3,000 orders for a single product per day! A batch of "dark horse" links emerge on Amazon

Since the beginning of this year, orders for many Amazon sellers have continued to decline. With the sharp increase in advertising costs, profits have been greatly impacted. Even the top sellers cannot avoid the situation of increased revenue but not increased profits.

In the relatively sluggish market conditions, a group of Amazon sellers "broke through the siege". They seemed to have found a simple and crude way of playing the game. Driven by this method, the daily order volume soared from 300 to 3,000. This method may change Amazon's traffic pattern and accelerate the formation of a new competitive landscape among sellers.

With 3,000 orders per day for a single product , some sellers are breaking the Amazon traffic pattern

While Amazon peers were discussing declining orders and plummeting profits all day, seller Wang Cheng discovered that his peers' orders were seeing a sharp increase.

Wang Cheng is a senior "cross-border veteran" who currently runs a beauty category on Amazon. Like many sellers, he thinks about how to increase traffic and order volume every day, and he also frequently pays attention to the trends of his peers. After the new year, he found that the order volume of some relatively large sellers in his category had increased dramatically.

"As far as our beauty category is concerned, some dark horse links have emerged this year. Previously, if a link could generate 300 orders a day, it would be considered a relatively good big link. Now these links and some other links can generate 3,000 orders a day. The daily order volume of the links is astonishing," said Wang Cheng.

Most of these links that quickly generated orders were used for influencer marketing. For Amazon sellers, influencer marketing is not a new method, especially for certain categories such as beauty and clothing. However, sellers in certain categories generally have a certain cycle for using influencer marketing. The difference this time is that sellers are breaking this cycle.

Wang Cheng introduced that sellers in the beauty category may do influencer marketing at a long-term frequency. For example, many sellers do influencer marketing once every two months. Some sellers may do related activities once a quarter or even longer because the effect is not particularly good.

However, this frequency of influencer marketing has changed. Many sellers in the beauty category have suddenly increased the frequency of influencer marketing. Some sellers changed from once a quarter to once a week, and some sellers even do related activities twice a week.

As a beauty seller, Wang Cheng is also one of those who has increased the frequency of influencer marketing. Currently, he basically does influencer marketing every week, compared to once a quarter or half a year before, or only when he needed to clear inventory.

Li Tiancai, who is also a beauty seller, said, "I am also doing influencer marketing. Last time, I made a product with a lot of inventory and it didn't sell well. Basically, I could only get more than 10 orders a day. After doing influencer marketing, the effect was still good. I got more than 300 orders on the first day and more than 100 orders on the second day. The daily order volume increased from more than 10 orders to more than 300 orders, which is a 30-fold increase!"

Regarding the current situation where sellers in some categories of Amazon frequently engage in influencer marketing, seller Li Cheng bluntly stated that this approach may impact Amazon's inherent ranking mechanism and affect the platform's traffic pool.

In the eyes of Amazon sellers, a product that originally sold 3,000 orders a month was considered good. However, now 3,000 orders a day has broken the original pattern. Sellers do influencer marketing on a weekly basis, and the number of orders brought to a product is far greater than the traffic brought by the Amazon platform.

Obviously, this is a challenge for sellers who rely on advertising to promote their products and for sellers who operate in a regular manner. Li Cheng said that the frequent influencer marketing by our peers has had a great impact on us. The original ranking structure was operated independently by Amazon, but now this ranking structure and the overall environment have been destroyed.

The logic behind influencer marketing

It is understood that there are two ways for most sellers to do influencer marketing: 1. Build your own traffic pool; 2. Find a service provider to buy traffic.

The cost of building your own traffic pool is relatively low. Some of the traffic pools are approached by internet celebrities who want to promote a product of the seller. This is because for many internet celebrities’ profit models, bringing goods is only one of the items. Another important item is to serve fans. Internet celebrities also need to make some substantive videos or content to attract fans and gain their recognition.

In this case, if the internet celebrity encounters a good product or brand, or a brand that she thinks matches her temperament and character, she may even be willing to spend her own money to promote the product, because internet celebrities also need to serve their fans.

Li Cheng once met such a client, who is the No. 1 online celebrity in Australian beauty products. Li Cheng said that the online celebrity took the initiative to find us and promote our products. We only needed to give her a set of products and there was no other cost.

Another way to build a traffic pool is for some qualified sellers to manage internet celebrities themselves. For example, some companies recruit internet celebrities overseas to serve the company's products specifically.

As far as beauty products are concerned, some sellers have become relatively mature in their own operations. Because there is no need to promote brands in this category. It is not like buying a mobile phone and choosing between Huawei and Apple. Beauty products may only require a web celebrity to do a review. If I think this product is good, I will continue to buy it. In addition, there are white, black and yellow people in the United States. Beauty web celebrities can achieve relatively good results by promoting products to specific groups of people.

There is a certain cost for sellers to buy traffic from service providers, and many service providers will also promote this kind of service. According to Li Tiancai, generally speaking, a single celebrity marketing promoted by a service provider costs about a few hundred yuan. The service provider will find an Internet celebrity with hundreds of thousands of fans for the seller . Within the three days of the celebrity promotion, some orders can be multiplied several times. However, not all celebrity marketing is effective. After some products have been promoted by celebrities, the effect is not obvious and the orders have not increased.

