ad investments or offer it at a lower price, which would match the leader of the market. And we have significant brand recognition. So doing this planning can have kind of a ripple effect that will help you also build a more solid business for e-commerce over the long term.

Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. Which leads me to sort of some of our final questions here. I want to ask you later to finish up with your kind of tips for success on this. So, any practical tips, but before I do that, in my experience, most agencies don't become good at this, without some serious learnings along the way, either themselves internally or seeing their clients, you know, fail miserably at, at some of these things before you get it right. What are some of the biggest learnings, mistakes, sometimes I'm called them like banana skins that, you've seen made over the years, that you encourage others to avoid?

Jason Landro
When it comes to this topic, I would say going too wide, which I've talked about a couple times. Like, Hey, we're going to come in and photograph  every single product in our catalogue to get better photos for Amazon. Okay. I mean, great. That's a good thing, but probably not the best use of your, if you have hundreds of ASINs, probably not the best use of your time and money and instead, cut that down by one-fourth or one-eighth and repurpose that time, money, and that resource into building other content like infographics or A plus content or put some of that money into Ad spend on what has the most growth potential.

And then once you realize that growth on the top portion of your catalogue, come back and reinvest some of that money and bringing up the rest of your catalogue. And you know, kind of related to this, see a lot of brands. You know, I would say it's a rookie mistake, but no one's immune to it. They fall in love with products that they're trying to make work but they just aren't working on Amazon. Or maybe they work in store, but they don't work online for a variety of reasons. And instead of just accepting it and moving on, they're trying to try too hard to make it work, which takes too much time, money, and effort, and would be better utilized and just reallocating that into what is working.

Paul Sonneveld
That's some great insights there, Jason. Thank you so much. We do have a few questions, that are flowing in, so I'm going to give people a few more seconds just to post any while. This is a live show. While Jason's here, he's about to disappear in a couple minutes. While he is here, make sure you've posted a question and get it to him. While we're waiting for those to come in, Jason, I wanted to just ask you to sort of maybe just wrap up the formal part of this conversation with what other could be broad, could be very specific, other practical tips for success do you want to leave with the audience today when it comes to this topic?

Jason Landro
Use a tool or a variety of tools to assist you with this. So obviously MerchantSpring is one option for reporting and understanding where you're coming from and where you're trying to go. Because you want to be able to automate pulling data out of your account, measuring the conversion rate over time, and be able to sort that data and look at trends. We've built our own internal software that's more customized for this, or that's called Ambrosia, where we can, but we don't sell it. It's only for our use, where you can tag products by group, create custom product groups, and then set custom goals by product group, whether that's Ad spend or sales goals.

But you want to rely on some automation, because the alternative is you spend a ton of time just trying to aggregate and manipulate data, which you know, that it's going to cost you thousands of dollars to keep up with that at least a month or euros. The alternatives are much, much cheaper and more efficient. So I would say that's number one.

And then number two, have someone who owns this. You want, you want somebody to be in charge of this process so that it. There's accountability and things don't fall in the gaps, because you really do need to coordinate between a lot of different disparate resources. So content creation and advertising management and catalogue management and operational performance. Those are very different skill sets and typically are owned by different departments in an organization. So you want somebody who's owning this process and quarterbacking it, to make sure that things aren't kind of falling through the, the gaps or cracks.

Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. That's a great wrap-up. I think a really good point around different stakeholders within organizations, and actually it's probably a big cross-functional effort just to bring all the different people together internally. So that's a great shout. Okay. We have questions flowing in. Some of them are rather lengthy, so, they may block our entire screen as I bring them up, but nevertheless, let's jump straight into them. 

This is the big one. I hope you can see this Jason here. We've got one from Jamie Boye. Let me just thank you for your question, Jamie. I really appreciate it. I've just taken over a new brand on Vendor Central that we would like to variate similar products. AVS is used for variation to group them automatically. The problem is that some of the products are in different product types with which drive different attributes. I've been having trouble getting them updated, which results in some broken and split variations. Now, Amazon stated they won't change these. They will however, update categories and subcategories with an Item Maintenance Form. My only idea is de-listing it, but I'm worried about losing important data, like reviews and ratings, and all of that. So what are my options?

