How to Deal with Unrealistic Amazon Monthly Targets?

Maria,

It’s one of those days where I feel overly stressed because one of the accounts I’m managing asked earlier today to summarize the reasons why we’re behind this month’s target. I wanted to be frank and say, ‘the target that the management has set is too high and unrealistic also considering that we just moved to Seller Central–but I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I presented data as to why we’re behind.

Here are the KPIs that I normally use to analyze overall sales performance–

  • MOM and YOY growth or negative growth
  • Conversion rate
  • Best Sellers Rank or sales rank — this is inversely correlated to sales which means low number ranking translates to high sales
  • Average order value
  • Organic sales vs ad sales
  • Advertising KPIs–impressions, clicks, conversion rate, total advertising cost of sales (TACOS)
  • Competitor data using Helium10
  • Search volume trend using Helium10

As it turns out, there are a handful of reasons:

  • First, there’s not much demand for our category to reach this month’s target.

If you want to check the demand for your own category or subcategory, use Helium10. Do a quick search using the main keywords that you’re targeting for your product and hit the XRAY Product Research on the Google Chrome extension of Helium10. Click on the graph beside the Search Volume (SV) number to show the SV trend for the specific keyword. Search volume is an estimated number of customer searches on Amazon for a specific product or keyword. It helps measure potential search traffic and also demand.

As you can in the image below, search volume for ‘toddler bed’ is high during January/February and July (Prime Day). From August onwards, the search volume is on a downward trend which means sales could also go down because not a lot of people are searching for this product on Amazon.

  • Second, one of the top selling category has a high price and a low rating (3.4)–a very bad combination. Because what kind of customer will spend so much money when the reviews are bad?
  • Third, the prices of the products are 2x than the average selling price plus we’re competing with similar products that have hundreds, if not thousands, of reviews and higher ratings. You can also use Helium10’s XRAY product research tool to check the average selling price of the category or subcategory that you’re selling in.
  • Fourth, losing the buy box over the weekend didn’t help, and worse, the ACOS jumped from 10% last Friday to 25% on Monday. NOTE: to know why there is no featured offer available to one (or more) of your products, go to Pricing Health > Pricing Opportunities.

I kid you not, I felt like throwing in the towel because no matter how much data I present, it doesn’t really matter. The management is adamant in achieving £500k in sales by the end of the year, and year-to-date (YTD), we’ve only achieved 30% of the target. Where they got that number? I have no idea. At some point, the management has to accept that the £500k sales target is not achievable this year–either that or I become the fall guy. What do you think will happen?

If you’re experiencing the same or if you have questions, drop a comment or send me an email.

Learnings