A Brief Analysis of why you should hire an Amazon Account Manager:
Being a one man army is a good sign. That shows your capability to tackle multiple tasks single handedly. However, it can be exhausting in some cases and can cause a decrease in productivity. Therefore, business experts suggest hiring a team for different tasks. So that you can focus where you are direly needed.
Furthermore, business experts suggest if you keep on doing everything yourself, you will end up burned out and would have very little capacity for strategic planning and implementation. They recommend you lay off your responsibilities and hand them over to your assistants, managers and other team members, and focus on your core responsibilities.
Same is the case when it comes to the business on Amazon. Amazon is a diversified marketplace with multiple tasks which require different skills to manage all ends. It becomes difficult for an entrepreneur to manage solely all of this. There comes the Amazon account manager. This personnel is responsible for managing all aspects of your amazon account or only one aspect of your account.
Important Responsibilities of an Amazon Account Manager:
It is the person who is responsible for the success and growth of your seller account. She manages vendors, supply chain, sales, and revenues. In addition, she is the person who keeps an eye on Amazon policies and makes necessary changes if there is any shift in the policy.
To understand the importance and role of an Amazon account manager, we will have to look into the different types and responsibilities of this specific job first.
6 Main Types of Amazon Account Manager:
- Vendor Manager:
When a business directly supplies products to Amazon, they need to procure the product from someone, who is known as a vendor. And one who manages the vendor is known as a vendor manager. In this category, the job of the manager is to negotiate with the vendor and make deals on fair price, manage supply chain, and inventory of the product.
- Seller Account Manager:
When an entrepreneur uses the Amazon marketplace to sell his product, he is known as a third party seller (3P). In this regard, an entrepreneur needs to list his products on the Amazon platform, employ market strategies to make sales. This is a huge task and a seller account manager can better handle this.
This is because product listing is not a one time job, every time you have a new product, you will have to update your list. Further, understanding market strategies and deploying a result oriented strategy is a huge task, which an expert manager can better handle. This is because market strategies include devising a road map to success through Amazon PPC management, and it is also a continuous process in which one has to stay on toes to keep strategy up to the mark.
- Ad Account Manager:
Amazon marketplace is an accurate example of a competitive market, where there are large number buyers and large number of sellers. However, what makes the sellers different from each other is their product and advertisement strategy.
Therefore, to sell your product on a large scale on Amazon, you have to be good at advertisement. Amazon has its own advertisement system called Amazon PPC. And advertising account managers handle this task to drive better outcomes.
He provides help in devising and managing advertising campaigns, analyzes the data and changes the campaigns accordingly.
- Launch Account Manager:
There are a lot of things to understand before opening or launching an account on Amazon. And the people who help you in launching your account on Amazon are known as launch account managers. They provide you necessary training, tools and assist you in creating strategy.
- Customer Success Managers:
A seller on Amazon is a customer of his vendors and the buyers of his product are his customers. The quality of the relationship between customer and any sort of seller is crucial in the success of a business. A healthy customer-seller relation is known as a success in relationship management in a business. And there are people who help you maintain it in a healthy way. They are known as customer success managers.
The customer success managers provide assistance in mitigating and addressing the issues and lead sellers to the opportunities.
- Account Health Managers:
Amazon is a happening and continuously evolving marketplace. It has different policies and terms and conditions a seller has to comply with. Sometimes, due to non-compliances or due to any other issue, accounts get suspended, banned, or temporarily restricted. In this scenario, Account health or compliance managers bring their skills in resolving any such issues and help you achieve policy compliance. Such a manager is an important Amazon account manager, this is because they mitigate suspension risks.
These are the important categories of Amazon account managers. However there are some other types as well which sometimes overlap with the above mentioned types and sometimes they stand alone.
These types include, strategic managers and consultants. Who helps businesses on Amazon grow in the long term. They help in devising long term success strategies. Above-mentioned managers also provide these services but sometimes large scale sellers need in depth and personalized assistance in strategy development. In this case strategic managers and consultants are hired.
5 Reasons why you need to hire an Amazon Account Manager?
The answer to this question lies in the challenges that a seller faces on Amazon marketplace. There are numerous challenges which have to be dealt skillfully to stand alone and be successful in this competitive market. We will look into the detail of the most important one:
- Product Listing and Visibility
The first and the foremost challenge that a seller encounters on Amazon marketplace is product listing. Product listing is the page where the product is uploaded and provides complete detail about the product. Simply listing a product does not serve the results rather visibility of the product is what brings the customers.
