Increased Rankings and Sales + Ordered a New Shipment – Update 15

I am here today to give you all an update on how my sales and Amazon keyword rankings have improved since my last update. I will be talking about what I have been doing and why I have been seeing improvements.

I will also be ordering a new shipment for my product. I will be discussing why I am doing this so soon and my thoughts on this decision.

I am really excited about the results I am seeing so far from selling on Amazon and I think it is going to turn out to be a profitable business for me. It is still very early to determine how successful this will be, but it is a good start so far!

Now, before we get into the actual post, make sure to catch up on all of the previous updates in my Amazon FBA case study!

1. PART 1 – Intro to Case Study
2. PART 2 – The Game Plan
3. PART 3 – How to Find Profitable Products to Sell on Amazon
4. PART 4 – How to Find Suppliers on Amazon
5. PART 5 – Info About my First Order + Calculating Profit Margins
6. PART 6 – How to Utilize your Samples
7. PART 7 – FNSKU Labels and UPC Barcodes
8. PART 8 – I Placed my First Order + a Minor Setback
9. PART 9 – How to Brand your Amazon FBA Business
10. PART 10 – How to Setup your Amazon Sellers Account
11. PART 11 – My Product has Shipped + Updates
12. PART 12 – The Definitive Guide to Getting your Product Pictures Taken
13. PART 13 – My Product has Arrived + My Initial Launch Strategy
14. PART 14 – Results from my First Month of Selling on Amazon
15. PART 15 – Increased Rankings and Sales + Ordered a New Shipment
16. PART 16 – Details of My First 90 Days Selling on Amazon

Alrighty, let’s get right into the post!

Increased Sales and Keyword Rankings

It has been slightly over two weeks since my last update and I have seen some nice increases in both the amount of sales and my keyword rankings. Below is a screenshot of my sellers dashboard from October 10th – October 27th, which is the time since my last update.

 

There has been a couple of things that I have done to try to increase sales/keyword rankings that has helped a lot. One of these things being lowering the price of my product and the other was giving away another 25 units.

I talked about these things in our Amazon FBA Facebook group, but I will break down each one of them below and inform you of the results that I saw from them.

Lowering my Product Price – Did it Help?

Yes.

But you will see that there isn’t enough data to see all of the results from lowering the price. The reason is because I lowered the price on October 10th and then did a 25 unit giveaway on October 17th.

This means that there is only one week (October 10th – 16th) of data that isn’t affected by the 25 unit giveaway. After I did the 25 unit giveaway on the 17th, it is hard to pinpoint where the increased sales/keyword rankings came from.

For this reason, I will mainly be looking at the data that was before the giveaway to get a look at the data that I know is only affected by lowering the price. I hope this all makes sense, if not keep reading and it will make sense soon!

Keyword Ranking Results

I changed the price from $19.99 to $14.99 on October 10th and since then I have seen nothing but more sales and increased keyword rankings. First, let’s take a look at it affected my keyword rankings:

My Main Keyword – 55,000 Monthly Searches

Another Main Keyword – 63,500 Monthly Searches

Smaller Keyword – 13,500 Monthly Searches

Smaller Keyword – 8,000 Monthly Searches

As these charts show, my keyword rankings have shot up across the board. These are significant gains as well, I am going from the 2nd page to middle-top of the first page for a lot of these terms.

Remember that increased keyword rankings are due to both lowering the price and the giveaway I did. However, I wanted to show you the date that I lowered the price so that you can see what happened after.

With these increased keyword rankings come more pageviews and more sales, which in turn brings in more money for me which is the main goal. Let’s now take a look at how my sales were affected by lowering the price.

Product Sales

Like I said, on October 17th I did a 25 unit giveaway targeting a specific keyword. I will be talking more about this giveaway and the effects it had in a second, but since I did this giveaway so close to when I lowered the price it is hard to determine which one had the most impact on things. We will dig into the numbers later on in this post to try and determine this, but I wanted to make sure you all knew this before we carried on.

For this reason, I will only be looking at the product sales from October 10th (the day I lowered the price) to October 16th (the day before I did the 25 unit giveaway). By doing this, I can look at the data before I did the giveaway so that we are only looking at the things that happened from lowering the price, nothing else.

To get an idea of what type of increases in sales I saw, I will be comparing the week before the lowered price to the week after the lowered price. This way I can compare week vs. week to see exactly what lowering the price did for my sales.

