Last shot at this, looking for any help on increasing sales please

#21

It was the ‘review’ type articles I was approaching, but before they would even consider it there was a charge. Strangely, all of the reviews in hindsight were positive, no negative ones at all, suppose on these types of articles it’s all about how much you can afford for a positive review!.

Nice one, I’m going to message them on their channel and see if they would be interested in receiving a few bars if it would fit with their eco/minimalistic lifestyle and if they enjoy using them maybe an affiliation for a wee plug on their channel :slight_smile:
Thanks for the steer

#22

they sound like weegies (Glaswegians) and started their journey just along the road from me

#23

Ecommerce and mores market places are horrendous. Sounds like you have great products. Handmade UK products are gold dust!..but you need outstanding marketing to stand out to succeed. Lots of handmade stuff of Eastern Europe, even the Chinese are making soaps etc. But there is a great place for British made goods, if you know how to market it. Look top sellers Etsy or NOTHS. I think your products fits well here. Compare their marketing to yours.

You need someone who knows about listing optimisation and do stuff on your sellers account that will drive sales. ie. A+ Contents, deals, sales, offers, promotion. You may need a VA if you want a long term person. Otherwise, you can seek help for the initial setting up/ amending existing.

That’s why 12 years old kids are making tens of millions from their bedroom after school, and so many decent businesses struggle.

#24

Agree with everything you’ve said, we primarily use Amazon, eBay and other selling platforms mostly as a stepping stone for our longer term plan which is to get the word of our products and brand out there, it’s very much hit and miss with ‘marketing’ privately as such, we had tried some advertising but because our market is highly competitive it’s near impossible to compete with the bigger players who throw hundreds of thousands and even millions of £££’s at their marketing budgets, even google ads is recommending something like £2+ per click for some of our keywords which is a massive price to pay for a click that mostly won’t convert.

As you rightly point out, social media is the way to go for a lot of marketing, unfortunately I hate it, and with a passion, I have tried to get my head around it but I feel a lot of the time I’m simply repeating myself with posts which could be doing us more harm than good, so my plan at the moment is as above, try and get key niche involved, like those traveling or going light, like vanlifers, gyms, etc, slightly lower competition on many of those keywords for our market and if it pans out we could have a handful of YouTubers from the travelling and gym world pushing our products as eco friendly, convenient and fuss free, especially when it comes to different water types, traditional shampoo bars just can’t cut it, whereas our shampoo bars work in all water types which is another massive push point for us.

Unfortunately, money is tight for many of us, particularly when sales are slow, so we’re keen to explore the avenues that cost the least and hopefully return a result, might not be the best result, but a result is a result for us and if it furthers the brand and products we’re all for it, but I will post back with our results as and when we manage to get a few people on board hopefully, already heard back from the guys mentioned earlier and they appear keen to try out our products so hopefully if they like them we can look at the possibility of affiliation if it means they offer us a shout out on their channel, hopefully the first of many, who knows, we could become the ‘convenient’ brand for travellers and gym goers !!

#25

It’s definitely worth having the 1:1 session (assuming it’s been offered for free). When I joined Handmade I had a 1:1 and it was really detailed and helpful. They looked at just about everything with me: keywords, descriptions, images, categories, etc, and gave advice about how I could make little tweaks. I was also able to ask specific questions. And this is only a vague memory because it was about 2 years ago, but I think they may have offered me a nice freebie as well, like credits for running Amazon Ads (although maybe I dreamt that bit, so don’t get your hopes up!).

Any chance to speak to a real live human being at Amazon about specific issues feels like a good opportunity.

#26

Totally, I’m still working on the listings and formats at the moment, hopefully those little changes may help as well and I’ll give it a short while before going back to arrange a 1:1, I presume it’s free of charge however nothing was ever agreed or offered as such but I’ll likely find out soon enough :slight_smile:

#27

Would totally agree with this, we had one earlier this year, even after selling on here for 10 years, we had a 45 minute session, and from the pointers we were given we saw an increase of 20% to our sales within a week.

#28

The other thing to think about is that you can promote your products on social media with having to pay for Facebook ads. I’ve repeated this story many times so apologies to everyone that’s heard it a hundred times before but…

When I launched a range of cards with various dog breeds on them I joined breed-specific Facebook groups and did an introductory price just for that weekend and posted on there that this was their chance to grab them at the lower price. I prefaced all of the posts with ‘Hope this is allowed, if not please remove and accept my apologies…’ and all barring one of the groups approved my posts.

Even just a few sales helps with your ranking and those would be considered organic sales which I have read carry more weight than sales as a result of Amazon ads (not sure if that is true or not.)

#29

can I ask…

Why are they so expensive?
Why do they take so long to arrive, do you make them to order?

