So, 2023 was fun; you’ve done well on one Amazon marketplace, and you’re ready to grow your Amazon business. It’s an exciting time for FBA sellers, who’ve tasted sweet success in one country, and are now eyeing the horizon, hoping to tap into new international markets. Hold your horses one sec; this endeavor, while exciting, comes with its own set of challenges and complexities. Strategic planning, market understanding, and, crucially, effective localization are the keys to ensuring your expansion goes well. These strategies will bring you out of a half-hearted attempt and straight into successful business growth.
We’ve put together a comprehensive guide for the Amazon Seller that’s interested in running a successful business in the competitive Amazon marketplace – all over the world. Read on to check out effective strategies to boost your sales, build trust, smoothen your Amazon selling journey, and grow their businesses in Amazon’s 21 marketplaces all over the world (soon to be 22 with this year’s launch of Amazon South Africa!).
It’s time to scale your Amazon FBA business. Let’s get started.
Grow Your Amazon FBA Business with Strategic Insights
Before you start selling on Amazon worldwide, take a look at your current business on Amazon first. Part of taking your business to the next level is to assess your business status and statistics first, and see where you can improve. Take a step back. Look at your Amazon business from an objective viewpoint, check how your business reached where it is now, and see what you need to do in order to take it even further.
Check your current sales history, sales momentum, pricing strategies, SEO game, inventory management, vendor relations, product sourcing, and so forth. Then set a strategic direction for growth.
Put it this way – you have to look at your Amazon business the way a doctor would assess a patient for the first time. Where is it healthy? Where is it lagging? Now, how can you “heal” those broken parts to get your Amazon business healthy enough to traverse international waters?
This level of strategic insight is crucial for your Amazon growth strategy.
Scale and Grow Your Amazon FBA Business with Automation
Without a doubt, when you grow your business, things will get tougher and more complex. You’ll have to juggle many more balls in the air as sales increase, the number of your customers increase, and your marketing ramps up. That’s why automation is your ally. Automating processes will help you streamline processes and free you up to focus on running your business, instead of spending time in the weeds.
Automate things like inventory management, customer service (we can help you translate a chatbot to handle FAQs in real time!), accounting, and so on. By employing the right tools, you significantly enhance your efficiency, and ensure you’re prepared to handle the increased volume that comes with expanding into new markets – even ones in languages you don’t personally speak.
Sure, it can be daunting to enter Amazon.de when you don’t speak German, but if the statistics prove that it’ll be a good move for your Amazon FBA business, don’t let the language barrier stop you from running efficient operations. Automating a lot of the operations can help you save time.
Scale and Grow Your Amazon FBA Business with Professional Services and Quality Assets
Here are the big mistakes that Amazon sellers make:
- Using ChatGPT to come up with an Amazon listing – without human editing, the output sounds contrived and robotic, and AI isn’t too good at putting keywords in strategic places to make the copywriting sound fluent
- Using Google Translate to convert a listing into other languages
- Not going to the experts for PPC (or not becoming an expert yourself)
- Conducting quick and dirty market research and going by gut feel rather than hard-and-fast data
- Taking photos with your camera phone without employing a graphic design outfit to manage your images, A+, videos, etc.
When your images don’t communicate the value of your product – when they aren’t pretty enough to increase the perceived value of your product – you’re leaving money on the table. Not to mention, localizing your images is crucial to growing your eCommerce business, because character counts often change from one language to the other, so it’s important to head to a native speaker to get the most out of your copywriting and communicate the key messages in a way that doesn’t detract from the integrity of your image.
As for Amazon PPC – there’s so much that goes into a successful campaign, from Amazon advertising using Amazon sponsored ads to dayparting to bidding on the right keywords. Some people get into Amazon selling as PPC experts, and that’s wonderful, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.
The point is, one of the best ways to grow your Amazon business is to leave the pros to the pro work. Copywriters write, graphic designers design, and PPC experts run successful campaigns. Furthermore, as your business starts to expand, you’ll be too busy to focus on these things, so it’s really a good rule of thumb to leave these things to the experts. Professional services can increase your presence on Amazon and improve your perceived value, which provides incredible value to everyone – whether you’re a new seller or you’ve been doing this for some time.
