BB10 - First Week Sales Re-Cap and Prime Day

Branding Blitz

I've finished my first week of sales and am ready (and excited!) to report the results of that first week. Toward the end of that first 7 days (on day 6) was a special promotion Amazon ran called Prime Day where a ton of extra traffic poured over Amazon's website. Even though I wasn't one of the deals being promoted by Amazon, I aimed to harness some of the extra traffic with my PPC campaigns.

For the full transcript head to http://brandingblitz.com/10/ or see below.

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Hello again! I'm JR, and you're listening to episode 10 of the Branding Blitz!

That's right, we're in episode 10 of this podcast! This is still new – we're still at the very beginning of this story – but it feels like a pretty significant milestone to get to double digits. It might not seem like much, but sometimes you have to stop and appreciate those little steps that you take along the way to get to the big goals.

Man, has it been an exciting week here! There has been a ton of stuff going on both on a personally and with the business.

I hope this week has been exciting for your business as it has for mine... and perhaps less exciting for your personal life or at least hope you're dealing with a less stressful kind of excitement.

Trying to prepare for a cross country move when you feel this weak is not an fun kind of exciting. I have to say though, my wife has been a superhero with all of this doing the majority of the packing all while taking care of our daughter... and taking care of me too. Unfortunately, she's having to bear the brunt of it; because, in any given day, I generally spend an hour or so at most outside of my room, which we've got closed up to try to keep it as climate controlled as possible. I never thought I would actually miss doing household chores...

Anyway, in the midst of all this, it's been great to have some positive and encouraging things going on with this new business.

When I closed out episode 9, I had sold 2 units of my main product – that was day 1. Since I'm expecting this to be a gradual build-up of sales as I move up rankings, I was excited to start off with a baseline of 2 sales the first day.

That was a Friday. In my past experience, weekends have tended to do poorly for online sales. I don't know if that is true across the board or if it is niche specific. What I experience this first weekend could indicate this assumption is going to hold true, but I really don't have enough data to say for sure yet.

On Saturday I held steady with 2 sales and then Sunday I dropped to 1 sale – again, no big deal. Fluctuations like that are expected especially in this early stage and I didn't expect the weekend to be a big sales time to begin with.

Then Monday came and I sold 6 units. Not bad at all considering I'd sold 5 total the previous 3 days, and it made for a nice start for the week. I had a couple of people ordering multiple units – which was encouraging to see.

Tuesday, again I stayed fairly stable and sold 5 units which brought my total for the first 5 days up to 16 units. Having never launched a product before and knowing this wasn't a super high volume product I was super excited to be able to say I had had at least 1 sale each day so far – let alone to get up to 5-6 per day so fast.

This is when the anticipation really began to build for Wednesday. I've been seeing Amazon promoting Prime Day. I'd seen people mention it in a couple of Facebook groups. I don't have a TV in my room, but I've heard they were hammering it pretty hard with television commercials.But I'd really just been focused on getting my product launched. I hadn't put much thought into how it would effect me. To be honest, I think I really had tried not to get my hopes up and was expecting to maybe be selling 1-2 units per day and not really benefit from the traffic.

But when I saw that I was getting 5-6 sales a day, and realized that the PPC was converting well and would allow me to grab some of the extra traffic, I started to get excited... but I still wasn't really sure what to expect.

When I woke up on Wednesday, I think I had 4 sales already. By noon I had matched my best day so far with 6 sales.

I've noticed that I don't seem to normally get sales between about noon and 6pm. I'm guessing that's just a slow traffic time because it's between lunch time and the end of the work day.Sales did slow down during the afternoon on Wednesday, but they didn't stop completely, they kept on periodically ticking in.

They picked up again in the mid-evening, before slowing down again. They had slowed to what seemed like a complete stop at 15, but I had one late order come in at the end of the day and that's where I ended my first Prime Day with 16 units sold.

That felt like a pretty cool place to land because it was about 3 times what it looked like my average weekday starting out was going to be. AND even cooler was that it exactly doubled the total number of units I had sold up to that point. How cool is that to be able to say I doubled my total lifetime sales for that product in a single day! Honestly, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect this to become more of a normal day for this product over time, but it was pretty exhilarating to be able to sell that many units just 6 days in! I'll need to build up more organic search rankings before I regularly get that many sales in a day.