How to do effective influencer marketing? Li Tiancai believes there are two important points.

First, you need to find an influencer that matches your product. If the influencer’s fans are all young women who love beauty, the effect of promoting beauty products is relatively good. If the influencer’s fan base does not match, it will be ineffective marketing. After all, each influencer has a different fan base. If your product happens to match the fan base, the traffic will be more accurate.

One problem with using a service provider for influencer marketing is that the service provider generally won’t allow sellers to directly contact influencers, and sellers can’t determine whether the influencer’s fan base matches their products. However, for some influencer marketing that doesn’t work well, sellers can communicate with the service provider to add another free promotion. If there is no effect, it’s like wasting money.

Second, it mainly depends on whether the product is suitable for influencer marketing. What impressed Li Tiancai was that he had previously used a service provider to find an influencer to promote a wall sticker product, but only a dozen orders were sold. No matter how he promoted it, it was ineffective. The same was true for some similar products. In comparison, household products are not as suitable for influencer marketing as beauty products.

In the industry seller group, there are also many service providers who promote influencer marketing services. One service provider said that many customers use 338 promotion packages, mainly from influencers, bloggers, and some paid groups. Generally, there are more than 100 orders, and products with a unit price of less than 10 US dollars can basically have explosive orders. When the off-site traffic is poor, there are at least 50+.

However, the 338 promotion package launched by the service provider only guarantees 15 orders, which makes the sellers can't help but complain: "It's really a business that makes a lot of money!"

For sellers who do influencer marketing, whether they get 100 orders or 3,000 orders in one promotion, these are just superficial performance. The ultimate question of influencer marketing is: is there still profit?

With so many orders placed, can influencer marketing make money?

Why can influencer marketing generate a large number of orders in a short period of time? In addition to influencer promotion, there must also be price advantages. In layman's terms, it is "discounting" to boost sales.

Li Tiancai said that before doing influencer marketing, sellers usually raise the price of their products a little bit, and then give a 50% discount code to the influencer during a big sale. The influencer posts with the discount code link, and fans can buy the seller's products at a 50% discount. Most of the time, even after the price increase, the seller's product price is still lower than the daily price.

"Our products are basically operated in this way. As far as I know, our peers also operate in this way. When the number of orders increases, we do the final calculations and find that we are lucky enough to break even. There is basically no profit, and even if there is, it is very little." said Li Tiancai.

In the absence of profit, some sellers may engage in influencer marketing in order to quickly boost their rankings.

However, according to the actual experience of relevant sellers, on the day of marketing, the ranking of the link may rise sharply due to the increase in the number of orders, and then the ranking will slowly decline on the second, third, and fourth days until it returns to a similar position as before. If there are more sales, the ranking will be slightly forward than before.

“With influencer marketing, the number of orders does increase very quickly. I see that I like the person very much, but the ranking can only last for two days. On the third day, it starts to drop sharply, and then for four or five days, it is basically the same as before. It may be a little better than before, but there won’t be any obvious improvement. It also has little impact on the weight of the link, because this kind of purchase is not done by searching for keywords on the Amazon website.” said seller Liu Dong.

Can the ranking be maintained if the influencer marketing is continued? Li Tiancai said that there is actually no profit in offering such a big discount and frequently doing influencer marketing. If there is no profit, who can afford to do charity for a long time?

In order to protect profits, can't sellers offer fewer discounts when doing influencer marketing? The answer is yes, but if the discount is not big, it is impossible to achieve the effect of more orders. "Who will buy if there is no wool to be taken?" Li Tiancai seemed a little helpless.

After sellers increase their orders through influencer marketing, the weight of the link is not easy to maintain. But why do sellers continue to do influencer marketing when there is no profit or little profit? Li Tiancai said frankly that if you can withstand long-term losses and continue to do influencer marketing, a link can really maintain the relevant weight and then rush to the top of the ranking. But this is not absolute. In addition to the discount price, it also depends on the specific product.

As Li Cheng said, in the beauty category, many products are guided consumption, which is why it is easy to promote with influencers. For example, for a lipstick, you don’t know which color you want to buy, but when you see Li Jiaqi apply a color, you think it looks good and you will place an order to buy it.

From the consumer's perspective, if consumers search on Amazon, they actually don't know what color lipstick they want to buy, but after a celebrity recommends it to them, they are more likely to place an order than buying it from Amazon.

So, returning to the profit itself, large discounts for influencer marketing may only be suitable for clearing inventory and launching new products.

Clearing inventory obviously cannot be for profit, and launching new products also needs to withstand early losses. "If there is a strategic loss in the early stage, some sellers can indeed promote a new product through frequent influencer marketing. I have seen such peers who have a large number of orders and courage. They send a lot of products to keep the goods in stock, and the ranking of new products continues to rise. In the end, we don't know the amount of loss others have suffered." Li Tiancai said.

“Big sellers do have the ability to spend money to promote a new product, but small and medium-sized sellers generally don’t dare to try the strategy of spending money to destroy it.” Liu Dong does not approve of this approach.

