Welcome to Yeoman!
We’re a unique, client-first firm that specializes in helping brands optimize online and offline sales. Digital Sales (Direct, Amazon, etc) don’t exist in a vaccum. They have a direct impact on your core business. We get that and we know how to strike the right balance. We’re hands-on experts who know B2B and B2C sales channels and know how digital can drive more revenue across every channel.
Hard to believe it's been 4 years since Amazon announced Launchpad a custom program that helps start-ups “launch, market and distribute” new products on Amazon. The program is really a re-skinned version of Amazon's Vendor Express, but it's goal is to let smaller manufacturers sell directly to Amazon. The reason for the re-branding? Simple - it's cooler and let's them position it as an option for business that were funded by Kickstarter, Circle up, or just an old fashion invention.
Their pitch is that you get to tap into Amazon's massive presence to quickly build your brand leveraging their platform to grow. They are correct - Amazon is the largest online retailer with over 1.4 billion sessions last Christmas. A recent Forrester survey noted that 50% of American's search…
Amazon took a dramatic step today help it quickly restock critical supplies. Effective today all inbound FBA orders (except for groceries, household supplies and medical products) would be paused until April 5th. In addition, Amazon has suspended all new purchase orders for all 1P customers, except for the same critical group of items.
This pause will impact brands across multiple categories; everything from clothing and office to sporting goods and electronics. Grocery, base household supplies, and most medical products are unaffected.
Yeoman considers this a smart move by Amazon. We have seen a dramatic shift in consumables and grocery buying on the site, with some categories up 500% vs prior week. Putting basics at the top of the list helps Amazon get products out to quickly and offset some of the stockouts that are being seen…
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. …
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…
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:
