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Download Your Product Inventory File from Amazon Seller Central

One of the most useful things that an Amazon vendor can have is a file containing all of their products’ listing information (i.e. SKU, description, bullets, and all product detail fields). In addition to being a database of essential information that can be used for analysis, comparisons, and records, it can also be really helpful to someone who’s looking for a template for csv product uploads. Seller Central doesn’t make it simple to download or even view this information in one place. At least it doesn’t anymore.

Here’s a quick tip on how to get this information:

  • Open a ticket with Seller Support and request that they enable your account’s Category Listings Report
  • Once you’ve received an email confirming that they’ve enabled your report (be sure to check email to see if there is a time limit on your ungated reports):
    • Go to the Inventory dropdown and select Inventory Reports > Select report type > Category Listings Report

This is the simplest way to get a comprehensive file that includes all of your details about your products listings.

If anyone has any suggestions about better or more comprehensive methods for the average vendor to get this information please share them with us!

 

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Get Started With Amazon PPC -Auto Targeting Campaigns

amazon auto targeting ppc banner

With small margins due to the competitive nature of the marketplace and a search algorithm that might not be as intuitive as Google’s, it can be difficult to figure out where to start with Amazon’s PPC advertising campaigns. A simple but effective strategy to start by using an Automatic Targeting ad campaign.

Auto Targeting is a great way to begin to collect information on what search terms are associated with your products or, more specifically, what search terms Amazon thinks should be associated with your product – essential information. A good way to look at it is as an investment in data for future campaigns – as well as a paid boost to a product’s sales rank.

Setting up an auto targeting campaign is incredibly easy. Start by mapping out a daily budget that you can afford. Unless you’re under serious time pressure, it’s best to start with a low daily budget in your campaign settings and then increase it incrementally until you’re getting the amount of sales and/or data that you need.

The actual setup of a campaign is straightforward. If you have a Seller Central account you can begin here.

Note that auto targeting is chosen at campaign level as seen below:
amazon automatic targeting ad campaign

 

On the next page, it’s as simple as selecting the products you’d like within one adgroup. Be sure to set up individual ad groups for variations of a single product to get the most accurate data possible.

A quick not for anyone new to Pay Per Click Advertising, the Default Click field what you’ll pay when an Amazon user clicks on your product ad. Your costs consist only of clicks, not impressions (display of the ad)

amazon auto targeting ad group

 

Search Terms Report

As your campaign runs, you can view the number of impressions and clicks that your product is getting in the Campaign Manager of your Seller Central account. Once your campaign has been running for a couple of days, you can start to download more detailed information on search terms. You can get to this page either by clicking into your ad group and following the link (below) or going to Reports > Advertising Reports > Search Terms Report.

Ad Group Overview:

ad group overview seller central

 

Search Terms Report Download:

download search terms report amazon seller central

Once you’ve downloaded this report you have some concrete information with which to start assessing your ad strategy. Not only do you have a list of the search terms that are actually being used by shoppers to help hone a manual keyword list, but you’ve also got an idea of how Amazon identifies your product which can be useful for improving the product detail page itself.

The Report itself includes:

  • Search Terms
  • Ad Impressions
  • Ad Clicks
  • Total Spend
  • Avg. Cost Per Click
  • Click thru Rate
  • Product Sales
  • Conversion Rate
  • Cost per Sale

 

Negative Keywords:

Because we’re using the auto-targeting as an information gathering tool in this example, it’s best to let your campaign run until you have a significant amount of information (a “significant amount” will vary from product to product, and seller to seller). However, after running for a short period, you can begin to add negative keywords. In the beginning, you can identify the obvious mistaken keywords (“Chicago Bears” turns up for your Teddy Bear). As your campaign runs for a longer period, you can begin to get more serious about weeding out negative search terms and try to get a positive return from the auto targeting campaign (This is not always the best strategy, or even possible, but if it’s making you money it’s making you money).

Adding negative search terms is another simple process in Seller Central. After identifying search terms that don’t relate to your product with the search term report, you simply click into the auto ad campaign > campaign settings >negative keywords > add keywords. Note that Amazon has an Exact Match and Phrase Match option for negative keywords. Be sure to choose the correct match type – in most cases you’ll want to choose Exact Match to avoid losing relevant search terms.

amazon negative keywords auto campaign

 

Adding negative keywords on a regular basis is good practice if you’re trying to hone a keyword list but still want to collect Amazon Auto Campaign data or, of course, if you’re running an auto ad campaign with the expectation of a ROI.

