11 Secrets for Amazon FBA Success in 2025

11 Secrets for Amazon FBA Success in 2025 Speaker 1: Hi, and welcome to today's training about why 80% of Amazon sellers will struggle in 2025 and why only about 20% will actually make a profit and rise to the top. Now, my goal today is actually share my experiences in terms of how you get into that top 20% around your product listing and your growth, the optimisation so you're making a profit and also a business reality check to make sure only your top-selling products are listed on Amazon. So what makes this different to things you've seen before? Well, from my experience, I've been on Amazon since 2013 and sold my first Amazon business for a multi seven-figure exit. I sold over $52,000 in under four hours on Amazon, taking three personal brands from zero to over three and a half million in two and a half years and also selling US, UK, AUS, Europe, Canada marketplaces. We also work with a number of clients as well, so we also help a number of companies have significant growth, which is really good to be able to help businesses on Amazon succeed as well. So look, I've done a lot of things right on Amazon. I spent literally tens of thousands of dollars on training, flown all around the world, spoken at events, spent hundreds if not thousands of hours studying Amazon to find out what works and doesn't work. And during that time, I've done a lot of things right. One time, I even went to a yoga class with my wife. Before I went in there, some sales started going really well. I got a bit nervous and actually walked out of the class halfway through and realised I was giving away a product we were selling at the time, a toy dinosaur. It was normally about $30 for free. I managed to cancel out half of that, but that yoga class cost me about $15,000 in free product given away. So I've done a lot of things right, done some things wrong, but what I've discovered is all those things that deliver the hard way, you guys get to cheat and I'll show you the Simify strategy to be a top 25% seller in 2025. So there's three strategies. The first one, You've got to get your product listing mastery and revenue growth. You've got to have an amazing listing that converts, but you also got to make sure it has revenue coming in. We'll also go through the operational cost optimisation. Now, this is a bit boring. Everyone loves talking about growth, listing optimisation. The cost sector, that's where you make the real dollars. I know it's boring, but that's how you put really fast, hard-earned dollars in your back pocket. And also business reality check. This is the bit that's often missed. People talk about, yeah, we're growing, our revenue is this, but at the end of the day, you've also got to check your product to make sure your time and energy is focused on the most profitable and top-selling products. So our first strategy today that we're going through is product listing mastery and revenue growth. Some of the things we'll go through is analyzing the top keywords, focusing on one primary keyword at a time and matching the keywords to your product lifecycle. So the first secret that I want to share today, analyze the top keyword effectiveness and check your product relevance to this one. So we go into So what we've done here is under reverse ASIN lookup, put in a couple of ASINs. I've just used two here. Product that's doing really well and a product that needs improvement and I've sorted by keyword effectiveness. This is what you want to start looking at straight away, super easy bit, low-hanging fruit. Starting at the number 10s and first of all, you actually mainly check if these are suitable for your product. So real microscope, microscope for adults. So if we look at, that's a product that's doing very well, number one seller in this category. This is one that could do a lot better. There's a few things you'll see straight away, but we're pretending we want to go after one that's doing really well. So, keyword effectiveness, sort it by highest to lowest. So, number 10, RealMicroscope, Microscope for Adults. This one's a bit more generic, even though it's got a lot of keyword growth at the moment. It's got a high PPC, lower average keyword sales. Product we're showing here is mature, so we want to go to this level here. So, we're going to go after this keyword here for the Now, once we know what we want to target, we work it out. So we're going for adults, microscope for adults. This is one we're going to go for. There's two here we could choose. I actually chose this one here because for me, this product more aligns with the product rather than real microscope. If you type in real microscope, one way to check this, actually the easiest way to check it, you type in the keyword here. And see what words come up. So I did this before, I typed in RealMicroscope, Microscope for Adults. This one was way more relevant. That's the most important thing we do. So we actually found a product. Also notice this, look, CPC is lower, fantastic. Higher average keyword sales, again, fantastic. But the real important one is, you want to look at, keyword effectiveness 10, that's fantastic. Well done, AMZScout. And when you go into the Search bar at the top here. Make sure when you're talking about keyword, whatever the products come are most relevant, that's the better keyword. Amazon is all about relevant keywords. The secret to the algorithm is high converting products. When I say high converting products, that's your conversion rate. Your better conversion rate, the more Amazon will rank for your product for that keyword. So always think hyper relevant keywords when you're looking at ranking. So, that's the first one. We worked out what keyword we want to go under. We use AMZScout for keyword effectiveness. We check that keyword in the search bar for the other products and then we also do a secondary