This company represented a unique challenge. They created custom products made to order, but their method of marketing their products, was by creating a separate product listing for each possible variation of the item.

This had brought them some success, their almost unlimited options enabled them to offer customers products that they couldn’t find anywhere else. The challenge was in taking their business to the next level.

Due to the massive quantity of listings, the quality of the listings were poor. Many of the listings could go a year or more without having any sales, and even their top selling listings, didn’t sell a significant amount in any given year, it was a volume play, which meant spending time fixing individual listings wouldn’t be cost-effective.

An additional challenge was they primarily sold low cost low margin products. This meant that investing in Amazon PPC marketing would be a losing proposition (we ran the numbers based on estimated CPC and conversion rates).

The good news was, by doing the analyses beforehand, as opposed to them finding out the “hard way”, we were able to save them from wasting money on advertising that would not work.

What did work? We utilized various methods to improve their conversion rate (figured out some new techniques along the way). We also strategically placed limited ads in social media. The result was within 3 months sales increased by 40% compared to the previous year. Since the improvements made were not a result of ads, but of fundamental improvements to their product listings, the performance should continue to increase over time.