Should Amazon Sellers Be Spending Their Time Doing Amazon Live?

TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:39

Hello, and welcome to episode number 46 of the marketing interruption podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Maff. And today, we're going to talk a little bit about Amazon live. So if you're not really sure what Amazon live is, it's been around for a little while, I'm not 100% sure on how long but they talked about it during the Amazon accelerator conference, if you weren't a part of the Amazon accelerator conference, you might have missed out, but I'm sure you can still find the videos online somewhere. It's a conference where it's usually every year, and it's kind of like a traveling conference, but obviously with everything going on with Coronavirus. They did it online this year. It was interesting, it was very staged, for the most part, a lot of like most of the virtual events going on right now. But one of the things he talked about was Amazon live where essentially, on your product page, you can actually just go live and they kind of want you to treat it like QVC to certain extent, or the home shopping network, or whatever your preference is. And, you know, at first a lot of people were like, okay, you know, another feature from Amazon. But this seems like a bit of a stretch. And it kind of is to me a little bit, it's one of those things where if you can really leverage it, it could possibly do very well for you. But I also think that there's certain types of products that it's going to do well for, if you're selling, you know, essential, so toilet paper, paper plates, or hand sanitizer, things like that. Although today that might be a little bit different. Normally, I would say that probably not going to be exciting enough to watch live. The other issue is Amazon's live platform that you use is completely separate from everything else that you could do with going live basically, so Facebook or Instagram or anything else that you would normally be able to go live with. And there are a couple platforms out there. Even we use one and I can't even remember the name of it right now. But essentially, you can go live on the platform, and it will stream to all of your channels. Unfortunately, that's not the case with Amazon. So if you're going live on Amazon, you either need multiple cameras, or you need to just strictly go live on Amazon. The other issue with Amazon just like everything else is that you have to drive traffic to this live video. And this live video may be on your listing, or they may host it elsewhere, which I'll touch on in a minute. But if you're constantly driving traffic to Amazon, we all know you don't own the customer, you don't own the data, you really get no benefit out of it minus the fact that you're driving traffic to your own listing. But if you can actually get enough traction, when you when you watch the the accelerator conference, and they kind of talked about it, they didn't really get into like, what the tiers are. But they mentioned that there's three different tiers. So essentially, you know, you start out here in Tier One, or whatever they call the tier, you're advertising your live video on your listing, and then maybe you get certain amount of views or maybe you sell a certain amount, I'm not really too sure we actually decided not to get involved with it. But essentially, then you tear up to the next thing. And the next tier has some bells and whistles that are added to it and a couple things that are kind of like okay, like I guess that's kind of nice. But the third tier is the one where everyone's like, Oh, wait, that sounds great. And it will actually put you on the homepage. Now. I don't know how many people are aware of this. But Amazon tested something for a little while called was the Amazon merge cards where essentially the cards were like little four by four squares of each product and a very small headline that would link over to your product store or your storefront.

04:27

And essentially, it was like on the homepage and it did really well because you'd have to pay to do it. It was just kind of a beta program. Because that did so well. Getting on Amazon homepage is a big deal and everyone wants to do it. However, you have to get so much traction to your own listings, and then get so many views and get so many purchases through these videos just a tear up to this third tier that they kind of made sound like only the best of the best will get listed there. And don't get me wrong. It sounds very lucrative and it Could be, but you're looking at an incredibly long process of building out these videos of building out an audience who's interested in hearing you on Amazon. And I know Amazon's goal is to obviously just become this massive place where everyone goes and shops there and no one goes anywhere else. But the reality of that seems kind of slim, where you know, they become just a monopoly. But essentially, if you have that much energy, you have that much time you have much bandwidth to be able to do those types of videos, you can get so much more traction from doing something like that on Instagram, or on Facebook, or on YouTube or anything along those lines, where you can not only keep your data, but even direct people on where they're going, and even do other videos outside of just product pitching. The other issue with QVC, video QVC style videos like that is that they can be kind of boring and pretty monotonous. sitting there listening to someone describe a pretty mundane product gets really boring after a while. So you can really lose some people unless you have an extremely interesting topic. Or if you can find ways to get influencers involved or they're going live. And that is something that might entice people to go to listing more often that makes sense. But in the beginning, you're definitely going to spend a lot advertising dollars, you're going to spend a lot of your outreach on maybe social media or on newsletters to actually get people to come out and to check it out on Amazon. So to me, it's kind of like Do you still want to drive traffic to Amazon? Our vote was no, we decided not to do it. And really, I just kind of wanted to touch on that on on our opinion of it right now. But you're more than welcome to obviously try it. Let us know how it goes. But our opinion, I would rather put that bandwidth elsewhere.

06:46

But Amazon live, it's out there now. You can now go ahead and try it. It's available to all people on Seller Central. I don't think it's available to vendors. I think I'm not sure on that. But that's all I wanted to touch on for today. So the usual rate review, subscribe. I'll see you all next week. tomorrow. I'll see you tomorrow.