check against if there's similar keywords that may be another 10, which one had better sales and which one had lower CPC. Okay, the second bit is when you want to rank, you need to have one keyword at a time. So people talk about, okay, I'm going to optimise for this keyword, this keyword, this keyword. No, take a step back. We looked at this and we said, we're just going to focus on microscopes for adults. That's the only keyword we suggest going for. The reason I say that is it takes time to start ranking for a keyword. Generally, Amazon looks at a trailing period and if you go for multiple keywords at the same time, It may be good luck if you get a lot, but the key is to focus one keyword at a time. Now, what must happen here is, this is the secret, I'll go in later, focus on one keyword at a time, but the imagery must match the keyword. So, if you go for a product and it's a microscope for kids. If you've got an adult in the background, it doesn't work. If you're getting a microscope for adults and you've got all kids in the background, they don't match up. So the keyword must match your imagery. I go to the point where I target on a monthly basis, probably one or two keywords we go through. So it takes two or three weeks to rank on one. Once we do, we move to the next one. I'll go through and we'll show this in the presentation, but I actually change the bullet points and listing to optimise for that keyword. The reason being, once you rank for it, it's easier to maintain it through PPC. The hard bit is initially ranking for it. So, the third bit you want to work out with your keyword strategy is the lifestyle of your product. If you're starting out and you launch your product, you don't go for high search volume traffic. It's like when you're climbing up Everest. You go up a little bit, you come back down. You go up a little bit, you come back down. You don't go for the top high search volume keyword from the start unless you're a mature product. Mature product you normally tell by if you're the top one or two sellers, we have over 500 reviews. Launch phase, you're first starting out, trying to work out what keywords convert. That's really important. A really important aspect I see, a lot of people go for high keywords at the start when launching a product. It doesn't work. Work out where you are in the product life cycle. Are you launching, you're growing, you're maturing or declining? And work out what keywords go for that. Generally, the more mature you are, the higher search volume keywords. Also, just back here, there's one really important thing I forgot to mention. AMZScout has a keyword tracker and it's super important that when you use this product that you actually check that your index. So if you go under here, keyword search, actually put in the ASIN here and what we actually found was the keyword. Microscope for adults wasn't actually indexed yet. So there's no point trying to rank on a keyword if you're not indexed. It's one of the most common things I see. People say, I want to rank for these keywords and nothing happens. The first thing I ask him is, are you indexed for that keyword? And if not, then you need to be. So going back to One thing I'd recommend here, if you're not indexed, go to your PPC campaign. First thing, do a single keyword campaign just for that keyword. Bid extremely high. If the suggested bid is $2, do it $6 fixed just to get three, four, five click-throughs and that should get your product indexed. That's one of the most important things straight away. So when I go back for the keyword strategy, The things I really want to make sure is, check the effectiveness of the keyword, go for the tens, check that it's relevant for your product. Then focus on one keyword at a time and it has to align to your imagery. And then do a safety check that your keywords, so your search volume, matches your product lifestyle. So if you're launching, don't go for high search volume, go for low. If you're a mature product, you're on the top two of sellers, more than 500 product reviews, you're indexed a lot, then you go for the high search volume keywords. Now, under this section as well, there's parts about your strategic listing. So, this is obvious. You have to optimise your bullet points for your target keywords. You need your imagery to match it and split test this. This is a bit of a bonus here. I'll show you how you can actually split test your main image until you beat your competition. So, first one here. If you look at this product here and then you look at this product here, it's pretty obvious which one's more enticing. The bullet points. Look at this here. We go down to here. Look at this. This is optimising. They've gone through, found out the keywords. This is not optimising. If you think about all the ways that Amazon can index your product for ranking, one of them is very simple through keywords on the listing. This has a whole bunch more. This is very basic. Amazon is changing this with its AI capability. We're using smarter elements, but at a minimum, you need to populate this out. The next one is also the main listing. So if you look at this one here, much more eye-catching, a whole bunch of accessories, quite boring. You want to make sure that this matches the search intent. This one could actually be improved. But the main image, remember, you can't actually have models of people in there. Some will do it, but it's against rules, but you can include all the accessories. That's why it's really great having accessories on here. This bit here, this is actually against terms of service because it has these slide images, but people don't know that. But these are all the accessories, so include those in there. This one just doesn't work as well. Now, what I also wanted to show you is how you can actually beat the competition on split testing the main image. This is something