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Amazon Juggernaut


Dan Cole

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Ok OsC guru's.... why does product_reviews NOT translate HTML?

 

I like to reply to "some" reviews - and it would be great if I could start a new paragraph.... ala <p>

 

Would it not be as simple as changing this:

        <p itemprop="description"><?php echo tep_output_string_protected($reviews['reviews_text']); ?></p>

To

        <p itemprop="description"><?php echo embedded_href_replace($reviews['reviews_text']); ?></p>
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@@greasemonkey it would be far better to do this by upgrading the admin > reviews page to allow the possibility of replying to a review.

 

If you do it by simply adding another paragraph to an already written review...that would cause issues with google (in terms of microdata) and may cause issues with the customer who wrote the review.

 

Keeping a review and a reply separate is the way to go.  

Admin side:  update the reviews.php page

Shop side:  new module for displaying reviews on product_info page

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  • 2 weeks later...

I was reading this thread, and I think by page 3 I almost lost track on some points that I would like to chime in. Old age. Anyway, give Amazon a try if you already run an online store. I have seen clients that do "really well" on Google CPC ($1k minimum campaign budget per day) but only mediocre on Amazon, and I also have seen clients that are the opposite. Couple weeks ago I met with a company that they had started on Amazon less than a year ago, but they were now on track to do over 5 millions a year. So this all depends on what you are selling online and etc (I told them they have no idea how lucky they are spending only ~10% fee to generate the sales as Google CPC could be 15%+. And I am speaking of a matured company and not a brand new store/brand). In any event, multi-channel selling is really important for any retail businesses today so my advice is always to give it a try. The GTIN and sales tax should not stop you if you can reach that critical mass to make it work. You really don't have to concern with tax nexus if you are not doing Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), and that you are fulfilling only from one location. In fact, that's what i would advise my client to not start out with FBA. Amazon actually would charge you to help you keep track of the sales taxes for every states, but it is still a pain as it would be your responsibility to apply for a reseller permit from every States that Amazon has a warehouse. Adding to that, it is also your responsibility to file that sales tax per each State's requirement on. So, yeah, save FBA for the right time, and do give Amazon a try. I expect Amazon to continue to erode away Google's CPC searches...

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Tim...I'm just curious...

Quote

Couple weeks ago I met with a company that they had started on Amazon less than a year ago, but they were now on track to do over 5 millions a year.

Do you know what they were selling...were they unique items or common commodities?  I can see doing well if you have a unique item(s) but for low margin commodities I think you'll have a had time covering the added cost.  At least that was my experience but I often wonder if I should try again.

Dan

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7 hours ago, Dan Cole said:

Do you know what they were selling...were they unique items or common commodities?  I can see doing well if you have a unique item(s) but for low margin commodities I think you'll have a had time covering the added cost.  At least that was my experience but I often wonder if I should try again.

Yeah, they do niche auto parts. These are my opinions based on my own experiences:

  1. Avg order value $150 seems to be a good number to make "things" easier for an online business. 
  2. It is truly a global economy now, and what it means is that it is very difficult to compete if you still have a middle man in you supply chain (this auto part business is a direct manufacturer).
  3. I am not seeing too many of my middle man B2B clients thriving. 
  4. Like you said, niche is important....
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  • 1 month later...

In Amazon vs. Walmart, things are heating up. 

The 2 Winners in Amazon vs. Walmart Battle

What impact will this have on your business?

Dan

 

 

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Interesting article.  Amazons dominance needs to be challenged, and that is only possible in one of two ways in my opinion;

3rd party sellers abandon it -> never going to happen

another big boy goes all out war on it -> walmart maybe?  ebay?

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The big news in the US last week is Amazon is buying Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, which is a premium fo Whole Foods.  I think Whole Foods is US only though, so many of you may not be familiar with it.  The nickname is "Whole Paycheck", becaue it's so expensive.  Great beer seleciton though, and cheeses too.  Amazon's attempt at delivering food with prime food hasn't been successful according to CNN. 

One thing I'm seeing is Amazon delivery vans with Amazon being the actual shipper all the way.  Shipping is my biggest challenge with dimensional weight making my shipping costs high.  I did hear rumors a few years ago that Amazon would become a player in actual shipping to compete with Fedex an UPS.

