A recent Yeoman study of over 1,500 items sold on Amazon from a leading US manufacturer found a whopping 70% contained errors or did not follow Amazon’s best practice recommendations for providing product details. This study further showed the same level of inaccuracy on Google and Bing product searches. This is a maddening problem that plagues manufacturers in every industry. Once a product is “out there,” resellers, partners, distributors and reviewers end up shaping and revising the product details that your customers are going to use to make their purchase decision.

Products sold by Amazon definitely had better data quality, but less than 4% could be considered 'optimized' with the proven best practices for any item:

• Descriptive title at least 50 characters long (including brand, purpose, color, and set/quantity…

Brands have a unique challenge with websites. They have to combine sales, operations, marketing, customer service and channel programs into one site. These have to be organized and easy-to-follow for customers as well as partners. Here at Yeoman, we’re rather famous for our website best practices review. In this blog series, we’re going to reveal our carefully honed criteria, so you can make sure your website is engaging and converting customers with the best of them.

Yeoman research has proven that brands providing multiple buying options on their core site not only send more traffic to these sites, but they also have a higher sales rate on their own site and tend to get more requests to resell/partner. This is especially critical for new brands; showing strong retail options helps instill customer confidence in a new product.

The graph below shows…

Reviews on one of the core values that Amazon brings to ecommerce.  They have more product reviews than that top 25 ecommerce sites combined.  And despite all the concerns about fake reviews (and there are a ton) consumers still rely on them heavily.  Brands go to great lengths to make a quality product and nurture good reviews. 

Unfortunately, bad reviews are bound to happen.  This is especially critical when an item first launches.  Getting  1 star review as the first review reduces your close rate but up to 80%!  So what…

What’s in a Name? In online merchandising just about everything.

Data quality online is one of the biggest problems manufacturers face. How good your product “looks” online (including not just clean photos, but also well-written product descriptions and titles) impacts everything from SEO rankings to customer preference to channel relations – so getting it right is important.

There’s a lot that goes into data quality. One critical element is the title. This is often the first and only information your prospect is going to see before making that all important decision to click or not to click. This snippet of text is also weighted heavily by the search engines, meaning a good title will get you in front of more prospects.

The biggest mistake we see manufacturers make is using their 'own' terms for items, assuming that everyone knows what they mean. …

Update 4/27:  Amazon has slightly relaxed some of their FBA and PO restrictions, but we are seeing dramatically lower PO volumes for none essential items. In addition Yeoman estimates that 75% of FBA items have a 'limited stock' restriction placded on them. This means that Amazon will be restricting how many items you can send in.  All brands should do the following:

1. Check vendor central for any new purchase orders (not just the normal Monday/Wednesday )
2. For FBA sellers, check the 'inventory planning section of seller central' this is where any prioritized items will appear.  Send in inventory if its an option, we are seeing eligible inventory change daily.
3. All brands should have a plan to…

Amazon has dramatically changed its operations in response to the pandemic up ending every single brands Amazon sales model. Every brand needs to review their current Amazon position and take steps to ensure their growth going forward.

Webinar is now available on demand:  https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/recording/7708467521657981441

Not only is Amazon experiencing unprecedented volume and demand related to the pandemic, but they also have to manage this new volume with a newly dispersed workforce and a delivery and supply chain that's breaking under the strain. Their current short-term changes to cope have included some major moves including:

1. Amazon Purchase Orders: Dramatic backs for non-essential products
2. FBA…