The first thing I want to look at is the sales data for the week before I lowered my price to get some baseline number to compare to.

Sales Stats from October 3th – 9th

The week before I lowered the price, there was a total of 44 units ordered. This comes out to be 6.28 sales per day. Also, note that there was on average 1.22 units per order.

Next, let’s look at the week after I changed the price:

Sales Stats from October 10th – 16th

In the 7 days after lowering the price there was a total of 56 units sold.

That means on average there were 8 sales per day, which is more than a 1.5 sale increase per day when the price was at $19.99. Interestingly, there was only 1.08 average units per order, which is quite a bit lower than it was at the higher price.

There might not be enough data here for us to make any sort of conclusions because a week isn’t long enough to gather enough data. It would probably take at least a couple of days before Amazon takes notice to the price change and makes changes accordingly. Nonetheless, it is still interesting to compare the sales before and after the price change.

Product Listing Conversion Rates

One of my main reasons for lowering the price was to increase the conversion rate of my product listing. I was then hoping that Amazon would take notice of this conversion rate increase and then move my listing higher for the keywords I am targeting.

Let’s take a look and see if my conversion rate was boosted from lowering the price. I will use the same data set that I used to compare the sales. Meaning I will compare the week before and the week after lowering my price:

Week Before

Total Sessions (visitors to product listing): 200

Total Item Ordered: 44

Conversion Rate: 22%

Week After

Total Sessions: 209

Total Items Ordered: 56

Conversion Rate: 27%

I saw a 5% conversion rate increase for my product listing after I lowered my price. This is also the reason for the increased sales.

You can see that there was relatively the same amount of sessions for each period (200 vs. 209) but the total amount of items ordered differed by 12 (44 vs. 56). It is clear to see that by lowering the price I was able to increase my conversion rate, which is what I thought would happen.

One thing that I found interesting is the fact that there was just about the same amount of sessions for the week before and the week after. This means that there wasn’t an increase in rankings because if there was then there would have been more sessions. Instead, the only thing that changed was the conversion rate which in turn produced more sales.

I am not saying that lowering the price didn’t help with rankings, but during the week after I lowered the price there wasn’t any significant keyword increases. I know this because the amount of sessions stayed the same.

Final Verdict from Lowering the Price

After looking at all of the data I laid out above, one thing is clear to see – lowering the price increased my conversion rates of my product listing.

I think that the increase in conversion rates improved my keyword rankings as well because Amazon likes to see listings that convert well. Later on in the article you will see why I have decided to raise the price back up to $19.99 for the foreseeable future.

In the next section, I will be looking at the 25 unit giveaway I did and see what kinds of results I saw from doing so.

Results from 25 Unit Giveaway

I gave 25 units away for free on October 17th.

The reason behind this was to try and boost the rankings of one specific keyword by using a super url for this giveaway. I was targeting this one specific keyword because I had reached the first page of Amazon for this keyword and I wanted to make sure that Amazon saw my product listing as one that converts well.

In doing so, I was hoping that Amazon would not only keep me on the first page, but also move me up even higher on the first page.

What is a Super Url and Why Did I Use It?

A super url is a link that you create that you use when you are giving away your product for reviews. The reason you use one of these links is because it makes to look like each unit you sale through this link was bought from someone searching for your targeted keyword.

For example, I could set up a super url that targeted three keywords, silicone baking mat, silicone mat, and large silicone mat. Then, whenever someone used this super url Amazon would think someone used one of the above mentioned keywords to buy the product.

Why is this useful?

This extremely useful because Amazon looks to see what keywords your products converts well for and which keywords it doesn’t. A keyword with a good conversion rate for your listing shows Amazon that your product is highly targeted for that keyword and exactly what the people are looking for. Amazon now knows that this keyword and your product should be associated with each other.

Amazon will then rank your listing higher up in the search results because it knows that your product is what people want when searching for that specific keyword.

The opposite is also true. If your product converts poorly for a specific keyword then Amazon knows that it shouldn’t return your product when people search this keyword.

That is why it is important to use a super url for your main keywords that you want to rank for when doing your giveaways and launches. Doing so will help boost the conversion rates for these keywords and show Amazon that your product converts well for these keywords, then in turn ranking you higher in the search results.

