2022 is the year of online business. The competition for products has moved online, and so have brand owners and sellers. Most online business owners struggle to understand why a customer may choose another product over yours.
In a brick-and-mortar store, it can be easy to see. If your competition offers free ice cream for walking in the door, you have immediate, tactile feedback on how to convince customers to come to you. Online, though, is a different process. However, we have some tips and tricks for your business to excel on Amazon.
If your brand sells products online, you can access reports through your store’s profile. These show which products are similar to yours on Amazon and why someone may purchase something from your competition. Of course, there will not be a detailed, line-by-line explanation such as “Your potential customers purchased Y product because it had a green background in its example images.” So this process will take a little bit of creative thinking on your and your team’s part. It starts with the Alternate Purchase Report, and here is how to use it as of 2022.
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Making an Alternate Purchase Report
In the Amazon Seller Central profile, you can navigate to the Alternate Purchase Report by clicking through the following:
- Help
- Monitor feedback and performance
- Tasks & tools
- Brand Analytics
- Alternate Purchase Report.
- According to Amazon, “The Alternate Purchase report shows Brand Owners which products Amazon customers (in aggregate) most frequently purchased on the same day they viewed but did not purchase the Brand Owners’ products.”
Take particular note of “same day” here. Same day means that an Alternate Purchase report is only good for 24 hours, and each time you want to see the statistics, you will have to generate a separate Alternate Purchase Report.
Be sure to save your query parameters if you want to check this multiple times throughout the week. It will save you a lot of time.
The Alternate Purchase Report is a great tool, but Amazon Analytics can only do so much. The Alternate Purchase Report does not magically find every product like yours. You and your team will have to take a hard look at your product, then look for competitors’ products. You want to find the top competition in your niche, write down its ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number), then repeat this for as many products as you deem relevant to your search query.
An Alternate Purchase Report can contain up to 500 ASINs, so there is no shortage of possibilities in any given inquiry. This is the reason it is so important to save the relevant search data outside of Amazon. Imagine manually locating up to 500 ASINs to make an Alternate Purchase Report every day. That is a lot of work! Once you save it, you are good to go.
Once you have collated every ASIN, you can generate the Alternate Purchase Report file and begin your analysis.
Alternate Purchase Report Example
Imagine that a new company sells a niche product such as alternative wallets. We will call this company Wallet Co. These wallets can only carry three credit cards at a time. Based on this information alone, there is a multitude of information we can assume when building an Alternate Purchase Report:
- These alternative wallets likely target a younger demographic
- These wallets are very likely niche products
- The competitors in this market are likely other smaller companies
- The two biggest focuses in design are sleek branding and a high-quality product
With these assumptions taken into consideration, we can develop a plan for the company’s ASIN inquiries. Wallet Co. would want to identify the following in a search:
- Every alternative wallet on the Amazon storefront with a specific focus on the “top-selling” or “most popular”
Doing this will generate an Alternate Purchase Report which shows the top sellers and why someone purchases them instead of yours. This is where the creative thinking comes in again – it only shows you the products customers purchased instead of yours. It will be up to the staff at Wallet Co. to examine the store pages, the prices, the reviews, the branding, etc. to see what these competitors are doing better than Wallet Co.
These reports can indicate to Wallet Co. that their product is too expensive, too new, or even something as simple as the store’s pages search terms are sub-par.
Then, of course, there are other options for searching. What if Wallet Co. wanted to generate a report that specifically focused on wallets in the same price range? What if they wanted to examine their competition in non-linear ways? If there is a hit in one of these search parameters, it could pay big dividends to the strategy of any company.
Knowing that thousands and thousands of customers considered Wallet Co.’s Alternative Wallet, but chose a money clip instead, could shift the perspective of a product line and strategy. Maybe they need a new product line? An Alternative Money Clip?
Examining innately unintelligible data and extracting the key information is one of the best ways to grow a business. If you would like some help or guidance using Amazon’s Alternate Purchase Report, contact the experts at Laser Sight Digital. We are here to answer any questions you have and help scale your Amazon business.