Visibility is the phenomenon that demands attention to detail. Visibility means a product is easily discovered by the customer. Therefore, making a product visible is important and that comes with SEO based optimization of the listing.
How can a manager help you Mitigate this Challenge?
Like many other marketplaces, Amazon also works based on an algorithm. The algorithm crawls down the line and fetches the product relevant to the keyword searched by the customer. So, a manager, expert in SEO optimization can solve this problem meticulously and help you in making your product visible through listing optimization.
- Supply Chain Management:
Once the listing optimization is done, customers have started coming your way, sales are on the increase, and continuous supply of product becomes the backbone of your business. This is because if the orders are pouring in and you have run out of stock, customers will be disappointed and will leave for your competitor with highly effective supply chain inventory management.
Solution to the problem of Supply Chain Inventory Management:
Amazon account manager expert in supply chain and inventory management is usually the person who is expert in analyzing the demand and planning inventory accordingly. The manager is also an expert in Amazon’s FBA service, through which the manager will ensure the smooth supply of product from manufacture to your warehouse. This will reduce an immense amount from the shoulders of the seller.
- Compliance with Amazon Policy:
Amazon marketplace is a highly secured platform wired with a range of policies, within those policies a seller has to operate. Furthermore, Amazon keeps on updating its policies. Therefore, staying informed and implementing those policies becomes crucial. Ignorance or non-compliance can cause great damage to the seller.
Solution to the Problem of Changing Amazon Policies:
To stay up to date with Amazon policies, one needs to have a dedicated expert. An expert who would keep an eye on existing Amazon policies and seller’s compliance to those policies. The expert would further ensure that the seller is adapting to the changes in Amazon policies amicably and swiftly. So that the seller has a good legal standing on Amazon marketplace.
- Amazon PPC Management:
The fourth challenge that a seller comes across on Amazon is making his product reach potential customers. That is possible through advertisement. On Amazon advertisement is carried through Amazon PPC system. However, many sellers cannot create a successful ad campaign and end up burning their advertisement budget.
Solution to the Problem of Amazon PPC Management:
An Amazon account manager expert in Amazon PPC can handle this problem skillfully. Such experts design ad campaigns in a way that is result oriented. They are data driven and optimize ad campaigns based on the data insights.
- Repute Management
A seller’s reputation on Amazon is a word of mouth that either attracts the customers or keeps them from buying from that specific seller. On Amazon, or on any e-commerce store, a seller’s reputation is based on customer reviews and feedback. A negative review can cause great damage to the seller’s reputation.
How can you manage your reputation on Amazon?
Managing reputation on Amazon is equal to managing customers. If you manage the customer in a healthy and effective way, you are actually managing your reputation. For this task a dedicated customer care manager is needed. Who would be handling and responding to the customer feedback and queries swiftly in a professional manner. Such experts also manage customers in a way that ensures the positive review from the customer which helps in enhancing the seller’s reputation.
Should you hire an Amazon Account Manager or an Agency?
Since we have thoroughly elaborated the types of the Amazon account managers and why you should hire one. However, it gives birth to another question, that is: should a seller hire an individual expert for every other head of the account management or hiring agency that serves the purpose?
The answer to the question lies in what cost you want to bear? If you can pay a huge amount to each expert for each category of amazon account management, then hiring individual managers can be an option. However, if you do not want your cost to exceed a certain limit, hiring an agency to manage your amazon accounts is a better option.
Secondly, hiring an agency as Amazon account manager is a better option because the agency has all the experts under one roof and specializes in the service delivery. This is further because managing all the experts separately would again increase the stress for the seller instead of mitigating it. Therefore, hiring an agency for this job is an efficient decision.
Hawkways is a specialized agency in this sphere. It has its expertise tailored for Amazon algorithm and provides all the services efficiently for every single type of Amazon account management. Hawkways’ service delivery guarantees growth.
Takeaway:
Managing an amazon account is a challenging task. It becomes even more difficult once you try to manage it all alone or with an unbalanced team. This is because amazon account management has different types and each type has multiple challenges. Solution to these problems lie in hiring an Amazon account manager for each category or an agency as a one stop solution. Hiring an agency would be an efficient decision.