I highly recommend. This is one of the fastest wins you can have is by Improving your main image. The reason I say that is, there's something called stop the scroll. So if people go on Amazon, they type in a keyword, my respect for adults, they start scrolling down, everything looks the same. How do you beat everyone else so you get the clicks? That includes your click-through rate, really important. When we've done this before, we've actually gone through and tested numerous different variations. You can see one here without it, with the packaging, with this one, all different types of variation. But the best one I've seen is something called Prolific. So Prolific is a survey tool. Go in there, select your audience, age group, if you know it's boys, girls, female, male, age. If it's a kid one, what is the age of the purchaser? And you put in two, three, four different products. I normally do two at a time, see which one wins, and I always start with the competition. Put the competition's one up there, put your one and keep going until you beat it. It's fantastic because all you need is about 30 minimum, but I recommend 50 people to do the survey. You do the survey and it'll actually give you the data back on which one works. This is one of the most important things you can do to improve your click-through rate, improve your traffic. Split test your main image, take the top selling competitor, get his image, your image, split test it through here, see who wins. If you don't win, change it. Do you win? No. Change it. Keep going until you win. For example, this one here, just by adding the packaging, 70% more people preferred it than without the packaging. Now, a couple of things about growth with PPC. It's really important to have a few principles here. The first one is, I talked about it before, you really got to use single keyword campaigns for top search traffic keywords. The reason being, you can control the top of search bid, you can control the specific keyword on it, so it's not bunched with the other keywords that people often do, and it's not a phrase or not a broad, so you're not bidding on all different variations. This is one of the most important things you need to work out. What are your top converting terms for your listings? So look at your PPC. If it's established you know which terms, and it's a customer search term, what customer search terms are buying, put them in a single keyword campaigns and they're the ones you want to focus on. The second one is you have to have above average conversions for these. So basically, conversion is your orders divided by your clicks. Really simple, export this in Excel, add another column, conversion, do your orders divided by clicks over the last 30 days. The terms you wanna convert on, are they above or below your own average? So if you work out your own average is about, say, 9% on Amazon, because Amazon's much higher conversion than eCommerce, because it's a marketplace that already has the traffic. So just say you're 9%, generally your PPC is half your conversion of your organic. So in PPC, just say you're at four and a half, 5% conversion. So you've gone through your orders, Last 30 days, just say you've had a thousand orders, you've had 10,000 clicks, you're at 10% conversion rate. Now sort these. Look at your top converting single keyword campaigns. Are they above or below that conversion rate of 10% I just mentioned about? If they're below, you need to fix up your listing, say convert higher. If they're above, great. So basically what you want to make sure with your PPC is that once you've worked out your top converting terms, is that conversion rate higher or lower than the rest of your PPC sales conversion rates? Now lastly, you need to increase your PPC keywords sales to boost your rank. So we're looking at Microsoft for Adults, single keyword for that one. On a daily basis, you need to check that you're increasing sales on a daily basis. The reason being, Amazon gives a lot of kudos to sales for a keyword as long as you're converting. They don't want to give money to PPC clicks if they don't convert, because they miss out on the money from the FBA fee, so there's no benefit for them. That's why we went at the start and we talked about that the imagery, the listing all has to match the keyword, because you need a high conversion, so when it comes through your PPC spend, which you're going to use to boost at the start your rank, that it converts well. And what you want to be doing is once you know you're converting above your average, so on the previous slide above your average here. On a weekly basis, you wanna increase your sales for it, so then the algorithm says, okay, this week, this listing's getting more sales than last week, more sales than last week. And once it sees that trend, you wanna be increasing it every week. So not on a daily basis, but on a weekly basis, you wanna be getting more sales for that keyword through PPC to boost your rank. Now, that was all the great stuff about optimisation, revenue growth that people always talk about. This is the stuff that puts money in your back pocket straight away. I know it's not this sexy, exciting stuff, but Amazon's about making a profit. So, what I say straight away, supplier relations, storage reduction costs, cost recovery. Okay, supplier relations, two things really quick. Speak to your supplier, work out your forecast for 2025. Just say your aim is to grow by 30%. Go to your supplier and say, Our growth, we sold 100,000 units last year. This year we want to sell 130,000 units. We're going to grow by 30%, so you get an extra $30,000 in orders from us. What can you do to discount that to help us out? And it's really important to say the quality has to be the same. There's no coming back on quality. Because what often suppliers will do, they'll say, yep, we'll reduce the price by 10%, 