- Paulina Masson
- Founder of Shopkeeper
Bio:
Paulina is an Amazon seller and a founder of Shopkeeper. She calls herself a ‘numbers girl’. Her favorite topics are on optimizing profits, pricing strategies, cashflow management and ways to save on Amazon fees.
Sponsors:
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Links:
Transcript:
Charles (00:00):
In this episode of the business e-commerce. I talked with Paula Masson about pricing strategy. This is a business of eCommerce. Episode one 12. Welcome to the business e-commerce, the show that helps eCommerce retailers start launch and grow their e-commerce. Miss us. I’m your host, Charles [inaudible] and I’m here today with Paulina Mahsan. Paulina is an Amazon seller and the founder of shopkeeper. She calls herself a numbers girl. Her favorite topics are optimizing profits, pricing strategies, cashflow management and ways to save on Amazon fees. I started the show today to chat about how you can tweak your prices to make more sales to eCommerce products. So, Hey Paulina, how are you doing today?
Paula (00:44):
Hey Charles, thanks for having me on.
Charles (00:46):
Yeah, it’s awesome to have you on. I love the topic of pricing strategies. I feel like it’s one of those things that once you kind of established it’s a very easy way of just increasing that profit margin on what you already have by like just some strategies. It’s one of those things, it’s very easy to just optimize. And if you’re already getting X amount you can kind of squeak up to more margin. So it’s a very cool topic for retailers. How’d you, how did you get into this? So you originally an Amazon seller, right?
Paula (01:15):
Yeah, I’m actually a software developer by background, so I am quite technical in nature. So all technical people like the numbers and I’m one of them. And so I liked math, I liked the calculus, you know, those types of things. And so I became an Amazon seller first and then I decided to build this little software for myself on the side that now became a successful commercial product called shopkeeper. But while I was doing that, I researched a lot about different fees that were not like explained. And I usually, if you get some fee charged on Amazon, it’s not explained anywhere very much. Like for example, compensated underscore clawback, like what is this, you know, compensate a glove. Like, and it’s not even in the help files and supports is not so helpful. So I’ve been researching a lot about numbers that are to do with Amazon and then eventually I just drifted out into optimizing my own pricing because that’s also a numbers related and started looking into different psychology things that I could use for my prices. So I actually experimented quite a bit with that and I could share with you some of the learnings that I have and what I had tested them, what worked for me and what worked for other sellers when I shared with them as well.
Charles (02:27):
Yeah, that’d be great.
Paula (02:29):
Cool. So basically I guess I would start with the big picture first. I’ll just tell you two sentences. The big picture, the big picture is that when you think about your pricing strategy, it’s not enough to just, it’s not the flow that you first create a product, then you publish it on Amazon, create the listing, ship it to Amazon, and then you sit there and think what price I should put. Actually the price strategy should start before you even go design your product. And the reason I save is because there are different of buyers that you can actually target. So there’s been research done for general e-commerce and online research has discovered that there are three general types of buyers. One is called screws, those bargain hunters. And the other type is the luxury spenders. So the big spender, and then there’s this middle somewhere, average spender.
Paula (03:21):
So if you want the percentages, actually there are 24% of those cruises, the bargain hunters online. So, and then there is 15% of big spenders under 61% left in the middle for average spenders. Now what does that mean to you? Now if you have any type of product that you’re selling on Amazon, you should really think about who is your buyer forests before even deciding your pricing strategy. Because if you are going to target the big spenders, you can afford the luxury upgrades on your item in terms of one faction cost, right? You can go to your Chinese manufacturer and say, okay, let’s L add a velvet bag and let’s change this to stainless steel and upgrade the product and so on. So basically you will be improving the product and the cost will increase and you can afford that because you know you’re gonna target the luxury spender, right?
Paula (04:08):
But if you know you’re going to compete with the bargain Hunter in the bargain Hunter bucket with the other guys who are like 1199 products, you know every cent counts. And then you’re going to go to your manufacturer and we’ll say, all right, so let’s cut the cost does not use the stainless steel. You know, remove the bag and just make it as cost effective as possible. So because it’s important to look at that overall picture of us, why I wanted to start with that, it’s not only the little psychology tricks that I’ll tell you, you know the little bits and pieces that you can have, but also the very big picture. And it’s important to think about it way in advance before you design your product. Now some of you, I guess will say, well, but I already have some products launched so it’s a little bit too late in the game for those.
