How to Manage Hundreds of SKUs

I’ve managed accounts with hundreds of SKUs and one specific account with almost 2000 SKUs. It can be overwhelming at first, also considering how messy the accounts can be, but I’ve learned an effective strategy that made it manageable.

This is HOW–

If you have hundreds of SKUs to manage and content updates–i.e. listing images and copy–are necessary, doing updates for all SKUs all at once is not an efficient way to spend your time. Why? Because not all SKUs have considerable impact to the account. So how will you know which SKUs to start with?

I highly recommend implementing the 80/20 rule. What that means is–to start with the SKUs that contribute 80% to the account’s total sales. It’s most likely going to be 20-30% of the total SKU number. Once you’ve identified which SKUs to start with, you can go through content updates in batches so as not to overwhelm your creative team.

The same goes with advertising. You can’t advertise hundreds of SKUs at once because that will be money down the drain. Apply the same 80/20 rule and make necessary adjustments along the way. If the campaign performance of the first set of SKUs has stabilized, you can proceed and add more SKUs to advertise–granted that advertising budget is not limited.

Here’s another tip–

When doing content updates, there’s a process that you need to follow–identifying the conversion rate for the past 3 months, identifying keywords the products are already ranking in and other complementary keywords, brand guidelines, etc. If the conversion rate is 10% or above category average, you should rethink doing major content updates because the changes might negatively impact conversions. Instead of doing major updates, you can do minor changes and regularly monitor conversion rate. Regarding keywords, I’ve always used, and still using, Helium 10 to check relevant keywords as well as keywords that are used by competitor products. The cerebro tool is my favorite because it makes keyword research fast and efficient.

I will be discussing next the tools that I’ve used and currently using to effectively manage Amazon accounts, including my own, so stick around!

Got questions? Drop a comment or send me an email.