I hate Walmart for multiple reasons, so I won't buy anything from them.

I'm not really a dog.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey all who have followed this thread - I just wanted to touch base....

I have gone to the "dark side" and I'm testing 100 (of 3400) sku's on Amazon. I have been up live since Thursday last week.

Because we are a "just launched" seller in a very competitive space we are not getting a lot of traction... yet... However have won a few orders and I do see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Not advocating for Amazon here... at all... in fact, if I didn't have a larger competitor on Amazon steeling some low hanging fruit - I wouldn't do it (the fee's are very high).

From an OsCommerce standpoint - found all the current Amazon product addons, for one reason or another are not working.

So, I have taken the steps to modify an old inventory reporting excel addon to fit amazon's Add Product template and also their Price and Quantity updating template. Together these two addons offer a "small" amount of automation to adding products to and managing Amazon inventory.

If anyone is interested in testing these addon's please let me know - I will, when done, add them to the addons.

 

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Hey Scott,

 I'm very interested to hear how you do with this.  Thanks for including us.  I see Amazon vans delivering now.  I've heard that they may move into shipping.  Maybe they can hammer Fedex and UPS in the US for a while.  Shipping is killing me.

I'm not really a dog.

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4 minutes ago, John W said:

Shipping is killing me.

Me too... in Canada F & U (as I call them) are even LESS competitive. That said, I presume Amazon will only use their own shipping for FBA (fulfilled by Amazon/Prime... which I'm not using).

I don't think we will have anything great to report for at least a month or more - we need to be customer rated before we can get ride of the "just launched" title and then need to prove ourselves a little further to win out the buy box from our competitor (where, when a customer clicks the "add to cart" button on a product we are competing for... the order gets directed to us automatically).

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15 hours ago, greasemonkey said:

I have gone to the "dark side" and I'm testing 100 (of 3400) sku's on Amazon. I have been up live since Thursday last week.

@greasemonkey

Hi Scott....I've been thinking about this too.....I have a supplier who is moving to EBay and I might travel that path with him with the idea of expanding to Amazon and beyond.  I understand the need to develop a feed but I'm not sure how ones goes about getting orders that you might receive back into osC?  How are you handling or what plans do you have to handle that?

Dan

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@Dan Cole

50 minutes ago, Dan Cole said:

I understand the need to develop a feed but I'm not sure how ones goes about getting orders that you might receive back into osC?  How are you handling or what plans do you have to handle that?

For now the volume is very small - an order or 2 every day, so we are handling it manually. Just printing the Packing Slip from Amazon and manually creating a shipping label.

However, as the volume increases we will definitely have to do some kind of automation. So far I'm exploring 2 options:

1) a commercial addon (holbilink) that does exactly as you suggest - pushes your Amazon (or ebay) orders into OsC... Or...

2) keeping Amazon orders separated from OsC and pushing them directly into our accounting software with a different commercial addon (Webgility... which we currently subscribe too... however requires an update).

The thing I like about option one is it allows us to maintain one "process" - for training staff, picking, printing shipping labels etc.

Along with this project I'm putting a massive push on saving money on shipping... Currently I have accounts, with FedEx, Canada Post and DHL... All have significant discounts and are negotiated based on volume. However, as mentioned above... the rates are still killing me. So, I'm currently exploring going "third party" to force more competition into our rates - with shipstation or eshipper.

So.... I need to carefully plan out how this is all going to work without adding too many layers of complexity.

 

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@greasemonkey

I don't know if Fedex SmarPost is an option in Canada, but it may be something for you to explore.  Fedex picks it up from you, but the post office delivers it.  UPS also has something like that.  One of the farms I work with is shipping that way and it's much less.  My main partner doesn't want to do SmartPost, and there are some limitations.  You might want to check it out.

I'm not really a dog.

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5 hours ago, greasemonkey said:

@Dan Cole

For now the volume is very small - an order or 2 every day, so we are handling it manually. Just printing the Packing Slip from Amazon and manually creating a shipping label.