Paula (04:51):
So what can I do with those products? And they do have a few tips for those if you want to hear them. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so let’s start with the fun part, which is pricing psychology. You know how we see it, the 99 ending everywhere. So the difference between 99 and zero zero, right? There’s 99 99 and every retail store you go, it’s 99 cents 99 cents at the end and you keep getting used to it. Right? We are used to it somewhat and now, well the basic answer why people use that, why retailers are using 99 cents is very simple because instead of $30 round, they do 29 99 and the first one sounds like 30 something and second one like 20 something. Obviously it’s a big difference and that difference is especially strong on those ends like the zeros on the fives. So you know from 29 to two 30 that’s especially strong from 24 to 25 that’s strong as well.
Paula (05:46):
So it’s very simple. That’s not the trick that I wanted to tell you. It says that they all use it to make it appear as if it’s you know, smaller press. But now what happened to us there? So that’s something that even this day cause I remember like it’s definitely yes it’s just migrate from retail. It just keeps working. Exactly. But you know what, I will explain to you what happened to us when we became conditioned to seeing that 99 everywhere. Now that we just see 9,909 and as soon as we don’t see the 99 if there is an item would like zero zero at the end. For example, I look at two identical items and one is 29 nine to nine and the other one is 30 well the first one seems like a bargain and bargain means cheaper and cheaper unfortunately means lower quality.
Paula (06:34):
Lower quality is a bad connotation, right? So that is a little bit of psychological association of 99 ending with the lower quality item. Therefore, if you are selling to luxury buyers or at least you want to position your product as a luxury item, it’s better not to use the 19 line and use the round numbers such as. So I would not go to 30 because it’s such a significant difference between 29 99 and 30 I would just stick to 29 round number. So stay in a little bit below like don’t make the big jump because you will have a little bit of psychological hesitation there. That’s like the first step of consultation where I’m going to think, should I spend it on not spending as 30 something? You know, if it’s 20 something, it feels like easier to spend. So I would just round it to 29 equal without the sense of 99 and that makes you feel like, Oh, so it’s like knock mine tonight.
Paula (07:25):
So it’s like something different about it. Like your, I be, you know, the part of the brain in the back that like drives for us. You know, when we don’t even think about it. It also does that with numbers. So when you see zero zero you’re like, Oh, so it’s not a bargain. So it’s not so cheap. So must be like a luxury or just released or something new. You know you have this a little bit of feeling like, Oh that’s cool. So my suggestion is if you have any product that you want to position as a luxury product, do round the prices in the end. So you use zero zero instead of nine to nine. Now there is another thing that happened with the nines here. Now as I said, nine became associated in our minds as a bargain thing. So nice always wins.
Paula (08:05):
And there was this interesting study done. They compare to prices and DentiCal products on the Shopify website. Actually it wasn’t Amazon. So they compared the two prices of 34 round and 39 round. So 34 versus 39 and actually 39 got more clicks. So it was more CTR into the listing because a nine was in it. Just because when we are skimming hundreds of listings side by side, we don’t really actually stop and spend the time on each listing. Right. We just skim until something hits our eye. We are skimming. So some part of our brain does it, which we don’t even consciously think about it. So we stop at those which seem like, Oh, that’s a good bargain, you know, 39 so like actually 39 had more CTR, more eyes on it because it had a nine and now Charles, you might say, okay Polina, 39 and 34 of those are so different, you know, and that’s a big jump.
Paula (09:01):
I probably have competitors who are pressing on my back. I can’t really jump from 34 to 39 now in that case, you can use numbers like five, seven or nine. These three digits are used. They’re called charm pricing. So you know, like Walmart is using nine, nine to five nine 95 so they are not only using 95 or nine to nine but also 95 at the end. And sometimes if you’ve seen internet marketers like to use 97 in the end, they like to use the seven in 67 they put the seventh at the end. It’s like the, when you’re selling a course or something, there’s a lot of sevens out there and there and there are stores that are using nine 97 as well. So five, seven and nine are the most commonly used numbers when they reduce the prices to something 90 so if you use five, seven or nine in your prices, so if you can jump from 34 to 39 jump to just 35 and you will still have that effect.
