Hi gang,
Whelp, it’s happened: you logged in to your sales software from home on a random Wednesday before work and notice that your online sales have taken a sharp, sudden drop overnight. Your sales graph looks like a downhill ski slope. Not good, especially since this always seems to happen right after you’ve spent a ton of money on inventory or a new forklift or signed a long-term lease or hired a warehouse manager. NEVER fails, trust me.
This morning, you haven’t even had your morning coffee and you forget all about it as you race to the warehouse in sheer panic. If fact, you’ve got so much adrenaline running through you that about halfway to work you realize you’ve forgotten your car and are just sprinting down the street….ok not really but it feels like that.
So, is it time to panic? You bet your sweet patootie it is. As the owner of the company, not only are you responsible for you and your family’s financial well-being but also all your employees’ income. If something truly awful has happened – well, it’s nightmare fuel.
Your mind is racing as you pull into the parking lot. How are you going to handle this disaster?
Luckily, right before you walk into the building, you remember reading this article and remember all the advice you were given by a truly OG seller who has encountered EVERY variation of this scenario in his 20-year ecommerce career both as the owner and as the C-Suite executive. This seller has owned the 20th largest eBay id in the world and worked as an executive for the 2nd largest eBay id in the world. He was one of the first 25 sellers EVER to be asked to join Amazon’s third-party sales platform. At one point he was selling 2,500 – 5,000 items a day on sites like eBay and Amazon. Millions in annual revenue. He has personally experienced every single problem that a seller can have with a platform. He has truly seen it all.
In other words, this guy is a battle-hardened field general who couldn’t feel emotion if he tried. Oh – and I don’t think this matters – he is devastatingly handsome. Again, probably doesn’t apply here.
Obviously, that seller is me, and I’m about to tell you exactly what to do in this scenario. Ready?
1. Remain calm, even if you ARE panicked. Just…pretend you are a very calm person if you have to lol. The worst thing you can do is walk in and firebomb your entire company with panic. The people who work for you want a calm, level-headed leader and by gum you’re going to give them one. You do NOT want every department head walking twice as fast everywhere with a look like they’ve just pooped their pants on their face, ok? BE. CALM.
2. Whomever oversees each different software process needs to do a full audit of the software. I cannot tell you how many times after panicking we find out that our shipping software didn’t import 100 orders or that Amazon is having an issue with reporting data in Seller Central or your channel management software is glitching out etc. In fact, I’d guess that at least half of the time the issue is a software glitch of some kind in your chain of software that connects all of your processes together. It can also be something as simple as hardware – maybe your router is down or your PC that contains the shipping database froze up. Test connectivity to EVERYTHING hardware and software.
3. If you find no problems with anything, proceed to do full account audits of the selling platforms you’re on, especially eBay, Amazon, and Walmart. Seller Central alone has something like 30 different metrics you are judged on and oftentimes you’ll find the issue there. Somebody should be checking Account Health EVERY day. Pay attention to ODR in particular – that one can and does create issues now and then. Depending on the category, even a single negative or AtoZ claim can push your ODR to an unacceptable (to Amazon) level and they WILL begin throttling the visibility of your items. For books, that ODR starts to cause trouble at about .25% and if you hit 1% Amazon can and does take action (this happened to me a year ago and I was down for SIXTY days, but that is another story). Make sure you’ve got no open account warnings or unanswered claims and close every open return request you can. Make sure your Shipping Performance is in line. See if your Account Health Rating has changed. Another overlooked setting is inside of User Permissions in your Account Settings – make sure that all of the software that you have allowed to connect to your Amazon account is still showing Active. These connections DO expire and this is very often the problem. They’re easy to reauthorize. Do a similar audit of eBay and Walmart and anywhere else you’re selling.
4. Steps 2 and 3 fix around 75% of the problems – but what if everything on your end is running smoothly? So that’s when Sherlock Holmes puts on his beanie and gets to work. Here are some possibilities that are not in your control:
a) It’s simply a slow period in general for sales. You must get verification of this from other sellers in your category or even from some of the tools you use to list. If you use a channel management service such as ChannelAdvisor or similar, call your rep and ask – they have the advantage of tracking thousands of sellers across hundreds of categories and can very easily see a trend. So, use other sources to verify.
b) One of your selling platforms has made a change on their end. Amazon, in particular, is just fantastic at making changes to their product pages which can reduce the visibility of your item for sale. Lately, they’ve been playing havoc with book sellers for example. They’ve got those pages so locked down now that if you aren’t in the Buy Box then only an experienced buyer would know to scroll down and look for the Other Sellers single click box. So, basically, if you aren’t using FBA and aren’t in the BuyBox – even if you’re the lowest price – good luck selling your book there. So, in general, do a quick audit of Amazon and see if they’ve made any changes to their product pages. eBay, on the other hand, is FANTASTIC in totally changing their search algorithms without warning, so do some product searches and see if anything has changed for your items’ visibility.
c) One or more of your competitors has become more aggressive with pricing. Check your competitors! As you well know, if they undercut your price it WILL hurt sales and can do so badly. Counteract their move appropriately – and NO that does NOT always mean cut your prices as well. In fact, the better you are at playing Price Chicken, the higher the profit on your sale.
For 99% of the sales drop issues, Steps 1 – 4 WILL discover the problem. See, don’t you feel better? I have found in my extensive career that the best way to combat panic is to simply have a plan. Walk in to your business with a calm smile on your face, and execute the plan. Ignore questions about where your car is and why you’re so sweaty – that’s none of their business!
Happy selling, and you’re welcome 😉
-Kevin
Kevin Harmon
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thekevinharmon/
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