However, as the volume increases we will definitely have to do some kind of automation. So far I'm exploring 2 options:

1) a commercial addon (holbilink) that does exactly as you suggest - pushes your Amazon (or ebay) orders into OsC... Or...

2) keeping Amazon orders separated from OsC and pushing them directly into our accounting software with a different commercial addon (Webgility... which we currently subscribe too... however requires an update).

The thing I like about option one is it allows us to maintain one "process" - for training staff, picking, printing shipping labels etc.

Along with this project I'm putting a massive push on saving money on shipping... Currently I have accounts, with FedEx, Canada Post and DHL... All have significant discounts and are negotiated based on volume. However, as mentioned above... the rates are still killing me. So, I'm currently exploring going "third party" to force more competition into our rates - with shipstation or eshipper.

So.... I need to carefully plan out how this is all going to work without adding too many layers of complexity.

 

Thanks Scott....funny you should mention Webgility....I used them years ago pulling osC orders into QuickBooks....I'm glad those days are behind me....it was a good program though.   I'll keep an eye on your progress here and if I make any progress with EBay I'll post about it too.  

Regarding those shipping costs...I suppose the shipping companies need to get the revenue from some where so they can continue to subsidize the rates that Amazon and the other large shippers get.  :rolleyes::ph34r:

Dan

 

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Hey all, just wanted to follow up this thread after a full week on Amazon...

As a "just launched" seller... we did 13 sales worth $672. Not bad at all.... I'm impressed.

Not one order came from a "current" customer - all are brand new.... again I'm impressed.

From an integration stand point, un-related to OsC, I was able to very easily add my Amazon store to ECC for easy invoicing.

However, most interesting about integration is something HUGE missing from the OsC community. ShipStation.... Wow... what a great program!

Was extremely easy to integrate with Amazon and, it would seem, almost EVERY eCommerce platform available (both hosted and self hosted) BUT NOT WITH OSC. It even will integrate with Zencart.... however, not with OsC. I have asked ShipStation if they would consider adding OsC to their platform... here is there reply...

http://feedback.shipstation.com/forums/330429-product-feedback-fresh-ideas/suggestions/20039272-oscommerce

Seriously... go forth and SPAM the hell out of them requesting integration!!!!!

Anyone who ships more than a few orders a day....needs access to this!
 

 

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@greasemonkey Scott...were the orders from Canada, the US or both?  Is ShipStation available in Canada....I seem to remember that it was US only but that was quite awhile ago.

Dan

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2 minutes ago, greasemonkey said:

@Dan Cole all orders are from Canada as we are currently listing only on .ca. ShipStation DOES work in Canada - including integrations with Canada Post and Purolator. I'm going to start a new thread on ShipStation....

 

@greasemonkey Thanks Scott....I'll be sure to watch your ShipStation Thread.

Dan

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Nice thread here. If you can't beat them, join them. And neither you or I can't beat Amazon. For the last few months we've integrated our OsCommerce shop with Amazon. We haven't added a single SKU to Amazon's catalog, we have just added our SKUs price and quantity to existing Amazon ASIN (Amazon Standard ID Number ) listings, that is how Amazon works. The barrier to successfully enter the Amazon market - meaning getting a couple of sales at least, a pulse - is far lower than for instance eBay (where we also started selling recently), where buyers will scrutinize a new seller to a much higher degree. On Amazon, I actually think many or buyers believe Amazon is the actual seller and if you're listing your inventory against products with already good reviews, you sort of inherit those products' trust.

We're now using several Amazon MWS APIs to synch our inventory, download Amazon orders etc into OsCommerce, so far so good.  We did the same with eBay btw. We got approved for Seller Fulfilled Prime not long ago and it has helped our sales quite a bit, it wasn't that hard to get approved, just ship your stuff on time every time. Based on this experience, I think multi-channel is the way to go, your local osCommerce shop, brick and mortar, eBay, Amazon and what else? 

I would encourage everyone here to create an account with Amazon, get approved in the category your sell and see if you can manually list a couple of products there. Try it out. Just be careful, Amazon does not favor sellers that are unable to fulfill orders or ship late. Read the Amazon forums for sellers complaining over and crying about being suspended for not upholding their merchant metrics.

 

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