Paula (09:55):
So I would totally avoid, look at your current products and see which prices you could improve. If you have any 30 for anything that ends in the four, six or eight, you should change change to five sevens or nines depending on how far you can go. It could be just a game in sense as well. You know, the 19 nine there and the do you know, and 97, I don’t know, you could play with that a little bit if you are really very depressed for dollar by dollar by dollar, if you’re playing for the bargain Hunter bucket. But if you have a space to change $1 up or down, I would totally recommend using those five sounds on lines. So that’s an interesting psychological bit for you there.
Charles (10:32):
Yeah, that’s very cool. Do you find this certain like almost like tears at different buyers fall into like, I feel like between, you know, one and let’s say it’s $20, this kind of this tear of you’ll just buy it without thinking and then there’s like another tear buff that up till let’s just say a hundred and this kind of, and like the difference between, you know, 85 to 89 like you were saying, it falls into the same tear. It’s almost irrelevant at that point. You know, you still have to look at competition, but it seems like there’s like these buckets of pricing
Paula (11:03):
And this is very true actually. There is I would say the first step, that first bucket, like you say, is up to $40 and the $40 is sort of the number of that. When you spend something over 40, you feel like, you know the F the step of hesitation here. You feel like, Oh, I should go and check with my husband the first okay. Disbanded. Or at least you think two times before spending an, Oh, that’s quite significant. Right? But if it’s like 35 you just spend, without thinking normally 40 or whatever currency would be U S dollars. Euros 40 is sort of psychological first you know, hesitation step. And then like you said, the next bucket is probably at a hundred around the a hundred dollars. So over a hundred is a different feeling than less than a hundred you’re spending. And there’s more steps after that. So actually if you have any products right now that are like 41 or 42 I would highly recommend just dropping it down to like 39 to be just below those thresholds to monetize on that ease of buying because you want to make it as easy to purchase as possible. Right? So play with your price to like make it smoother and easier for them as well.
Charles (12:09):
Yeah. So you never want to be at the bottom of the threshold because you can, if you can move up, that’s great. But if you’re right at the bottom, it’s almost worth dropping down, right to get now ramp up sales if you can.
Paula (12:19):
Yes, exactly. That’s right. Exactly.
Charles (12:21):
Yeah. It’s funny. I bought this Mike shock absorber. I actually have it just sitting right here. I was just saying that I think it was $12 on Amazon. I did it literally without thinking. I was like in my car, like waiting for someone doesn’t even fit the mic. It doesn’t work. I’ll probably throw it away and buy another one, but it’s just funny. A $12 part, just, you literally don’t think about it. Versus like a iPad or something, that’s something a little more substantial. You sit there and actually compare, look at different options and you really think that purchase throw versus the $12 shock. I didn’t even look at the size. I just said, let’s try it. Put it on. The, Mike said, Nope, doesn’t work. So let’s go in the trash today and I’ll just buy another $12 until they keep working. So it’s very odd though, how that works.
Paula (13:00):
What do you do when you spend, let’s say mm, $45 item, you’re buying a knife sharpener for $45 would you think two times and look at other websites, the price match.
Charles (13:11):
You see that’s the funny part is right around there. I think. Yeah, that’s kind of where you start looking at a couple of different options. Even looking at like, I think this one I didn’t even look at the the features. I literally said, yeah, look, I looked at the picture and I was like, it looks about right. Let’s do this verse at 45. That’s when you start comparing. I felt like, and actually look at the feature set verse a competitor.
Paula (13:33):
It’s interesting. You see that’s where the different buying habits come in actually as well. I am sort of like this big spender on, I’m trying to learn to control that, but it’s so hard. It’s just somewhere in my DNA that I just look at the first page of Amazon results. And if it’s like $50 kettle or $250 car, I, you know, unless it’s not $500 kettle, if it’s still like reasonable, I’m just going to buy it because I like the color or something big handle on it. So it’s very easy for me to spend the money. But if you talk to my brother, for example, who’s complete bargain Hunter, he would have like these Chrome plugins, extensions, you know, where he would price match on all the other websites and find the best deal of the best of the best. You know? And whenever I purchase something, he would tell me, Oh, you could get a rebate now.
