The last few weeks have been bad news for everyone who thought Amazon was going to stabilize after a few months of the pandemic.  Not only has Amazon's sales continued to grow, they've launched a flurry of new rules and requirements that are going to impact 100% of brands this holiday.

They likely have good intentions; they're trying to absorb the initial 50-60% growth in order volume that started in March in an environment that's made their operations 10-20% less efficient.  Now they're staring down the barrel of a huge surge during the holidays that requires some hard decisions that go against the core of their marketplace selling model that's made them so successful.

Join us for a detailed discussion of the current landscape and what your brand needs to do to succeed this holiday and into 2021.  Planned topics…

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 info)
• Multiple images of product
• Bullet/summary list of product features
• Complete description that…

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…