In this 25 unit giveaway I did this exact thing, except I only targeted ONE keyword with these 25 units. The keyword I targeted is the biggest keyword (63,500 monthly searches). Let’s take a look at how my keyword rankings were affected from doing this giveaway and using a super url.

Keyword Ranking Boosts from Giveaway

Like I mentioned, I was mainly targeting one keyword with this giveaway. It is the keyword with the most monthly searches as well. The reason I wanted to target this specific one was because I had recently gone from the 2nd page onto the first page.

I was talking with with the owner of Spike Listing and he suggested it was a good idea to show Amazon that my product converted well for this keyword now that it is on the first page. Let’s see what happened:

When I started the giveaway, I was sitting at position 16. Currently I am at the 10th position for this keyword.

So did this help?

100% yes!

The funny thing was, I saw bigger increases for my other keywords that I am tracking. I am not sure why, it is probably just a side effect of doing this giveaway. However, with all of my keyword improving in rank it lead to a lot more sales coming in each day.

Increase in Sales

Since doing my giveaway, I have seen a massive increase in sales and the amount of sales keep going up each day. I am so excited to log into my Sellers Central account each day because everyday I am breaking the previous days sales record 🙂

To show this massive increase, I will compare the sales data from the when I first started selling on Amazon to the day before I did this 25 init giveaway vs. the 11 days after the 25 unit giveaway.

That means from September 9th (first day of selling on Amazon) to October 16th vs. October 18th – 27th.

NOTE: I am excluding the 17th because that was the day of the giveaway and it would skew the data. I am also excluding the 100 units I gave away during my first launch as those were not organic sales and would also skew the data.

Sales from September 9th – October 16th

In total, I sold 227 units during this time period, but remember I am excluding the 100 units I gave during my first launch so there are only 127 organic sales during this period.

In 37 days there was a total of 127 organic sales that occurred. This comes out to only 3.4 sales per day. Let’s now compare this to the 11 days after the 25 unit giveaway.

Sales from October 18th – 27th

This data starts on October 18th because I wanted to exclude the 17th due to that being that being the day of the 25 unit giveaway.

So in the 11 days after doing the giveaway, there was a total of 165 sales. That comes out to be 15 sales per day!

Wow.

After doing this small giveaway, I was able to increase the amount of daily sales up to 15 per day. That is crazy to me that I could see such a huge increase in such a short period of time. It is pretty obvious that this giveaway was a huge help and did exactly what I was hoping for and more.

Lowered Price + 25 Unit Giveaway = a Good Combo

Even though I have seen the most success AFTER doing my 25 unit giveaway I still think that lowering the price to increase conversion rates was a major factor to these sales increases. The combination of lowering the price and then doing the giveaway seems like it was exactly what I needed to do.

It will be interesting to see how things unfold in the upcoming weeks/months.

I Ordered a New Shipment

With all of these sales I am making it is time to order a new shipment!

Honestly, I probably should have done this a couple weeks ago but it was hard to determine how long my current stock would last because each day I was selling more units and it was almost impossible for me to estimate how long my current stock would last.

Now that I am selling 20-25 units a day, I needed to order a new shipment ASAP.

Current Stock

Right now, I have 619 total units at Amazon but only 539 are currently available due to 80 of them being reserved. See below:

The 80 units marked as reserved mean that they are currently tied to a sell. This means that I have around 80 units that have been sold, but are currently at Amazon for whatever reason. So I really only have 539 units left to sell.

In less than 2 months of being live on Amazon I have already gone through just about half of my initial inventory, with most of the sales coming within the last couple of weeks!

Inventory Forecasting

By the look of things, I will be selling around 20+ units a day if I keep up the current pace and possibly even more. However, if I use this 20 unit a day average I can get an idea of how long this current inventory will last me.

If I divide my current stock by 20 I will be able to see how many days I have left until I run out of stock.

539/20 = 27 days

If I was to keep up the current pace, I will only have around 27 days until I run out! This is not good since it takes a around 2 months to get my new shipment to Amazon. If I don’t do something I will run out of stock and lose my current rankings and miss out on making money!

How I am Planning on Making my Inventory Last

The first thing that I have already done is raise my price back up to $19.99. I might even have to raise it higher if I keep making a lot of sales per day.

Raising the price is the best way to slow down sales, but I hope it doesn’t hurt me too bad in the long run.

