Should E-Commerce Sellers Drive Traffic to their Amazon Storefront?

On the 41st episode of Marketing Interruption, your host Andrew Maff talks about the controversial practice of driving traffic from off Amazon to Amazon and if you are going to do it, the correct ways to do it. He talks about the pros and cons of why some sellers choose to vs. why some may not want to but also the ideas behind testing it.

Tune in and enjoy today's interruption!

TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:39

Hello, and welcome to episode number 41 of marketing interruption. I'm your host Andrew Maffettone. And today is an opinion piece and I'm going to piss off a lot of people or I may not Who the hell knows. So I'm timeout should you or should you not run traffic to your Amazon storefront? Well, my vote is no Thank you. I'll see you all tomorrow. No. So some sellers do want to. So it's gonna be very dependent on if you are more of an e commerce seller, I'm sorry, more of an Amazon seller. So a majority of your business on Amazon or inventory business is off Amazon. Usually I find that if a majority of your business is off Amazon, clearly you wouldn't want to do this. But if it is on Amazon, you really have to find that fine line decipher whether you want to so a lot of times when I'm doing social media ads and things like that, I might do a retargeting of some kind and test sending them to Amazon. Now the issue is, when you send a customer and Amazon, your margins are crap, you don't own the customer so you can't really retarget them again in the future if you have a lot of repeat customers and I probably would not suggest doing this either. It's also nearly impossible to track. So the best way that I've always done it is the custom source code. So in the back of the Amazon store To create a custom source code, it's essentially just an extra part to the end of the URL, if you're not familiar, that allows you to track where traffic is coming from. So if I want to send someone to a specific page on my Amazon storefront, I'm going to create a source code for that specific page, I'm going to use that link in my Facebook ad. And I'm going to run that traffic there. And then Amazon in the back and the analytics will tell me what's working, what's not, who came in who bought etc. But I won't own that data, I won't own any aspect of it. So it is kind of tough benefit is for the customer. So you're gonna put the customer first. That's when this kind of becomes an interesting conversation. A lot of people are more comfortable shopping on Amazon. And the sooner that you kind of just accept the fact that that is the case, then this becomes a little bit more realistic and might be something you actually want to try. But again, you lose margin. It sucks. It depends on really your approach but But we've also been trying kind of more of an omni channel approach where you take your Buy button on your website, and you make it as prevalent as possible. Great, looks big. And then somewhere on the product page elsewhere, you've put several other buttons that say also available on and you can put conversion codes, event codes into each of these buttons. Your developer can absolutely do that. And you can track who's clicking them. But we have tested doing also available on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, jet, whatever you're doing, and letting people purchase wherever they're more comfortable, we've actually found that it can improve the conversion rate of the the actual product, because people will see that Oh, wow, this product is available in so many places. This must be a huge company, you have to remember that. A lot of people. A lot of your average consumers don't realize that it's that easy to sell on Amazon and Walmart, hence why there's a lot of crap on these websites. But it actually does kind of tell them like okay, this is a reputable company. Have actually seen it improve the conversion rate of the website. I've also seen an improved just overall traffic or I'm sorry, overall sales from people who are just clicking over and purchasing on Amazon. But if I have an Amazon account, and you're not offering Amazon pay or something like that, and that's the easiest way that I've always bought stuff, I'm gonna go that way. Or maybe I like Amazon's tracking. Or if you can offer two day free shipping, obviously, I'm gonna go to Amazon. So there's some benefits to it. My vote is still no, I would rather own the customer, I'd rather invest in the business going forward. I would rather have assets have an email list and social media and my website traffic and things like that that I can control. And I'd rather leverage the traffic that just pre exists on Amazon and work with it there. And I'll use my storefront for sponsored brand ads. But it is something to consider it is something to think about. There are other benefits like doing a product launch when I do a brand new product launch. Lot of times, I'll send people straight to the Amazon storefront first to kind of get the snowball effect of that new product, then I'll stop doing it. There's a lot of ways and a lot of things you got to think about. But I wanted to kind of bring that up today and talk about the pros and cons of driving traffic to the storefront and what that may mean for you. Please rate review, subscribe, and feel free to email me at marketing interruption@bluetuskr.com if you're really upset about what I just said, but if not, I will see you all tomorrow.