Regarding the frequent use of influencer marketing, Liu Dong believes that this is a new type of internal circulation, just like the current low-price strategy used by some sellers. The goods are constantly sold out without making any profit, and this type of promotion does not greatly increase the weight of the link itself and has no positive significance .

However, sellers who frequently use influencer marketing and can promote new products may have certain value even if they lose money. An old seller in the industry believes that when there is capital backing, we cannot deny this marketing strategy. After all, the order volume is indeed considerable, and Amazon does not prohibit sellers from diverting traffic from outside the site.

If powerful and large sellers conduct influencer marketing for a long time and frequently, will traffic continue to move toward them in the future? Will it be more difficult for other sellers?

Wang Cheng believes that in the cosmetics category, there are top sellers who place 3,000 orders a day, but small and medium-sized sellers are also allowed to survive, because different consumer groups have choices in cosmetics colors. Just like buying watercolor pens, people like all kinds of colors. So while there are large chains of top sellers, some medium-link products will also have a certain market.

After the New Year, more and more sellers frequently engage in influencer marketing, and some of them do so just to clear out inventory because they have a lot of stock.

In major seller groups, people will ask about similar situations one after another. How to clear the inventory when the products are unsalable and there is a large backlog of inventory? Generally, veteran sellers in the industry will recommend celebrity marketing. One seller said that he prepared a large amount of goods this year, but only half of them have been sold so far. As the season is coming, he does not want the goods to rot in the warehouse, so he asks his peers to recommend reliable off-site promotion channels.

Sellers spend 1 million to learn influencer marketing and get ripped off

Relying on large discounts, influencer marketing is indeed an important channel for some categories of products to place orders. However, whether it is for the purpose of clearing inventory or placing large orders to promote new products, sellers need to reasonably plan influencer marketing based on the situation of their own business categories. Moreover, there are still many pitfalls in the influencer marketing promoted by some unreliable service providers.

With the popularity of short video platforms, many sellers have also followed the trend and cooperated with influencers to promote products. However, some sellers have been deceived by some unscrupulous service providers and influencers who maintain their own accounts. After paying, no orders were placed, and their money was wasted.

According to an informed seller, the market for off-site celebrity marketing is quite chaotic now. There are both first-hand and second-hand service providers, and it is difficult for many sellers to distinguish the real ones from the fake ones. The service providers are very enthusiastic at the beginning, but once the sellers pay, they just find an internet celebrity to deal with the matter. Subsequent inquiries from sellers regarding low orders and poor conversion rates are simply ignored.

One seller said that he had found video influencers with hundreds of thousands or millions of fans to promote his products, but the conversion rate was very low and there were almost no orders. Later, he simply found a service provider to do it, but it didn't seem reliable and the conversion rate was still very low. The process of communicating with influencers was rather tortuous, and sometimes he couldn't contact the influencers directly. Therefore, the number of fans of influencers was not a problem, but the conversion rate was the biggest problem.

Whether a product that uses influencer marketing can be sold has a lot to do with the product and the discount. In fact, influencers just provide a platform for sellers. Some sellers believe that influencer marketing is still 50% product-oriented and 50% luck-oriented.

In order to seize the trend and promote product sales, some sellers bought courses to learn about influencer marketing. One seller spent about 1 million yuan on the course, which systematically explained the operation process of cooperating with influencers , including how to develop influencers, how to cooperate, how to share commissions, how to maintain subsequent cooperation, etc. It also focused on breaking down the standardized operations of cooperating with an influencer.

After finishing the course, I followed the teacher's instructions and did marketing step by step. As a result, the standardized operations I learned led to low willingness of Internet celebrities to cooperate, low conversion rate of traffic brought to the website, and negligible number of orders. Calculate, excluding the cost of buying the course, the traffic of this kind of Internet celebrity marketing is very expensive. As a result, the seller's cost of buying the course and the cost of doing Internet celebrity marketing are almost wasted.

In a mixed market, when sellers first start influencer marketing, there will definitely be trial and error costs. Experienced people share a few practices as follows:

First, sellers need to develop plans based on their products to determine whether their products are suitable for this type of marketing. If they are products that guide purchases, the probability of placing an order is relatively high.

Secondly, when looking for a service provider to cooperate with, it is best to screen the information of celebrities. Specifically, you can watch the videos released by the celebrities to determine whether the celebrity’s fan base is in line with your own products, whether the product user portrait is consistent with the celebrity’s fan portrait; whether the brand or product is in line with the celebrity’s tone; whether the celebrity really likes the product and whether he will really recommend it to his fans, etc.

Finally, sellers can cooperate with several service providers and conduct multiple comparisons. After the cooperation, sellers can ask each service provider to provide delivery data, determine the effectiveness of the cooperation based on the data, and plan the delivery for the next step.

At present, although some sellers with suitable categories rely on influencer marketing to quickly place orders, how long can the volume of orders without profit last? In addition, if sellers consider promoting new products and clearing inventory, they also need to carefully screen before engaging in influencer marketing to avoid being cut off for no reason.

Influencer Marketing

Amazon

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