Mint-X sells Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Registered Rodent Repellent trash bags that are 8-10% more expensive than a regular trash bag. SalesDuo onboarded Mint-X in April 2020 to improve sales and drive visibility for their products on Amazon. Having set the goal, SalesDuo reviewed their complete catalog and provided the below recommendations.
Ensuring Availability and Buyability of all products
SalesDuo reviewed the catalog and identified that the first fix is to variate all the items together as most of the items in the catalog differ by size or color. The next focus was on availability concerns for their products and we recommended Vendor Central Dropship Warehouse to be enabled to cover any potential availability issues for the items. These two changes ensured that all the products were viewed on one single page helping the consumers with selection and the buying decision became easier with the increased review comments all added up (advantage of variation). Born 2 Run was not successful previously - hence, enabling Dropship ensured all the items were available to be sold on Amazon.
In June 2020, Mint-X was trying to launch two new products that are used in a kitchen (indoor). We had set up the items in Vendor Central, but the usual process of Amazon not buying the newly set up products and not approving the Born 2 Run requests was a major concern. The idea of selling them through Seller Central was suggested to the customer.
While setting up the catalog and launching products through Seller Central, we optimized the Detail Pages by updating the Titles, Long Product Descriptions, Bullet Points, Display Page Images, and A+ pages. In July 2020, Amazon introduced a mandatory pesticide attribute that blocked (yanked) all the items from the catalog. Since Mint-X is an EPA-registered pesticide trash bag, we were able to reinstate the items and ensured all the products were updated with the EPA Number. In October, we completed the Brand Page. All these changes translated to a sales increase of 290.35%.
The power and advantages of Seller Central / Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA)
One of the most important aspects of Seller Central is utilizing FBA – Amazon's prowess of Last-mile shipping through their FBA Program. The added advantage is a “Prime” Tag which you don’t get through Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) (unless you had the privilege of subscribing to Seller Fulfilled Prime when it was around). In January 2022, SalesDuo Recommended the customer to move from FBM to FBA to improve their sales further as the cost of shipping would be similar if switched to the FBA program.
The first FBA Shipment was sent in February 2022. In the next 2 months, Mint-X saw a 2X growth in sales when compared to FBM; there was no stepping back from there. Having built the momentum we needed, SalesDuo recommended the customer to go with some discount promotions ranging (5-10%) to attract more customers. This was received well and by the end of 4 months, we were at 3X in sales when compared to FBM sales.
The last piece of the puzzle was to increase the AMS budget to drive visibility on top of the search results. Hefty and Glad are the main brands that are listed on the first page and to bid on the generic keywords with higher CPC would have only resulted in higher ACOS. The campaigns run at an ACOS of 5% with heavy optimisations done for the different hours of the day to be run at based on the historic purchase patterns of the consumers.
Mint-X closed 2021 with an overall increase of 86%, as compared to 2020. The cumulative 2-year growth of Mint-X is 626%. The SalesDuo – Mint-X Partnership continues with a target of 2X improvement from 2021 to 2022.