Paula (14:17):
You know, so, so these are just different types of buyers and it doesn’t really matter on how much money they make. Like I’m not so rich, but I’m still a big spender and my brother is really a, you know, wealthy and he’s still as crude, you know? So I think this critters that are actually the richest people because they know how to control the money and they think twice before they spend. So now that’s important for you as a seller to know that these types of wires exist. And now, like I mentioned, there are 24% of those bargain hunters on there, like and 15% of big spenders. So you will do with that information. Well, you’ll go to your main keyword on Amazon and look at your competitors. So look at the first 20 competitors that you have and know down their pricing. So don’t just know down today’s pricing though, go to use like jungle scout or something and look at historical price average because maybe today he’s out of stock and maybe he’s, you know, I’m running a promotion or something.
Paula (15:14):
So you need an historical price average. And on sidebar of Amazon, you have to check box the box saying include out-of-stock items because maybe some big seller is not there. And you need to know that information before you decide which bucket you’re going to play in. So once you have everybody on the spreadsheet with their historical price, average is the 20 people on your main keyword, then you know who you are dealing with. Maybe everybody’s playing this bargain Hunter game and every knife sharpener that you’re competing with is actually even late 11 nine to nine or that range. Then be that luxury knife sharpener. You know, so it, it will all depend on your situation, look base your strategy on your competitors that you have instead of just guessing and inventing an item that you personally like and prefer to buy.
Charles (15:58):
Yeah, I feel like when people first start to do is they take, you know they try to figure out their costs all in and out of margin, but that’s like a very basic way of pricing. Cause you’re not looking at the, you’re basically just looking at yourself and your costs. You’re not looking at the outside world and pricing up that way. You are talking about taking a more holistic approach to pricing.
Paula (16:17):
Exactly. It’s sort of like the other end because the way you design when you are looking at the prices and costs, you already decided your product, you already decided it’s going to look this and that so you don’t have space to too cheap and you know what to cut the cut the cost anywhere. So if you know in advance that you can afford to be in a big spender bucket, then all right, so you’d be there. And mathematically I actually did the numbers. You know, I was wondering for myself which bucket I should be in because in my situation there was a little bit of everything, you know, it was some competitors were in the bargain Hunter somewhere expensive, somewhere right in the middle. And I didn’t know which one is actually a profit-wise better to be. And so I made this math, you know, based on those research, you know, how many of each type of buyer there are.
Paula (17:04):
So I just pretended that there will, there will be 1000 units that I will sell and then calculated how many of each unit each buyer will get. And they put 40% margin. And appropriate pricing, like $45 for big spenders, 1299 for those scrooges and in the middle was $25 item. And I calculated how much I’m going to make. That’s all based on 40% margin because that’s the average private label margin and the I checked actually, but the best place to be in is not the big spender place even though it seems like, Oh it’s the best place to be. Right? So they are paying huge margins. You need to sell a little items, a few a units and you will make the most money. Actually not there are the, most of them are average spenders, 61% and that is the best bucket to be in.
Paula (17:48):
So if you have enough space and you don’t have to slice that bucket into many, many parts, you know, sharing with your competitors, if there are, there is enough space for you there. Play in the middle, be that middle one not too cheap and not this crazy. So you’ll have strong enough volume then of buyers and your price. You will still make a good margin. But if everyone, if there’s like only one big spender targeter in like those 20 results, definitely you can be that unique item that’s different item that could be a little bit more expensive. Just keep in mind those percentages I told you the 15% big spender is based on eCommerce in general. If you are an Amazon seller, Amazon started as a place to find the cheapest items, right? They were like find the cheapest and the biggest selection. And because of that, the initially attracted the law of bargain hunters, people who were looking for the cheapest, the best deals they came to Amazon.
Paula (18:45):
So I would say the data would be a little bit skewed on Amazon in terms of less big spenders being there in general. Maybe it’s not so true these days anymore, but I would still consider that, you know, when you’re thinking about creating a luxury item, it’s not the easiest place to be in with a luxury item because you obviously you’ll have to order large minimum order quantities and then they will sell very few and then you’ll pay big storage fees. You’ll have to figure out a lot of additional things that you normally don’t have to with high volume products. So my best suggestion is if you can be in the middle, and I used to never recommend this cruises bucket, you know, because there’s such slim margins and I thought, you know, no space for PPC, no nothing. But after one conference, when I gave a talk about pricing, one seller came to me, says, Paulina, you’re telling everyone not to play in this bucket, but I’m an eight figure seller and all my items are for bargain hunters, like less than $10. And I thought, wow, it figures from that, you know, and actually you can make money in any of the buckets is just you have to see which one you fit in, where you can, and then base all your strategy from that.
