Headquartered in Northern Minnesota, The Blissful Dog has been in the pet supplies industry since 2002, and has been selling on Amazon via the Vendor Central model, with a diverse catalog of a whopping 3656 SKUs. 

The brand is a popular pet supplies brands, when it comes to items such as nose butter, paw butter, elbow butter as well as the boo boo butter! The positive reviews based on happy and satisfied customers, along with excellent ratings are a testimony to its success and how much pet owners and animal lovers alike, love their products! 

The Blissful Dog has been working with SalesDuo since 2019; there were multiple roadblocks that were identified, associated with becoming successful on Amazon, as they had been invited by Amazon to sell through Vendor Central. They were struggling to understand the way Amazon operates and functions; their catalog was having a lot of issues and any attempt to fix these issues from their end would revert the changes to their original state due to a violation of the ASIN, and subsequently, these ASINs would be suppressed due to compliance issues.
 

The roadblocks we identified

The brand realized the immense opportunity that Amazon Marketplace presented after seeing their growth in 2019. However, there were still some of the aforementioned roadblocks that they faced - they needed help with Vendor Central management, and of course, a full-service team that could handle it efficiently with their expertise, technology and a proven track record of consistently leveraging it effectively. 

The actual gravity and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic were unknown at that point of time, especially when it came to the category of pet products, and these products were being sold via the Vendor Central platform. Any communication with the customers was virtually non-existent, as Vendor Central does not allow asking for reviews, or even offering replacements. And thus, all their efforts had to be re-directed solely towards creating the best possible customer experience through product pages, and marketing the products through AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) to further shove the brand into the spotlight. 

The SalesDuo Formula

SalesDuo reviewed The Blissful Dogs’ complete catalog, and identified that a large part of their items could be variated through a 3 level variation; which meant that their entire catalog could appear on a single page. Think of it as an efficient categorization which helped us reduce major clutter and increase the efficiency of operations. This was the first step towards making this brand a success story on Amazon. This is a record to date: We variated 1600 ASINs on one page for The Blissful Dog. We are yet to beat our own record here. This single move helped them aggregate all their reviews and ratings, and improved in the discoverability of the products. 

Our team then proceeded to develop a comprehensive strategy to improve the brands’ current catalog quality by reviewing the entire catalog; the Detail Page images, ensuring that it meets all the content and image guidelines of Amazon to avoid any violations of their policies. We also rebuilt their detail pages to improve the products’ searchability and discoverability, while also search engine optimizing the content based on recent trends, which drove higher conversion rates, increased rankings, and built brand awareness as well as customer loyalty. The detail page optimizations also included a high resolution revolution to the images and videos. 

There were some concerns that were noticed with the Availability and Buyability situation, which was addressed using Vendor Central / Dropship as a backup to the primary Vendor Central / In-Network (Purchase Order Model) model. Seller Central was ruled out to the nature of the products.

The brand also had multiple top-selling ASINs which were suppressed due to ‘pesticidal’ claims. Large companies like Amazon obviously would not like to be held liable for any damages that any product sold on their platform. And thus, they wanted the brand to provide an EPA certificate, and only after that would they allow the listings to go live to be sold on Amazon. Understandable, but guess what? The products sold by The Blissful Dog are unrelated to pesticides or insecticides, so this posed a uniquely difficult challenge. 

During our audit of their catalog, we were able to determine that there are specific keywords (such as ‘pesticide free’, ‘helps repel flies, mosquitos, chiggers, gnats and other bugs and pests’), if mentioned in the product’s detail page Title, About the Product and Long Description sections triggered Amazon’s filters, and thus the ASINs would get identified and suppressed. 

After identifying these keywords, it was only a matter of refreshing their product titles, about the product and long description sections to exclude the words that were triggering Amazon’s filters. Afterall, it's easier to jump over a hurdle rather than trying to find a way around it. Of course, this made a rather large impact for the brand, since it helped them return their top selling products back to Amazon, with a bang too, we might add. 

AMS (Amazon Marketing Services)

Since the customer has been on the Vendor Central model, the only drivers we had to push on for advancing the brand onto centre stage was improving the catalog quality, and AMS. 

With AMS, our approach was simple, but brilliant; we began by creating sponsored product campaigns for the best sellers, since these products generated 60% of the brands’ sales, with an advertising budget going as low as $200 - $500. Our aim was to create a clear visibility for the brand on Amazon, and with these campaigns we were able to generate an astounding 150,000 to 250,000 impressions, with 700-1500 clicks at an average ACOS of 7.40%, which was a very good sign, and definitely contributed to generating more interest and confidence from the brands’ side as well. This prompted them to invest more on AMS, and so, to reach more customers on the platform, we continued through 2020 to increase our spending on AMS. We added Sponsored display campaigns to generate brand visibility on Amazon. This initially led to a general spike in ACOS, but once the keyword optimization was done, an average ACOS of 14.77% was being maintained over 2021; during the Q4 holiday season, we achieved an all-time high of 950K - 1.02M impressions, 3K - 5K clicks and $16,000 - $21,000 in sales, with an average ACOS of 22%.

The Outcome

● A massive change in revenue from 2019 to 2020 by 91%

● In Q4 2020, we completed the first batch of optimizations, and the results were visible by Q1 2021

● With continued optimization on the catalog, along with AMS, the revenue continued to grow from 2020 to 2021, increasing by an impressionable 40%

● The top selling 85% of the products saw an increase of 38% in 2021, compared to 2020 along with 29,390 incremental units 

What The Future Holds - Expansion and Flexibility

As the Brand is now growing and expanding their selection, bringing in new sister brands such as The Blissful Cat and The Blissful Horse, they are looking to work on having more control over the cost and pricing of their products. The inventory planning could always be better, and it also means that it’s easier to deal (or completely do away) with shortage claims and chargebacks. Some of the ASINs are also getting ineligible for AMS, which poses another unique challenge. 

Nevertheless, as we have always maintained, there is a solution for everything, we just need to figure out the right combination of ingredients to make it work.