Estimated Arrival of New Shipment

I placed my new order on October 22nd for another 1008 units.

Basing the time it took for my last shipment from placing the order to arriving at Amazon it took around 70 days! If things go at the same pace as last time I should expect my shipment to arrive around the beginning of January.

That is a really long time to make these last ~500 units last, but I will have to try my best!

It could even take longer than 70 days due to it being during the holidays and everything being extremely busy. Fingers crosses it is a quick shipment and it arrives before I run out.

I need to make 539 units last 70 days. This is going to be hard, especially since it is during the holiday season. I need to sell under 8 units per day to make 539 units last 70 days.

This is a big drop off from the current pace I am at and I am hoping raising the price will decrease the amount of daily sales. I will have to keep raising the price until I am making under 8 sales per day and try my best to make it last!

I’m Glad I Ordered 1000 Units for my First Order

When I made my first order for my product I am glad I decided to go with 1000 units instead of 500. I was anticipating I was going to have success and I wanted to have enough inventory in stock to make sure I was able to ride out this success as long as possible.

If I only ordered 500 units for my first order I would already pretty much be out of stock and waiting for my new shipment to arrive. This would have put me out of the game a long time and I would have missed all of the holiday sales.

Why I Only Ordered 1000 Units for my Second Order

My second shipment is going to be 1000 (1008 to be exact) units just like my first order. I would have liked to order more than that but here is why I didn’t:

1. The more units I order the longer it takes my supplier to manufacture
2. Large upfront investment

The main reason I didn’t was because of the 2nd bullet point, large upfront investment.

It costs me right around $4,000 in landing costs between my manufacturing costs and shipping costs for 1000 units. So just about $4 per unit.

If I was going to order 2,500 units, which is how many I would like to order, it would cost me A LOT in upfront costs.

Let’s assume I would get a better rate per unit when I ordered 2,500 units vs. 1000. Instead it costing me $4 per unit in landing costs for 1000 units, let’s say I was able to get the cost at $3.50 per unit when I ordered 2,500 units.

This would mean I would have to pay $8,750 in landing costs to order 2,500 units. That is a lot of money!

It is even more when you consider that I am still in the hole around $3,000 from my first order. I spent a total of $5,000 (all expenses, not just landing fees) to get my first shipment to Amazon and I have only made around $2,000 of that back.

So if I was to order 2,500 units I would have to put up $8,750 + still being in the hole $3,000. That means I would have to sink close to $12,000 in upfront costs.

Even though I wish I could do this because it would help my business grow faster, I just can’t put that much money up right now. That is why I am going with another 1000 unit shipment for now.

However, if I see the same success with my next 1000 unit shipment I will then place an order for 2,500 units for my 3rd shipment.

Summary Report for Oct. 10th – 27th

I want to show you the income and expenses for the time since my last update. The image below shows all of the stats from October 10th – 26th.

I made around $3,200 in revenue during this time period of 18 days. During this time period my product was priced at $14.99 and I made $4.5 in profit every unit I sold.

This means I have a profit margin of around 33%. This is lower than I would like, but it is low because the price is low.

We can use this profit margin and the total revenue to get a good estimate on the total profit I made during this time period.

3,200 * .33 = $1,056

I made around $1,000 in PROFIT during these 18 days. That is awesome to see and I know that this is just the beginning.

Conclusion

I know this was a long update with a lot of numbers and comparisons, but I hope you found it useful and interesting. I am trying to be 100% transparent with my Amazon business and give you all of the details that I can.

So far I am very pleased with how this is going and I think there is a good potential to turn this into a very nice business. I am trying my best to reinvest as much as I can into this business to help it grow as quick as possible.

I am seeing success much faster than I thought I would and I just hope that I can get my new shipment in before I run out of stock. These next two months or so may not be the best months business wise since I am trying to limit the number of sales I make per day, but once I get my new shipment in it will pedal to medal.

Thank you all for reading, I really appreciate it. I also want to thank you all again for following along my journey since the beginning and keeping me motivated to keep you all updated on how things are going. It means a lot when I get emails/comments from you all saying how I have been a huge help to you and I have inspired you. Those emails and comments mean a lot, so thank you.

Before I end the article, if you haven’t already make sure to sign up to my email newsletter below and join our Amazon Facebook group!