Charles (19:53):
Yeah. So it’s, it’s, you’re basically saying you can make money anywhere, but you have to be very purposeful about what bucket you’re in, how are you selling and how you’re pricing. And you just need to realize who you’re targeting in each bucket. Exactly. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. That’s very true. I feel like, I feel like a lot of people just do the thing where you price it based on your like internals, like we were saying and don’t look at all these other factors. But kind of thinking about that holistic approach then allows you to even realize, okay man, that bucket and maybe a competitor dropped out and you can raise your prices and you start to get a sense of, okay, I compete against these other five sellers every single day. Here’s my competition, here’s what they’re doing today. And pricing is a very dynamic game. That’s the other thing where every single day it’s changing. Especially, you know with Amazon it’s this very like close it’ll ecosystem. So when there is a change you can see it and it has very quick effects on your sell through and everything else. When you, when that happens.
Paula (20:51):
Exactly. You can know this. Many people are using dynamic repricing, but it’s only applicable to a arbitragers or people who do wholesale reselling. So my experience is mostly for private label and in there we don’t use repricers because we are the only one on our buy box. But there is still a way that you can lose your buy box if you’re a new, if you’re a new seller, you might not be aware that if you raise the price too quickly on Amazon, they make you lose your own buy box even though you are the only seller on the listing. And what happens? Visual purgatory, what happens, what happens visually is that, so on your listing when you go inside the listing, there is no more buy. Now buttons it says see all buying options button and then it says one seller available from, and then it doesn’t say the price anymore.
Paula (21:41):
It just says, you know, see all buying options as a link that completely kills your conversions. So Amazon lets you drop the price as soon as possible. You know very quickly you can drop from 45 to 12 and no problem. But from 12 to raise back to 45 it will take you many, many days, 50 cents, you know, 50 cents and little by little so that you don’t lose the buy box of your own. And in general, why am I even talking about that? Like how is it relevant? Well, because when you’re deciding your initial price, you will look at your break even, right? And then there’s this profit margin. Like you said, you’re adding the margin on top of your costs, like 40% let’s say there’s a price that you want to have in the end, but when you launch an item, you don’t want to launch at your best profit at the top, right?
Paula (22:26):
You want to launch it at a very nice price comparing to the other. So you get this boost of of purchases in the beginning. And many people unfortunately start at the very lowest. Like they do it at cost at first and then they try to climb up and then it takes for ever and ever to climb up back there. And you basically set the algorithm thinking about your product incorrectly. You know, you will basically the, you will keep rising your price raising to the dream price and they will start losing the rank and eventually you will be very, very hard to be back there on the first page you like you wanted. So start somewhere above the middle, you know, if if it’s between 12 the cost and 25 the price, you know, start somewhere like $19 would be the launch price, you know, start higher up so that it’s easier to climb back up.
Paula (23:13):
And one more little thing I would say, don’t base your prices on your own personal limitations box, like your personal financial limitations. You know, many of us are just, okay, well how much I would pay for knife sharpener? Never more than $36. Now who would pay $37? No, no. Okay. 35 is my price. So if you, most of us base our prices like that on our own Testament process, like I said, we are different people and there are many, many different incomes and habits and things and you know, you shouldn’t, you try and climb out completely put your own aside when you are considering the items price and just base everything based on your competitors around you. So on Amazon that would be looking at the neighbor listings and deciding, and this very often actually beneficial to match the best sellers price. If you’re like a second or third result already, if he’s doing like 25 99 with 10% off coupon, we’ll just match, ignore what Paulina said and just match 25 99 with 10% coupon because then people are comparing you to, in terms of benefits, like which color are like better or like which one I like better.
Paula (24:18):
They, they stop thinking about the price and you know, but if you do $1 less than the best seller, like he’s doing 25 year old, do 24 they will think, Oh $1 ah, but yeah, he has less reviews. Okay. So he just wants me to buy it. Okay. I won’t buy it from him, you know, versus going on. So just remove that, you know, hassle at all and just match exactly the price and they can consider from other things on the price. So it’s sometimes beneficial to just just do it instead.
