Episode Details

One last thing needed to be done before I could start promoting my product on Amazon... I had to decide what my initial sales price would be. Generally, I would recommend doing that ahead of time... In any case, once that was done I was ready to launch my PPC campaign(s) and get those first sales rollling in!

For the full transcript head to http://brandingblitz.com/9/ or see below.

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Hello again! I'm JR, and you're listening to episode 9 of the Branding Blitz!

Let's go ahead and jump right in here. At the end of episode 8, I mentioned that my products were ready to go live on Amazon. And it's true, the listings were live and the products were available for sale, but there was one last thing I needed to decided before I could start promoting the product.

Believe it or not, I got this far without deciding what price I wanted to start out selling the product for. I had put some consideration into the price I wanted to eventually sell at, but I planned to start at a lower price so that I could build up my sales velocity more quickly and start ranking organically for some keywords so I can get some non-paid traffic.

I mentioned before that the main product is a low priced product which only works because there is such low competition and I can get it so inexpensively. I'll have to do some testing to see what prices the market can handle, but I don't expect it to go above $10. It's a consumable product which I can eventually add variations of with larger quantities and that should be able to sell over $10, but this initial offering probably won't.

I'm okay with that though because my TOTAL product cost including shipping from China, the packaging, the extra business cards I had to get for labels, and shipping to Amazon comes just under 60 cents per unit. So a $10 sale would net about $5.35 cents profit.

All that said, my initial goal is to scoop up as many sales as possible even if I'm only making a marginal profit. Once I'm getting traffic from the regular search results and not just the paid advertising, I'll begin to gradually raise my prices. But I had to figure out where to start at.

I figured a good place to start was by looking at my main competitor. They are merchant fulfilled not FBA – which means it isn't elligible for free shipping. So I took their base price and added their shipping cost to it and tried to just match their price – even though I'm pretty confident my product will be perceived as more valuable.

I ran into a little snag with that plan because at under $6, my product got flagged as an add-on item. Which meant it wouldn't have even been available to purchase at all unless you placed a larger order – I forget if it's $25 or $35... but it doesn't really matter, I didn't want that restriction.

I don't think Amazon has ever clearly defined what qualifies something as an add-on item, but one of the factors is a low price, so I began to play around with the price a bit. Finally I landed at $6.25 per unit. This is less than a dollar more than my main competitor whi