#30

social media is def something we need to embrace, or master, even if it is trying to get the right ads, etc but our early experience was literally that we were spending money on advertising with little to no conversations. As I said earlier, our market is a highly competitive one, and unfortunately one which attracts a lot of people to ‘have a go’ at much cheaper pricing but this often results in an inferior product of which we see flooding the market, we’re lost in the middle of it all but obviously need to find a way to punch through. We’ve already started trying to get some YouTubers involved and we’re optimising listings, etc, but we’re keeping a note of all suggestions we receive and will absolutely go through them all and explore the options to see which ones are generating the most success :slight_smile:

#31

That’s quite subjective, personally we think they’re very competitively priced based on the market, sure, there are those who are selling “shampoo bars” for £3, but they’re also requesting £2 postage, we’ll then find the shampoo bars are actually soap based which, based on our experience and knowledge of the industry is pretty much the worst thing you could wash your hair with based on the PH levels of the hair and often those types of shampoo bars absolutely won’t work in hard water and even for soft water, the user will have to endure a ‘transition period’ which often involves having to rinse the hair regularly with an Apple Cider Vinegar rinse, and even then it’s still no guarantee that any of that will result in the hair you’re looking for.

Our shampoo bars are made to be finely tuned to the hairs PH balance, this means you wash, no fuss, rinse, done. Our shampoo bars also work flawlessly in any water type, and the ingredients that go into our bars are far more expensive than a ‘soap based’ shampoo bar. Like any product, there are always other alternatives which may ‘appear’ to be the same thing, but in reality, they’re not.

There are also suppliers like “Lush” who, admittedly, do a fantastic job of what they do, although the average price of their shampoo bars are around £9, that’s for a 55g bar, they then charge nearly £4 for postage, that’s £13 for a 55g bar, our bars are 80g and £6.99 with free postage. Granted, they are “Lush” and we are “TillyOak”, no comparison in regards to brand, but if we’re talking ‘expensive’ then I’d air on the side of Lush being the ones ripping it ever so slightly !! :slight_smile:

We have a 2 day lead time on orders, after that Amazon will do whatever voodoo nonsense they do to their own guestimates as to when the product will arrive. We do make small batches of our products, but a lot of the time we do have to make products to order, this not only allows us to minimise the stock we hold (as we do offer a lot of different variations on our own website) but more importantly it keeps our cash flow to a reasonable level. We are able to scale up quickly, as this has happened before with multiple or large orders at once, and there isn’t really an issue with making a lot of the items as they last a considerable length of time after production but at the moment it’s more to do with the cash flow, but in hindsight I do also think it can be a good USP in regards to someone knowing when they order from us, they get the item made fresh, or at the very least was only made in the days or few weeks previous to ordering.

#32

Hi there, m
Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. I suggest opening an Pinterest account and putting lovely photos and descriptions with links to each Amazon listing.
This is something I have had some success with.
Because shampoo bars and the like are popular at the moment I think Pinterest will be a good fit for you.
Good Luck getting more sales!

#33

Very true… Actually they are not too badly priced when compared to 50g bars my wife buys | £4.37 / 50g. Maybe you need to get that message across

"Bigger 80g Bars Last Longer"

As you are the brand owner why are you not on Amazon Brand Registery? I believe when people click on the brand name it will take them to your brand page rather than a product search.

Good luck with your business…

#34

Another suggestion we’ll take note of as and when we’ve got everything else covered :slight_smile:

#35

Not a bad idea, and again, something we’ll def note down :slight_smile:

I think we are, we’re def registered as a brand as we hold the trademark for TillyOak, unless we’re talking about something different?

Many thanks :slight_smile:

#36

It is probably something else, when you click on your brand name it goes to a product search showing a mixture of brands, which to me is annoying, on others it takes you to a store page designed by the brand and only shows their products

Not sure how you set that up but it is obviously better as customers are not tempted to look at other brands.

#37

I’ll def check that out then, thanks for the heads up :slight_smile:

#38

I think it is called a store page, others will probably know more about that

#39

As Squirrel says - if you get Brand Registered - you have access to Stores. It should appear as an option in the menu on Seller Central. You can basically create a mini storefront within Amazon, it’s pretty flexible in what you can create, you can add images, videos, carousels, quite a lot and they have expanded it over time - you can even set pages to publish in advance if you are introducing new products on a certain date.

I would say its probably one of the better benefits of brand registry.

#40

Yip, got onto it, tried creating a ‘store’ to which then it just tells me “You don’t have any brands registered”, just yet another fantastic Amazon gremlin

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However, going to the brand registry page we get …

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There are a number of other threads on the topic of people trying to create ‘stores’ in exactly the same way as me, but they are meeting with the same issues, and the majority of them are unresolved even after having contacted support who also don’t seem to know what the issue is, I’ve even looked at some listings of big sellers who’s brand name links to the same search results as us, and not a brand page, I will raise it with Amazon but I’m not feeling confident lol