 

 

 

 

 

Ultimately, Amazon’s auto-targeting campaigns have the potential to be profitable to sellers. However, they can also be a worthwhile investment in data for broader use in optimizing manual PPC campaigns and creating product detail pages that rank for the correct search terms.

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Magento Paypal Rounding Error – Quick Fix

Recently we came across an issue of a paypal window not functioning on a Magento 1.7 site after a site-wide 40% Off promotion began. There are likely coding /extension fixes to this issue, but we thought we’d share the simplest way to address this issue when it’s preventing users from checking out.

The Issue: The item values do not add up to the subtotal given to Paypal. The individual item prices displayed did not match the real subtotal. Magento rounds each items price to two decimal points (for USD, EUR, and others).

So, two items discounted at 40% will look like this:

Original price: 2.99 x .6 = 1.794 Price Displayed: $1.79

Original price 3.99 x .6 = 2.394 Price Displayed: $2.39

This is fine, but the Subtotal displayed is $4.19

The problem is that Magento is adding the actual values (1.794 + 2.394) to get the subtotal. When Paypal receives an order like this, it rejects the request because it does not believe 1.79 + 1.39 = 4.19. It’s receiving each item rounded to two decimal points and a subtotal that’s been calculated with up to four decimal points. These are not always the same value.

 

The Quick Fix: Although this solution leaves you with the problem of inconsistent numbers, it’s a quick solution to getting Paypal to accept these transactions. All you need to do is stop feeding the individual item prices to Paypal.

This is done through System > Configuration > Payment Methods > Paypal Express Checkout. Select Configure and then select No on the “Transfer Cart Line Items” dropdown:

magento line items checkout

Disabling this causes only the total to be read and displayed in Paypal. Users will still finalize their transaction on the Magento checkout page, enabling them to view a price breakdown before actually paying anything.

Ultimately, this still leaves you with prices that add up to more than the individual product sums, so it’s worth finding a more comprehensive solution. However, we should just reiterate that the subtotal is actually a correct sum, it’s just more precise than a sum of rounded sums.

 

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Magento URLs With Numbers

Are you seeing some product URLs that look like this – www.mymagentostore.com/mycoolproduct-1435?

Below is a brief explanation of this issue and how to fix it using only the admin panel of Magento. Please note, if you have a large number of products with this issue, you’ll want to look for a coding solution. This is for those who’re experiencing the issue with a relatively small number of products that have likely been uploaded manually.

Why:  Magento (rightly) won’t accept multiple products with identical URLs. This is true regardless of whether or not your simple products are visible individually.

How: This issue may show up for different reasons, but the most common–and most simply addressed– for an administrator is when Simple and Configurable products are created with the same URL key. For example, if you create a three simple products in three different sizes but do not give each one a unique URL key (e.g. productX-small), Magento will add a numeric suffix to each product that is subsequently added with the same root URL. So, in this case your configurable product can end up looking something like /productX-1458.

Remember that magento will auto generate a URL key from the product title. So if you’re simple product title is the same as your configurable product title leaving the URL key field blank will have the same result as entering duplicate URL keys.

What to do? (Again, this is simplest solution without coding or spreadsheets necessary)  To address this issue there are three steps to take:

1) Give each of your products a unique URL key

Simply identify the configurable product and all associated simple products. Starting with the simple products, save each one with a URL that is unique (include reference to size, color, etc). After doing so, make sure that your configurable URL key is correct.

Magento Simple Product URL Key field

 

2) Get rid of URL rewrites

URL rewrite management tabWhen multiple products and variations are created with a single URL key, Magento will create a rewrite to direct links to what it thinks is the correct URL. After you’ve saved your product and it’s variations with unique URLs, you need to delete these rewrites.

To do so, go to Catalog > URL Rewrite Management. Here you should be able to identify all associated rewrites by searching for the base URL key (e.g. productX). Once you’ve identified all associated rewrites, delete them.

Note: this is assuming that the products have URL issues because they are recently added and no significant URL rewrites have been created by the administrator.

3) Reindex Data

The final simple step is to reindex your site so that Magento recognizes the new URLs you’ve created. This is done by going to System > Index Management, Select “Catalog URL Rewrites” (or simply select all, and select the action “Reindex Data.”

reindex data action in magento admin panel

After having completed these steps, you should be able to view www.mymagentostore.com/mycoolproduct without any suffixes being added.