5% and they use a cheaper material, something like that. So we always suggest, and it may involve quality inspection or you're going over the meter person, but go to them saying, we're gonna get 30% more sales, so 130,000 units we're gonna buy for you this year, not 100,000. What discount can you give us for that? 5%, 10%, 15%, what can you give us for that? The next one is to extend your payment terms. We use SinoShore for years. What it basically is, you go and pay a small amount to an insurance company in China like SinoShore, and they'll pay your supplier for you, then you pay the insurance company up to 180 days later. For us, this was the easiest way that we could grow for ourselves. People don't talk about this. When you're selling large volumes and growing fast on Amazon, you actually need cash and inventory to be able to fund your next order. So if you're going from $10,000 to $20,000 a month, $50,000 to $100,000 a month, $100,000 to $250,000 a month, you need the cash to be able to pay your supplier and often you don't have that. So if you go to these guys here, we actually found we could get terms up to 180 days. So by the time we ordered it, it was shipped, arrived in Amazon, we could actually pay off probably two-thirds or half of our order even before we had to pay for it. So this was really important for us to be able to grow. The storage costs, AWD, I won't go into it. There's a link for it. It really helps reduce your storage costs. Also look at your product packaging. Go back, do an audit. Can you reduce your product packaging by one inch, two inch to get under the next category level? Cost recovery. This is a no-brainer. If you're not doing this at the moment, start straight away. Sign up to a reimbursement agency. There's a whole bunch of them. We say one client over $14,000, they didn't have this process in place. Basically, what you do, you integrate your account with the reimbursement company who's Amazon affiliated. And they go through, automatically submit it, they generally take a 20% cut and then you get the money back. Basically, these are things where Amazon hasn't paid you for loss, damage, inventory. Amazon used to allow you to go back, I think, 18 months and now they've just reduced it to two months. But you've got to think about this, if you save $14,500 here, you're selling at a 25% margins, that's the same as selling $60,000 a year. Basically, this will take you less than one hour a month. Once you integrate this in, all the reimbursements done for you, normally when the companies will just say, hey, we need an invoice or example for this one, you upload it. It's less than an hour a month and it's the biggest bang for your buck. Now, this one is strategy three and people don't often talk about this, but you need a bit of a reality check in business, especially selling on Amazon. My story, I actually liquidated about $100,000 worth of inventory on Amazon once and what that meant is I actually sold at a loss just to get rid of the product. We had a product, now first month we sold $30,000 US, in the next month we break $50,000, really happy. I was selling at break-even to get market share, get reviews and then I said I'll increase the price once we're getting there, fantastic. What happened within three or four months Chinese manufacturer had come in, sold it at our landed price. So we were selling a product for, it was at 70, we wanted to increase it to 100. They were selling it for 70 and we could not get our margin back because we wanted to sell it at 100 to make that 30% margin. We tried this for a few months and I just wrote off. I said, we're not going to be able to crack this market. And this often happens, people don't talk about it. You launch products or you have a product and it's fluid. You need to launch new products, change products. But you have something that's not working, you've got to kill it. Just say, I'm going to take that money, I'm going to liquidate it at cost, get your money back, put it into other products that are profitable. So in our case, we had other profitable products. We said, okay, let's put more money into that product. How can we make it better? Put more money in PPC, let's grow that one. You need a clear decision-making process for underperforming products. If you don't look at your products on a monthly basis, use accrual accounting so you actually know your profitability. And if products aren't being turned around, so you may have one that's doing $50,000, $60,000 a month, but if it's not making money, you're going to have to kill it. You either try innovate, how can you improve it, what can you do differently to get your margins in. If you can't get the margins back, you're going to have to kill it because Amazon is all about margins. And lastly, one thing I'd really strive for and recommend is actually selling your Amazon business. 80% of the money you make in business is when you sell it and when you exit. And often people don't realise that when you're growing for a business, we went from zero to over three and a half million in two and a half years. During that period, you're not putting much money in your back pocket. You're growing so fast every month that you need to put whatever money you can into more inventory. So we did sell our business. It was a great moment. And the reason I say that is it's something to aspire to and it's something that really helps change your lifestyle. For example, this year we went on three different holidays. Went to Waikiki, Disneyland Tokyo, went to Ubud in Bali. It was great and even went up to Vancouver and visited Taylor Swift and it's really fantastic because that's what this business is about, to be able to give you experiences and lifestyle choices. I love selling on Amazon. I really enjoy it. But when you get to have these great experiences with your family, that's what makes it all worthwhile.