Jason Landro
Yeah. So this is very specific question. Does the brand have brand registry? It’s the first thing that pops out to me. Because the product type is a very basic attribute that should be able to be changed by the brand registered brand. So it may not be properly associated or you may need to open up the case from the administrator's account, on brand registry, would be go back and check that, but de-list the product. You don't delete reviews or the products when you de-list the product. 

Because it's like the commons, it exists in the catalogue now, and it's there. You're just deleting and relisting your offer for it. But if you're not able to influence the changes, I wonder if they're rejecting your cases to do it. I'm not sure that deleting and relisting will fix that issue. It seems like there's somebody who has higher preference in the contribution hierarchy and you've got to figure out why you're not top of food chain and figure out who is and correct that. 

Paul Sonneveld
Thanks Jason. Great question Jamie. Thank you so much for that. Moving on to one from Nicholas. He's asking what is your, and I think he's talking to you here. Jason. Jason, what is your philosophy around writing effective titles? Seems to be a bit of an art and science. It's tempting to keyword stuff, but it hurts readability and arguably customer experience. I think it's a good point. How can you find that line and feel confident the metrics and performance are negatively impacted by saying not including more keywords as an example, the art and science of writing title. What's your take? 

Jason Landro
Yeah, that's a good question. I'm actually going to take a step back on Vendor Central. The titles are automatically populated when you create an item based on a formula. So, When you create the item, it takes information from different fields, and puts it in the title in a certain order, which is why a lot of the vendor titles look very similar. And lot of them contain SKUs, for example, because Amazon automatically puts the SKU in the title. And you should override those titles because they have significant SEO value. And as Nicholas head on, you have to find a balance. 

So in most categories now, the title limit is 200 bytes, I believe. And that doesn't mean you should max it out. That means we recommend somewhere usually around a 100-150, so that it's readable, but you're still able to get a good amount of information in there. And yes, you give up some ss e o opportunities, but as Nicholas head on, you have to find the balance. You want it to be readable and not this huge block of text that's just focused on SEO. 

And then even within that, you still want to break it up in chunks so that those chunks are readable, whether you're using end dashes or some other punctuation. Just keep in mind that Amazon, about a year ago, changed the terms of service, surrounding, symbols and special characters. And Nicholas posted an add-on. You definitely want to optimize for mobile. The first 35 to 45 characters are what is most prominent on mobile.

So you want to make sure the beginning of your title really resonates with customers for who are searching for products like yours. And that's even more important if you're able. There's some categories where Amazon, allows main images don't have the product on white background, like a lot in bedding and home, where you can show like drapery, curtains, bedding, actually in setting. So you want to have it be even more obvious what your product is and you want to mirror high volume search terms or that the search terms that customers are using to find and buy products like yours. 

Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. Great, great question Nicholas. Very, very good. Appreciate the follow up there and great answer Jason. The last question here is, it's slightly outside the domain of content. It's more to do with vendor pricing and getting and margins and the like. But you know, Zach has taken the effort to write it, so, I'm just going to throw it in there and get your take on it, Jason, and I'm happy to add my perspective too, if that's, it's a failure to Zach.

So, Zach's asking, it's really about vendor pricing. Now, he is launching several new products. Giving Amazon better margins than ourselves, but Amazon is not accepting margins of greater than 30% for our co-op and other vendor fees. What is the sweet spot on Amazon margins and how do we get our pricing approved? So slightly outside the domain of content. If you've got thoughts, Jason, I'd love to hear them. Otherwise, I'm happy to add my thoughts as well. 

Jason Landro
Yeah, this is tough in a vacuum, right? If you have a vendor manager, you can get more insights. Like, what is the disconnect? What are they looking for, for products like yours in the category in terms of profit margins? Or, you know, what, what is the reason that they're not accepting your pricing? Assuming you don't have a vendor manager. 

I think you just need to keep playing around with it. And resubmitting it and you know, whether that's a few cents that you're changing, trying to open cases. You know that this is a major change that has happened in the past few years where vendor managers keep going away and they don't come back. And it makes new products where you, or when you run into problems like this, it makes it really, really challenging because you don't know why. And then same thing for price increases. When you're trying to get an increase and you don't have a vendor manager, you got to open a case and it's usually not all that that helpful.

