FAQ

Marketplace Valet helps brands dominate direct to consumer sales on marketplace channels worldwide. Our account management, optimizations, sales and fulfillment services save brands time and money to maximize profitability.

Yes of course. Amazon is an open marketplace. Amazon can provide a means to ship and warehouse your products, but they are only one marketplace and half the battle. Marketplace Valet can list your products to 16+ Global channels as well as Amazon. We’ll also help you with bundling, content optimization, quality control, customer service—the entire D2C process. Amazon can be a confusing jungle and they have many complex systems. Rely on our team of experts to handle this for your team as an extension of your brand.

Marketplace Valet will handle and optimize your advertising budget on marketplace channels. We utilize powerful machine learning bid management software to aid our paid media spend for maximum ROI on channel. Clients rely on us to spend millions of dollars on their behalf every year.

Marketplace Valet develops custom programs for our brand partners. We are reasonable folks, and we look at revenue generation as a sliding scale based on volumes.

Marketplace Valet has built over 200,000 listings, and generated hundreds of millions of sales on marketplaces. We know what works. Our company is like a marketplace listing best practices brain trust. Marketplace Valet will tell your brands story with the most optimized content and best practices to drive conversion and ranking

Marketplace Valet helps large brands transition their 1P business into a high powered and extremely profitably 3P operation. As a completely outsourced direct to consumer solution, brands can leverage our entire team to accomplish everything they need to “Win” on Amazon, under one roof. We handle global sales and distribution, tax compliance, and more. Marketplace Valet also eliminates channel conflict with our brand protection services.

Brand Registry is designed to control your brand’s content and copy while offering access to tools that increase your product sales, expand your advertising capabilities, and protect your listings from copyright or trademark violations. Tools like A+ Content, Stores, Sponsored Brands, the Brand Dashboard, Amazon Transparency, and Project Zero are some programs that brands can utilize once they are enrolled  in the Brand Registry 2.0 program.

Amazon uses a barcode-driven system. Every product you send to a fulfillment center requires a barcode so that it can be tracked throughout the fulfillment process. You have three options for labeling products sent to a fulfillment center: You can use existing UPC or EAN barcodes for eligible products; you can use an Amazon-generated barcode, known as an FNSKU, that you affix to the product yourself; or you can use the FBA Label Service to apply barcodes to your products for a per-item fee. With Marketplace Valet, we can manage any labeling needs from our warehouse.

On Amazon, Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) is way digital marketers refer to advertising effectiveness, similar to Facebook or Google’s ROAS (return on ad spend). ACoS is calculated by dividing ad spend by the revenue generated from those ads. To decrease ACoS, ad spend must decrease against fixed ad revenue or ad revenue must increase against fixed ad spend. The amount you spend on ads is a function of the number of clicks times (x) the average cost per click. Ad revenue is a function of the number of clicks times (x) the average conversion rate times (x) the average order value. Lowering ACoS comes from either an increase in conversion rate, or a decrease in cost per click. To decrease cost per click, you must either lower your max keyword bids or add more longtail, lower-cost keywords. To increase conversion rate, you should optimize your listings by improving product titles, images, and bullets, adding product video and A+ Content, and soliciting product reviews and customer Q&As. 

There are third-party feedback / product review solicitation tools like FeedbackFive.com (what Marketplace Valet uses) that automate the process of sending emails to recent customers, asking them for feedback on their Amazon orders.. A seller can also manually send emails to customers asking for feedback or product reviews. Before sending any emails directly or through third-party tools, please review Amazon’s latest Terms of Service (TOS) on feedback solicitation – note that Amazon regularly updates its policies on feedback / product review solicitation. Unfortunately, there are a number of “black hat” techniques available to Amazon sellers, the use of any of these can get a seller kicked off the Amazon marketplace forever.

Removing a product listing is different from removing all sellers on that listing. Once a listing is created in the Amazon catalog, it is forever in the catalog and cannot be eliminated unless it is “tombstoned” internally by Amazon. Amazon won’t get involved in helping you remove unauthorized sellers from the Amazon marketplace. Instead you will want to consider some combination of a) eliminating the availability of product for others to sell (e.g., tightly controlling your own sales channels, domestically and internationally); b) implementing an online reseller policy, which you tightly enforce, c) aggressive legal upgrades to your trademark, so as to eliminate “first sale doctrine” protections, which currently give unauthorized sellers legal protection to re-sell your brand without your permission.

Brand gating is nearly impossible on Amazon. We have seen two situations work: either a) the brand has a long documented history of counterfeits being sold on Amazon, and the product goes on the skin or in the body of consumers (so fake product could be very dangerous to consumers), or b) the brand is a very strategic brand to someone senior in Amazon so special considerations are offered during 1P vendor negotiations (Apple and Nike are two such strategic brands that got limited gating from Amazon). If your brand fits the first scenario, you can apply through Brand Registry to be considered for gating — if you are approved, it’s important to understand that gating by Amazon’s definition often means removing the ability of additional sellers from adding their offers to your products, but does not include removal of existing sellers who already had offers on your listings. If your products do not meet either of these two aforementioned criteria, brand gating on Amazon is a highly unrealistic goal for any brand.

Amazon won’t get involved in helping you remove unauthorized sellers from the Amazon marketplace. Instead you will want to consider some combination of a) eliminating the availability of product for others to sell (e.g., tightly controlling your own sales channels, domestically and internationally); b) implementing an online reseller policy, which you tightly enforce, c) aggressive legal upgrades to your trademark, so as to eliminate “first sale doctrine” protections, which currently give unauthorized sellers legal protection to re-sell your brand without your permission.