Charles (24:44):
Okay. I like it. So I want to, I want to go back to what you’re saying a minute ago. So when you first launch, and you said, come out of the gate and set a decent price with a decent on margin, how much, so let’s say you want to get to a 40%, eventually, how much should you cut and your product, your all cost is 30, 30. For everything. All in. How, what would you start as your initial margin and would your goal be to kind of ramp up over how much time and what would you kind of do there?
Paula (25:11):
These days it’s very often we don’t have many launch strategies to choose from on Amazon. Most sellers these days are using PPC and aggressive PPC if they want to rank and aggressive PPC costs money, right? So you have to leave yourself a good margin there so that you could have some space, you know, you completely don’t go bankrupt, you know, doing the PPC in the beginning. So I would say at least 20% margin you should keep for the PPC. So half of your margin that you dreamed to have the 40%. So slice half for PPC and the other half you could sacrifice in the beginning for the launch, right? So I would drop it to 20% from your margin. So half, half of the margin I would drop for the, for the initial launch. But it all depends. Like if you, if it becomes above $30, you know, it’s more beneficial to have at 29, you know, just use those little bit of strategies here. I forgot to mention this one other strategy. Do you want, I will say about the free shipping as well that you can use? Yes.
Charles (26:11):
Free shipping. IFLA this is a always a good one. Yes.
Paula (26:14):
Okay, cool. So on Amazon, we have something called free shipping, right? For prime members. So if you’re a prime member on Amazon, you get your goods free shipped. But if you’re not a prime member, then you have to spend at least $25 to get it free shipped. Right? And in different marketplaces, that amount is different. Like 29 years in new in France and places like that. Then five 99 Mexican dollars in Mexico, there is a minimum threshold. So now how are you as a seller can monetize on that? Well, I had this item a was $20 and 99 cents I was running, I’m in the apparel category, and that was calculating how much is going to be if the person doesn’t have prime membership. Actually on top of that, they would have paid five 50 so it’s like 26 50 the product became worth shipping, you know?
Paula (27:04):
And I thought, Hmm, wait a minute, but 25 is the threshold. So basically I increased my price from 2099 to 25 99 to be just a little bit, $1 above the threshold. And then immediately that person was paying zero unfortunately. And he actually saved 50 cents without calculation and I earned five extra dollars in my profit. Usually I just make $5 in profit on every item. So that was double and profit. And you are monetizing on something that is one of the most popular features used by non prime members is this checkbox free shipping. There are two boxes, one is prime box, so all prime members just check the prime and the other one is free shipping, you know, so if you have free shipping, if your item is enabled for that, you will appear in so many more results. Social results on Amazon if you just have a price which is above the threshold. So in Europe, if you have, or in Europe if you have any prices less than $29, for example, 29 euros for example, or in U S okay, let me start with you as $25 is threshold. So if you have a $26 item or $27 item then I would say keep it as, as is. If you have a $23 or $24 item, then raise it to be above the Adam. Now
Paula (28:27):
If you combine all of these strategies together, the five sevens and nine that I said to you is right. Plus you enable the coupons. Plus you will do promotion stacking. There are also many other strategies that I didn’t even mention, right? And then you use the endings properly and then all of these together and then you just raise your prices to be above a free shipping thresholds if possible. You are monetizing on so much compound effect there. You know that it will even feel if you enable all of his strategies today will feel like a little mini launch, that you will have actually significant boosts that you will notice. And you will say, Polina, yes, I noticed that. And I’m not just being proud of myself, but actually many people have come to me and told me that they did implement the strategies that I mentioned and that worked for them. So
Paula (29:13):
I guess, let me just remember if I missed any important one that you should do that will help you with a compounding effect. He has the very important one is the coupons. So you know, on Amazon the coupons are little green highlighted discounts, so either 10% off or like $3 off, right? So used to be orange, they used to be orange and orange used to be blending in. So blended with Amazon branding, they have everything orange, so orange, orange, you want to G and that orange coupon highlight was not really standing out, but now they switched it up to a green color. So the green is just, if you look at the listings search results there, you will see that whoever has a coupon, the green just stands out so much. Even the fewer bestseller like next to you stands a bestseller with many thousands of reviews and you only have 50 reviews.