In the near future we’ll try to provide a slightly more complex, but more comprehensive solution for those who are encountering this issue on a larger scale or with a different root cause.

As always, please feel free to add your suggestions!

 

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Spend More Save More Magento Coupon Creation

Spend more save more magento coupon tutorial banner

In this article, we’ll briefly go over the method and concept of setting up a multi-tiered promotion using Magento’s Shopping Cart Price Rules promotion creation. In this case, the desired promotion is:

  • Spend $100, get 10% Off
  • Spend $200, get 20% Off
  • Spend $300, get 30% Off

For this set up, we will only go over the necessary fields. Please see our Overview of Shopping Cart Price Rules, for a more detailed explanation of all the available fields and their functions.

Unfortunately, Magento doesn’t offer a simple option for such a multi-tiered discount, so we need to create three separate coupons. Using the rules available to us we will set up three, exclusive shopping cart rules that apply 10% off orders over $100, 20% off  $200+, and 30% off $300+ orders. Theoretically you could also also apply non exclusive rules that add a fixed discount percentage each time someone reaches another amount (i.e. 10% off $100, $200, and $300 NON-exclusive), but this complicates the promotion unnecessarily in our case. Our method assumes that this is the sitewide promotion for the moment and that it cannot be combined with further promotions or coupons.

The actual set up for this promotion is relatively simple. The three rules we’ll create for this promotion are:

  1. 10% Off $100
  2. 20% Off $200
  3. 30% Off $300

Each rule will be set up nearly identically, with the obvious differences in spend / discount and a difference in priorities to prevent all three rules from applying at the same time.

To begin, go to Promotions > Shopping Cart Price Rules > Add New Rule

Rule Information Tab:

The screenshot below shows how we set up the Rule Information tab for the first rule. Most fields here are self explanatory. As this is a site-wide sale, we’re assuming that we have banners, emails, and/or other marketing that’s alerted our site users to the promotion, making a coupon unnecessary.

Note- the Priority Field. For our promotion it is important that we create a higher priority (lower number) for each successive amount of money spent. In our example we choose an arbitrarily high number (low priority)  to begin with and assign decreasing numbers to each tier:

  • Spend 100 get 10% off: Priority- 33
  • Spend 200 get 20% off: Priority- 32
  • Spend 300 get 30% off: Priority- 31

 

magento promotions rule information tab 10% off

Priority is the only field that will vary in this tab between our three rules.

Conditions Tab:

In this tab we specify what conditions are necessary for each price reduction to go into effect. The three rules will be as follows on individual promotion rules:

If ALL of these conditions are TRUE

  1. Subtotal equals or greater than 100
  2. Subtotal equals or greater than 200
  3. Subtotal equals or greater than 300

Magento Promotions Rule - Conditions tab

Actions Tab:

This tab defines what will occur if the conditions in the previous tab are met in the shopping cart. All three rules will be set up as Percent of Product Price discount under the Apply dropdown menu. After that we will fill out the Amount tab according to each tier (10, 20, and 30).

NOTE- in order to have the Priorities that we’ve set have any effect we need to set Stop Further Rules Processing to YES. If this were not done, a purchase of over $300 would have %10, %20, and %30 discounts all applied

Magento Promotions - Actions Tab Demonstration

 

Labels Tab:

This tab allows you to name your promotion as it will appear on the front end. Note that exactly where and how this displays (or doesn’t) is dependent on the unique construction of each site. In our case we can give each rule a label describing it’s discount because the rules will not be applied simultaneously.

 

Magento Promotions Demostration - Labels Tab

 

Finally, the Manage Coupon Codes tab is unnecessary as we did not choose the coupon option under Rule Information.

 

Once you’ve set up these three rules you should have the desired promotion ready to go and advertise. As a recap, we’ve set up three separate rules with identical logic, but each with a marginally higher discount according to higher amounts spent. The key factors for this promotion are the Priority numbers assigned to each of the three rules and that Stop Rule Processing is set to YES in all three instances.

A final note: always be sure to test any promotions in the most safe manner possible. If you don’t have access to a test site, try out promotions with insignificant (but test-able) percentages or amounts, and test them at times when you know that your site traffic is lowest.

See more about Price Cart Shopping Rules Fields Here.