Launching and Ranking a product on Amazon [Execution Thread]

[Saad Khan]

I think you learned a lot from this experience. The most important lesson you learned is that you need to provide a product which is differentiated in a way which is better than what is currently being offered - it can't just be different for the sake of being different. I think this is the most fundamental foundation of doing business. All the other things like marketing, branding, etc. only accelerate your business if your foundation is strong.

You should keep going. For your next product focus on designing the best product possible (assuming the product has a decent sized market). Do the hard work and think deeply about the product's design and create a functionally better product than what is currently available for sale. Then layer in great aesthetics into the product - improve the form, color, size, etc. Now patent that bad boy once you are confident that you've made the best product possible. Your business is now on a strong foundation. It's a pretty simple approach, but one that is difficult to do well. And depending on your design ideas, it also might not be cheap to execute. But if it is difficult for you to execute then it will be even more difficult for your competition to compete against you as well because they will need to also invest heavily to bring to market a product which can compete against you.

I've mentioned this before but I've messed up so many times on my ecommerce / Amazon journey so far. What has carried me through all the difficulties and allowed me to endure in a changing and ever more competitive market has simply been that I have a better product than what is currently available for sale from my competition. The one mistake that I made was not patenting. This puts a timer on my product as well.

So keep going and good luck!

I agree. I agree. I agree.

A strong differentiating product that customers love beats all the gimmicks. It sounds simple, but its the hardest step to do properly.

The product we were selling above was earring cards (we did patent the design and included all the 3 most in demand colors in the niche) for jewelry businesses. We spent 6 months trying to find all the value skews possible and did patent once all that happened. We still have one of the best designed listings in the market.

But we didn't understand the market buying behaviour itself.

When we went through the product opportunity explorer report for our niche, we realized that the best sellers in our category have an average conversion rate of 15%. Normally the low ticket products (under $15) have a conversion rate of above 30%-50%. We are already matching our niche's conversion rate (ours is around 13%-14%).

I wish amazon launched the product opportunity explorer when we were doing market validation

This meant our cost per acquisiton was 2.2x-3x more than we expected.

Lots of lessons learned, the next swing will be better than this one. Thanks for your insights @David4431

 

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[David4431]

I'm not familiar with your product, but if I'm reading you correctly you basically made aesthetics improvements to an existing product. If so, one last note that hopefully helps - I also avoid products where my only value add is aesthetic design. Just making something look "prettier" can be subjective and unless you really have a designer's eye (which I don't) I think it's hard to build a business around it. It is also too easy to copy (but maybe your design patent protects you enough). In my opinion, start with functional design instead and only work on aesthetic design once you can objectively say that you have a better functional product.

 

[Saad Khan]

I'm not familiar with your product, but if I'm reading you correctly you basically made aesthetics improvements to an existing product. If so, one last note that hopefully helps - I also avoid products where my only value add is aesthetic design. Just making something look "prettier" can be subjective and unless you really have a designer's eye (which I don't) I think it's hard to build a business around it. It is also too easy to copy (but maybe your design patent protects you enough). In my opinion, start with functional design instead and only work on aesthetic design once you can objectively say that you have a better functional product.

The best functional design I think you can implement to earring cards is to change dimensions of the card to the needs of the customer. We not only focused on aesthetic part but also focused on the functional part (the dimension for our cards were different than our competitors and while deciding on the dimensions, we kept in mind the types of jewelry customers hang on the cards.

I believe there still is something we could be doing better, but I don't see how you can improve the functional design by changing the dimensions, amd thickness of the cards themselves. We already did that.

 

[Saad Khan]

I also avoid products where my only value add is aesthetic design.

Yep, this is the most important takeaway for this product launch. The product itself didn't have any room for functional design skews.

 

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[freek]

Great read, learned some new things. How are you doing nowadays?

 

[Saad Khan]

Great read, learned some new things. How are you doing nowadays?

Moved onto brand management for Amazon sellers and brands. I do the same thing I did above, as a service, with refined processes.