Grow Your FBA Business with Comprehensive Audits
Regular audits of your Amazon account, product listings, and advertising strategies are vital to ensure you’re on the right track. These audits can reveal insights into your performance, highlight areas for optimization, and ensure your business complies with Amazon’s ever-evolving policies. Addressing these areas proactively can significantly boost your business’s health and growth potential.
Did you know that YLT Translations offers free audits of your listing? We assess where your translated listing is doing well and where it could be improved. This service helps Amazon sellers pinpoint areas for improvement – a helpful task when venturing into a new market. Get our free listing audit before you even think about expanding, so we can hold your hand and help you get on the right track.
Leveraging Virtual Assistants to Grow Your Business on Amazon
As your business grows, so do the daily operational tasks. It’s worth it to hire at least one virtual assistant to start, to offload mundane tasks and allow you to focus on growth on Amazon. Virtual Assistants, aka VAs, are a huge benefit to every seller, because they allow sellers to concentrate on bigger picture items, while they handle repetitive tasks, like optimizing your product page, managing your seller account, keeping an eye on products on Amazon and inventory levels, and so much more. Hiring good VAs is crucial if you want to scale your FBA business sooner than later, so don’t delay and start building up your team. Your business requires many hands on deck once you start scaling upwards, so it’s a good idea to start searching as early as now.
The good news is, VAs come from all over the world, and you’ll find experts in virtually any aspect of your business, and for different price points, depending on the relative experience of each VA. You can even find part time VAs if your business doesn’t require full-time staff just yet – but it eventually will, so make sure you find good ones.
Scale Your FBA Business with Amazon Brand Registry and Data Analytics
Enrolling in Amazon Brand Registry unlocks a suite of tools and analytics, offering deeper insights into your brand’s performance and customer behavior. These insights are invaluable for making informed decisions and tailoring your strategies to resonate with your new international audience. Furthermore, you’ll qualify for all the fun things like A+ – a proven marketing tool that can boost conversion and engagement. (Just don’t forget to get that A+ translated and localized before you expand!)
It’s gotten to a point that Amazon Brand Registry is a non-negotiable for sellers, especially those who are planning to increase sales on Amazon in more than just one country. Plus, you have access to all the hard data, which can inform the decisions you make.
Ways to Grow Your Amazon Business: Inventory Management Optimization
You know how it goes – when you go out of stock, you get dissatisfied customers, and your rank will eventually drop. But inventory management is a tad more complicated than just keeping stocks in the warehouse. Let’s take a quick glance at the best practices when you’re doing fulfillment by Amazon (although these best practices work just as well for FBM).
Effective inventory management is crucial for businesses as it involves balancing stock levels to meet demand while avoiding overstocking, which ties up capital and increases pesky storage costs. Holding excess inventory can stop you from responding in an agile way to market shifts (because your money is otherwise tied up!). Tools like Amazon’s excess inventory calculation alert help you optimize stock levels, which of course lead to better sell-through rate and ROI.
On the other hand, understocking can harm sales and brand reputation. Customers don’t like falling in love with an item only for their hopes to be dashed because it’s not in stock. It’s essential to use tools and analyses, such as Amazon’s Restock Tool, to predict and maintain optimal inventory levels. Having a good understanding of cost of goods sold (COGS) will help you figure out pricing strategies and inventory valuation, so you avoid issues like stranded or unsellable stock and spoilage – a particularly valid point if you’re selling perishable goods.
The good news is, Amazon offers a suite of tools for FBA sellers, including the Inventory Performance Index (IPI), which helps manage inventory efficiently, suggesting optimum levels and actions to minimize costs and improve profitability.
It goes without saying that when it comes to growing your Amazon seller business, proper inventory management across all the countries you plan to grow to is crucial.
Grow Your Amazon FBA Business Through Enhancing Customer Experience
This one’s pretty obvious: keep customers happy and they’ll be back. But customer expectations can vary widely especially across country lines and borders. Cultural nuances play a big role in conversion and engagement, so adapting a level of cultural sensitivity is a good idea when you grow your business on Amazon.