So I know it's not a great answer, but I would keep trying to play with things. I would look at other products in the category. How does other same products or, or you know, very highly relevant products. How does your price point compare? Because just because they're making good margin compared to you doesn't mean they're making good margin compared to other similar products, and that's probably the issue.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. I was just going to add to that, Jason, based on my understanding, is, you know, margins are category specific and if you put yourself in the Amazon vendor margin, typically they're interesting. Your products, either it's going to because it improve their category average or the percentage margin on their own P&L or it's going to fill in a particular gap in the catalogue and customer need and they don't have. 

Now probably the latter is more unlikely in very mature markets like the United States probably more relevant here in Australia. So to me the question's around what the margins you're proposing, how do they prepare? How do they compare to the category average that you are playing in? And I think Jason just gave a great tip around you. Maybe you can even look at some of your own products to work, get a glance of that. And then maybe just even ask your vendor manager, what is the category mar margin? What are you expecting? And then how can you and engineer something that means that your product will be accredited to the overall margin for the vendor. 

But yeah, hard to  sort of comment in isolation. We are out of time. We're almost at 40 minutes, but I'm going to be, I'm just going to throw one more question in there, Jason. I know you've already had to push back another meeting, so I'm assuming that's done. I'm going to take the opportunity and throw a last question because I think it's a good one. It comes from Christine and she's asking, can you share with me or provide some effective strategies or steps that can help me win the brand normalization process for a 1P listing?

Jason Landro
So, I'm not a hundred percent certain what the question is heading on here. To brand normalization ,typically refers to fixing brand names where they're misspelled or incorrect. There's actually a team within brand registry that is responsible for this. And you have to so assuming that's the question. And you're trying to reform or fix a brand name that was incorrectly set up, or it's changed. Actually, changing is different than fixing a misspelled brand name. Which often happens when you have resellers that set up the channel for you and then you as a vendor take it over and you assume the relationship directly.

So there's a team within side of brand registry called the Brand Normalization team and have to work to get to that team. There are a variety of reasons that they won't change it, or these conflicts happen. Sometimes they happen when two brands of the same exact brand name but in different classes. So like supplements and electronics. And it can cause conflicts. And then they have to go in and essentially remap the ASINs. Or again, they were misspelled, and you have to get them to fix it. The Brand Registry team does have the authority to do it, but if they're saying, Hey, we can't, or we're not able to address this, then you're, you want to push to try to get to the brand normalization team. So there's actually a team with sub-team within brand registry that deals with those issues. 

Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. I think Christine just confirmed that we did make the right, assumption there in terms of fixing the brand. So, great to know there is a brand normalization team. It's within the brand registry, part of the business, so that is fantastic.
Great. Okay. Well let's wrap it up. We are well over time. Feels like it's just becoming a bad habit on my part. But it was absolutely great to have you, Jason.

I'm going to ask for, in fact, we've got more questions coming through, unfortunately, I'm going to have to leave it there. But if there's anyone who's listening today live or watching this on-demand after they want to get a hold of you, maybe talk about, run some issues past you, pick your brain or even talk about like working with you and Nectar, how do they best get hold of you?

Jason Landro
Yeah. So please reach out to me on LinkedIn if you want to connect directly. And if you want to talk to us about working with us, our website, just submit a contact inquiry on, on one of the forms and we'll reach out to you.

Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. It was an absolute pleasure to have you on the show, Jason. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for all your sharing your frameworks, your tips and tricks, and insight is much appreciated. 

Jason Landro
Thank you for having me. 

Paul Sonneveld
All right. That is it for today's episode, of the show. I hope you found that useful, and more importantly, I hope you're walking away with some really practical actions and steps that you can take, to help improve your Amazon vendor performance or Amazon, seller performance today. Thank you so much for watching.

Please get in touch with me if you've got any questions or if you'd like to suggest topics or if you'd like to know more about MerchantSpring and how MerchantSpring can help you as an agency or as a vendor. You know, better monitor and manage your performance and identify opportunities. Until next time, stay safe and take care.