For trade sellers, because the product selection is wide and not limited to a few categories, the way of product selection is still worth paying attention to. Generally speaking, trade sellers have two product selection modes: “boutique-oriented” and “distribution-oriented”. Correspondingly, trade sellers are divided into “boutique sellers” and “distribution sellers”.
The so-called “boutique sellers”, as the name suggests, are to carefully select a small number of SKUs, and then purchase each SKU in large quantities and send them to Amazon FBA warehouses, pursuing the realization of thousands of orders per day for a single product. The boutique model is the model advocated by the Amazon platform and is also the model that can maximize the advantages of the Amazon platform. At the same time, it is also recommended that Amazon sellers adopt the boutique model so that sales can be increased. In addition, for factory sellers, they can only choose the boutique model. After all, the factory has only a small number of SKUs, and it is definitely not appropriate to use the distribution model. Of course, the boutique model also has its own disadvantages. If the product is unsalable overseas due to early product selection errors or later operation errors, then the seller may have to bear serious losses. Therefore, the selection and operation methods under the boutique model are crucial.
The so-called “spread type sellers” simply pursue the number of products and the product sales rate as much as possible. For example, if the sales rate of the entire company can be controlled at an average of about 3 points, then the more products uploaded to Amazon, the more orders will be placed? If the total number of uploaded products is limited, and the average sales rate of the products is increased by 2~3 points, will there be more orders every day? The answer is yes. For spread type sellers, product sales rate and the number of uploaded products are two extremely critical indicators!
The first key indicator “the number of uploaded products” does not require any technical content to improve this indicator. Basically, it is to upload as many products as possible every day. The number of employees of spread type sellers is very large, which is 30~50 times the number of employees of boutique sellers.
The second key indicator “product sales rate” is determined by the seller’s product selection method. In terms of product selection methods, spread type sellers mostly follow the method of finding a vertical sub-category and spreading as many as possible, rather than aimlessly spreading products through a wide range of cross-category models. In simple terms, it is to first identify a vertical sub-category, such as women’s swimwear, and then use your own distribution tools or enterprise systems to batch-up the goods. For each style, change the product pictures and descriptions as much as possible, and repeat the distribution as much as possible to increase the exposure of a single product.
This method can improve the product sales rate for two reasons: on the one hand, for the vertical sub-category of women’s swimwear, few people will buy directly by searching keywords, which makes it difficult for the top-ranked popular products to achieve traffic monopoly, and there will always be long-tail traffic in the category; on the other hand, the category of women’s swimwear is not large to begin with, and it is a very vertical sub-category. Seasonal popular products can easily gather large-scale traffic in a short period of time. When sellers distribute goods in this category, the total number of products on the shelves may be greater than the total number of products in the entire category, and the sales rate will be greatly improved. Moreover, this method will be more effective in some European countries with small languages, because compared with the US site, the women’s swimwear category in some European countries with small languages will be smaller, with fewer products and fewer competitors.
Although this article focuses on the product selection methods and operation ideas of general sellers, these ideas and methods are indeed very practical, but I still recommend that readers become boutique sellers.