You absolutely do want to provide an exceptional customer experience, but you’ll want to tailor that to each market’s preferences. The ability to keep your customers happy across many different marketplaces is quite the feat; it can boost your brand’s reputation and encourage customer loyalty.
Regardless of the countries you sell in, focus on delivering quality, value, and service that exceeds expectations. Solid customer service and the enhancement of the customer experience is one of the best ways you can grow in multiple marketplaces.
Grow Your Business on Amazon Through Amazon Prime and Order Fulfillment
Offering Amazon Prime-eligible products can greatly enhance your appeal to customers, providing them with the fast, reliable shipping they value. Whether you’re using FBA or considering Seller Fulfilled Prime, ensuring your fulfillment strategies meet Prime’s standards is crucial for success in competitive markets.
Many marketplaces also offer quick shipping. Furthermore, there’s tons of data online about what customers in different countries expect from eCommerce providers, so you’ll get hard info on whether fast shipping is a non-negotiable or a nice-to-have.
Whatever the case may be, offering quick shipping through Amazon Prime is probably a good idea, even if customers don’t demand it.
Grow Your Business with Multi-Channel Marketing and Diversification
It is so important to meet your customers where they’re at. In other words, don’t just limit yourself to Amazon! Get out there and find out where your customers are.
For example, Facebook is most used by people in India (385.65 million active users), the US (188.6 million users), Indonesia (136.35 million users), Brazil (111.75 million), and Mexico (94.8 million). On the other hand, Facebook is banned in China, and used very rarely in Japan, which is the country with the lowest social media usage in the world. So, implementing a Facebook campaign or creating a community around your product won’t work across the board.
You must find what works with your demographic. Where are they hanging out? How are they using your product? What are they saying about it? About competitors?
Use the data to guide you into a multichannel marketing approach. The more chances you have to meet your customers, the better.
YLT Translations Can Help You Grow Your Amazon FBA Business
Without a doubt, scaling your Amazon business depends heavily on international expansion. It’s not as simple as feeding your US listing into Google Translate and calling it a day. There are many factors at work, but to sum it up in a tidy little nutshell, you need cultural competence. According to Georgetown University, “cultural competence is the ability of an individual to understand and respect values, attitudes, beliefs, and mores that differ across cultures, and to consider and respond appropriately to these differences in planning, implementing, and evaluating health education and promotion programs and interventions.” In the scope of growing your Amazon business, this means a keen understanding – or at least a willingness to understand better – what drives your customers, what triggers them, what moves and inspires them, and to adapt your content accordingly.
Part of this involves a beautifully translated listing, which also needs localization work – fine-tuning the content so it displays cultural competence. Machine translations fail spectacularly at this, because AI simply doesn’t have the awareness of the emotions that drive a sale. AI can’t replicate the heart and soul that a good team of professionals can bring to your listing.
So, when it comes to growing your Amazon FBA business, leave the translation to the pros; YLT Translations has helped many, many brands expand to international markets, convert, engage, and gain the loyalty of their customers all across the globe.
Conclusion: Grow Your Amazon FBA Business the Right Way
It’s fun to think about chartering unknown waters. But before you jump into the deep end, consider the best practices in growing your Amazon FBA business:
- Employ strategic insights to assess your business from an honest standpoint before making any decisions
- Automate wherever you can
- Employ professional services; the experts know what they’re doing
- Get audited every once in a while to check your business health
- Hire at least one virtual assistant, then plan to grow your team as your business grows too
- Apply for Amazon brand registry
- Optimize inventory management
- Enhance customer experience
- Provide speedy shipping through Amazon Prime
- Explore multi-channel marketing to meet your customers where they’re at
- Get YLT Translations to handle your translation and localization for you, so your chances at resonating with your customers all over the globe is way, way improved!
There – hope that helped. Growing your Amazon business should be in the crosshairs of any astute Amazon seller, so we’re glad you’ve come across this tell-all guide. Don’t forget – get audited before you start – and involve YLT Translations every step of the way to get it right the first time.
Do you have plans of expanding internationally? Where would you like to expand to? Share with us in the comments below!