What are the other numbers people make mistakes on? What things to people go wrong on and how can they go right?

Promotion services

There are a lot of great services out there to handle promotions, but one major mistake is failing to calculate the cost of those promotions. It might sound like a great idea to give away another 10 units until you factor in the cost of that. It’s important to get those numbers in front of you because that is a lot of money.

Weigh your reasoning for doing that. Is it important to show Amazon that continued sales velocity? Do you want to hit 1000 reviews? Is that really important? For Ryan, he has goals outside of Hello Profit and Amazon. He wants to help others. By taking a look at his numbers and not just throwing money away to be the big seller, it helps him reach those goals.

Conversion Rates

It’s a very important element of selling on Amazon that is underrated and not talked about so much. Ryan was talking with another seller that had been working with Amazon for about a year that didn’t know what unit session percentage was or where to find it.

What this is, is the ratio of people that visit your page (sessions) to the number of units that those people  purchase (unit session percentage)

This number is very important to Amazon. Amazon has very limited amount of space to devote to ads and they spend actual money on you promoting products on Facebook and other places.

So it’s in their best interest to promote products that will convert. So will they choose product A that maybe 1 out of 5 times someone that visits that page, will buy the product. Or, product B that gets 1 sale out of 10? Amazon wants the higher converting product because that means they will make more money of the sales.

Whenever Ryan got his unit session percentage up, he noticed a lot more traffic to his ASIN because Amazon started promoting that product more.

Is there a magic number of conversion percentage we should hit?

There probably isn’t a magic number but Ryan suspects that it varies by category. For instance, in beauty, shoppers will more likely comparison shop. So they will look at several different items before choosing, therefore conversion rates will be lower. Unlike hammers which shoppers will likely buy the first one they come to.

On a side note, Ryan was getting around 30% in home improvement, which is really good. Sometimes up to 40%. However, if you’re getting 20%, that’s still very good. If you’re in the teens, still probably above average. However, if you’re below 10%, it’s probably a sign there is an issue with your listing.

With unit session percentage, is it important to differentiate between units per session or orders per session? For instance, if someone buys 10 units in a single order, that gives 10 units for one order

It seems to be units per session that matters. So if you sell 10 units in a single order, it’s 100% order session percentage,  but it’s it’s 1000% unit session percentage.

It’s unit sales that seem to drive Amazon. If Amazon can send an ad and get 2 units sold instead of 1, they get that 15% commision twice for the same ad. It is definitely in their interest to promote that product, so focus on units per session.

Refunds

Refunds often denote returns, and returns are not your friend. You will get listings, and even accounts, shut down if you have too high  a return rate.

Hello Profit has recently started tracking your refunds for you right on your merchant and product dashboard so you can see your rate of refund.

Now you can see if you are having a lot of refunds and can do something about it; c...