I had started selling in the middle of the day on Friday so it's possible I missed some morning sales, but if you count that as a full day that means I had one more day until I closed out my first week of selling this product. I was curious to see how extra bump received on Wednesday carried forward.

It's about 2 AM here in Oklahoma right now and I'm doing this because I can't sleep – but that also means it's just ticked over to Friday morning according to Amazon. I finished Thursday selling 5 more units of my main product.

I'm not sure if that means the sales yesterday didn't give me much more momentum, or if Thursdays are going to be a slower day, or if I just haven't seen the affect of the sales yesterday yet since they're still shipping out and my BSR is jumping around. My organic rankings probably haven't caught up yet either.

Anyway, it wasn't a bad day either way. It stayed on par with Monday and Tuesday. But something even more interesting happened today. I sold one of my secondary products. I launched the two other products along with this one. They went live at the same time, but I have done no PPC. In fact I haven't promoted them AT ALL. I wanted to really just focus on my main product at first before starting to promote those.

I can't imagine they're ranking very well for anything in the search results, but apparently someone somewhere in North Carolina took the time to dig down to some bottom page of the search results and buy one of them. I know it's just one sale, but that has me pretty excited about the potential these secondary products may hold. Could they be more valuable products than I originally expected? I guess we'll find out in time...

So I closed out my first 7 days by selling 37 units of my main product and 1 unit of what I guess I'll call product 2A. I'll count that as a success for my first week for sure.

I've noticed a couple of interesting things in this first week.

I know the PPC sales reporting lags, but I was under the impression that it normally updated the sales from PPC when an order ships. But, if that is true I am getting some organic sales already. Amazon has shipped 30 units so far and my PPC report only accounts for 13 of them. So that's less than half of my orders accounted for. So either the PPC reports are even more delayed than I realized or I'm showing up in organic results more than I realized. I've peaked at some of the searches that I thought could be delivering some traffic, but I haven't honestly found anything major that I rank highly for. So maybe I just need to wait to see if my PPC report updates.

I've also been curious to see if people would order multiples of my main product, and it's great to see they already are. In fact, it seems fairly common. I am a little surprised how common it is because I already have over twice the quantity of my main competitor. But I already have several orders where people have purchased 2 or even 3 units. This shows that there may be some potential to add a variation with greater quantity that is a higher price but still cheaper than buying two of these. And I'd make more money off of one unit of those than two of these so everyone wins. I'd been considering doing that eventually anyway, but it's pretty cool to already have confirmation that this may be a good idea.. but the first priority is establishing the rankings for this product.

The other interesting and kind of frustrating thing is that over half of my inventory still isn't available for sale. It was delivered to Amazon's warehouse on July 6th. But it still hasn't been checked in. Both UPS and Amazon show it was delivered, so the box has been scanned in at their warehouse they just haven't processed it for some reason...

That box happens to have been the largest of the 3 shipments by quite a bit and accounts for 222 of the 400 units I sent in. Not to mention also over half of the secondary products as well. Obviously this hasn't been an issue yet, but it's a bit concerning so I chatted with Seller Support today and they said they'd put in a ticket to have it investigated.

Either way, I'm already thinking about my first inventory re-order. I don't want to feel like I have to log on and place an order ASAP when I get to Idaho. I'd like to have a bit of cushion and not have to worry too much about it. So I may try to place an order before I leave so it will get there a week or so after I do and I've got some flexibility in how quickly I get it to Amazon. Or of course if sales really pick up then I'll have it there and ready to get out right away!

Anyway, that's my first week. If you're selling on Amazon already, I'd love to hear about how your first week went. Even if you haven't gotten that far yet, what are your expectations? Fear? Excitement? Wherever you're at, leave me a comment under this post at brandingblitz.com/10 or shoot an email to [e-mail]!

And if you have a question you'd like to ask, head over to brandingblitz.com/ask and drop me a line there!

If you've listened to previous episodes of this show, you probably already know I'm going to ask – have you subscribe yet? If not, why not head over to iTunes and subscribe to Branding Blitz right now? And while you're there, could you leave me a review? Just like a review on Amazon, iTunes uses the reviews to help guide people to quality content – and I'd love your feedback.

That's it for this show, I'll catch you next time on episode 11 of the Branding Blitz!