Paula (30:06):
If you have a green highlight, the eye goes to yours. It’s just how it is. So you will get so many more eyes on your listing. If you enable the coupons and the coupons have a coupon redemption fee. Actually each coupon will cost you 60 cents in us to be redemptive. But, but I, in my experience when I enabled the coupons, I actually bought, bumped up the price a little bit and then gave a discount. Right. But not every single person applies a coupon. Unfortunately on Amazon you have to click this check box called apply the coupon and men in nontechnical users or shoppers, they don’t even have a clue what they have to do it. They see a discount, they are buying it and they don’t apply it. So only like one of three people that are my buyers applies at the end. The other sellers I’ve heard one of five for them only applies. That means you actually, cause remember you bumped up your price to give a coupon so you are selling more items because of more eyes with the bumped up the price and, and actually, you know, so that redemption fee becomes negligible because the 60 cents, you know, over the three people becomes like 20 cents on each and it’s not really significant anymore to influence you not having it. So coupon is something definitely, definitely highly recommended to enable, like on all of your items that you have today.
Charles (31:26):
That’s a very cool one. Yeah. Cause I feel like, I feel like all of these strategies, right, they’re techniques that aren’t going to change your actual bottom line. Do you know your actual hard costs, but they can just get that extra margin and just something like adding a coupon, like you said, you can increase your cost to cover that 67 fee plus whatever the discount is. So you can essentially make it a wash. But if one out of three people just don’t redeem it all of a sudden just profit increases just from doing that one thing, which is fat, which is amazing. It’s just such an easy way of taking your existing business and just getting X amount more profitable on top of whatever you’re doing today. So I’d love that. Awesome. All right, cool. I think that, I think those are some great tips actually people if you join a plug, anything or people want to find you kind of see what else you’re working on, what can they do? So
Paula (32:13):
I’m not plugging, I’m working on, on shopkeeper.com. Excellent. She has a logo in the background. I love it. It’s great. Yeah. My logo right there. As I mentioned, I’m a software developer by background. Well I didn’t develop myself the shopkeeper app. I actually have a team for that. But I guess for your audience, if you like, I have something that I could offer for anyone who’s interested. A shopkeeper is just the profit dashboard is to calculate your profit automatically to pull the 72 different fees automatically from Amazon. So you don’t have to do manually
Charles (32:47):
If you have, if you ever start reading that document manually, you like go blind instantly. You. It literally is like the most I’ve played with them before and kind of some different things. And those fees, they don’t make any sense. You don’t know what they mean. It’s, it is really hard to figure out that if you download the raw, yeah.
Paula (33:04):
So that’s the offer for me, especially for new sellers who are beginners. They can’t really afford any software. What I could do for you is I could give you a long free trial. So useless after founders say, okay, I’ll give you two months free trial instead of 14 days. Actually I will give you six months free trial instead of 14 days. So that could help you, you know, to at least understand your costs. So look at the software. It will pull all the fees in the few days and then you will see properly, you know, because on Amazon, seller central, when you look at the order page, they only give you the basic fees. They don’t, they’re not going to even list something like coupon redemption fee there, whatever the PPC cost was. And then the refunds associated with that, like the reimbursement fee. All of these things, they’re not going to even show up on that one order.
Paula (33:47):
So you want an app, like a lek shopkeeper to show you your, your profit. Maybe you are actually losing money on something. So to claim the six months free trial, go to shopkeeper.com and you will find the little chat bubble in the corner like many other apps have and just type in the code stingray, one 80, you know the fish stingray gray one 80 Oh capitals show notes as well. Okay. So when you type it in then we will get back to you and we’ll upgrade your account to be VIP and you’ll have the six months free trial from me. There’s a little present.
Charles (34:22):
People should definitely, if you’re selling on Amazon, definitely check that out cause those fees are, you know, digging through that report. I have not done it. Don’t do it cause it’s, it’s not pleasant so thank you for that. I definitely people shouldn’t take you up on that offer. Cool. Awesome. Well thank you very much for coming on the show today. It was great chatting.
Paula (34:40):
Thanks so much for having me, Charles.
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Good post! Thanks!