At the beginning of April the news returned: Amazon continues to add thousands of vendors every day, following the trend of recent years. Specific, over 2,000 vendors have joined daily since 2016.
Thousands of new sellers involve tens of thousands of new products wanting to compete (more or less cleanly) for the first page of search results that, according to numerous studies, It is the only one verified by the vast majority of buyers.
This uncontrolled situation means that there are more voices raised about the need for a competitor that threatens to dethrone Amazon. Without going any further, recently, in ecommerce community, We were talking about Amazon’s lack of interest due to its total lack of innovation or, simply, of “wanting to do things minimally well”. Among the complaints of some experts, were, – I quote, verbatim -:
- A “convenient” shopping experience, devoid of surprises, but increasingly plagued by unknown brands and products.
- Search results increasingly chaotic, extensive, and difficult to navigate.
- A category or product detail page that looks like a classified section of the old newspapers, full of ads and thousands of options that mislead us.
I introduce myself, I am Dori Lopez, and I want to tell you that from our experience in Innova Digital Export We cannot help but compare, at a technical level, the situation that has been occurring at Amazon in recent years with how their Chinese counterparts (JD, Tmall) deal with this problem. And some conclusions can be exciting.
A CPC campaign in the West
SEO, whether in Google or in any Marketplace – which is just another search engine – we already know that it is more of a marathon than a sprint. This means that any new account must rely on short/medium-term traffic purely based on advertising generated at CPC (cost per click).
This CPC, both on Amazon and on Google and other Western platforms, is calculated based on the well-known “supply-demand” ratio. Hence, a “long tail keyword” is much cheaper than a more generic word. At most, in those campaigns you can also be affected by the CTR (Click Through Rate) – how interesting your ad can be for the target that is seeing it -. And having a good SEO on Amazon can improve your CTR, that is, it can positively affect the visibility of those ads that you have configured.
But come on, the usual conclusion in a campaign in the West is: “If you want results in the short / medium term, take out your wallet and buy traffic”. The more traffic you can buy from the opening of your store, the more results you can count from the start of your project.
A CPC campaign in China
Now… let’s go to China. The exciting China!! One of my first surprises when we start marketing campaigns on marketplaces “equivalent” to sponsored ads on platforms like, for example, “JD Worldwide”, is that they do not work exactly the same as Amazon.
In fact, in my opinion, as in other areas of digital marketing, the platforms in China seem much more evolved and perhaps more successful in avoiding the lack of precision and quality that multiple experts complain about with Amazon.
In China, not all sellers play in the same division. In fact, if you are a new seller, your CPC is going to be very expensive – we are talking up to 5-10 times more than an average CPC. This is because, This CPC is calculated for you based on the organic positioning and performance ratios of your store.
That is to say, the sellers in China do not have it as easy as “well, in the short term CPC, while I earn SEO”. You have to start with other types of actions, such as searching for KOC (Key Opinion Consumers), beastly customer support ratios – chat response in less than half a minute -, super positive ratings, impeccable logistics, etc. And then if we talk about the CPC.
Specifically, I leave you the calculation algorithm on one of the platforms mentioned:
China CPC= (next applicant’s score * next applicant’s price) / my score + 0.01 RMB
In my opinion, this makes the job of marketers more difficult – although it is true that they have a wider range of techniques at their disposal -, but… Could it be that the ultimate goal is to increase the quality of the product pages and avoid that problem of lack of quality and specificity that we complain about so much at Amazon?
Well yes. If you want to be on the front page, work on your branding and that’s it, let’s talk. China 1 – Amazon 0.
Happy to read you in comments,