I launched a new product on Amazon recently that had taken a LOOONG time to develop and since day one of conception my plan was always to do a Zonblast with it and see what performance was like. So earlier this month, I did.
To give you some context, the new product I’m launching is a super competitive pharmaceutical with 55,000 products being returned for the exact match product name.
I did a 4 wave Zonblast, on Saturday 28th, Sunday 29th, Monday 30th August and Tuesday 1st September, giving away 75 coupons each day. The product usually retails at $34.99 and we provided coupons so it was available at $1.99
I use Amazooka to graph my products so I have quantifiable results to show! The Best Seller Rank immediately shot up, from around 28,000 to 1,000, then hovered between 1,000 – 2,000 for a few days before slowly starting to drop off. Proof BSR is more concerned with the number of items sold rather than the price of those items.
All our keywords spiked, 4 days after we started, on Tuesday 1st September, which is super interesting. That’s quite the delay and I’m going to make the assumption that keyword ranking is still tied more to the amount of money you’re bringing in for Amazon rather than the number of units you’re selling.
After the give away our current sales volume for this product is higher than before, increasing from 3-4 units a day to 7-10, for the moment. The overall trend is the product is slowly dropping though.
The Dangers Of Zonblast
Something we noticed earlier this week, a seller called IWentPrime had appeared on our listing, selling our product, with a couple of units in stock. After looking at the other products they sold it was pretty obvious they were buying up cheap products from Zonblasts, for $1-2, then getting them in to FBA and competing with the original product owners. Judging by the variety of products they had available, it’s probably an extremely profitable business model
Zonblast Conclusion
I think that a Zonblast, in a way less competitive niche, will get you to the top and keep you there, after giving away a reasonable number of products.
Despite the huge rankings increase for both BSR and keywords, we didn’t get anywhere near the top, but sales have increased. Only time will tell whether we keep the new sales volume up and if rankings actually stabalise.
The total cost of the Zonblast was $717 + $3000 in product cost, so $3717.
I think that $3717 would have been MUCH better spent running Amazon PPC adverts to the max, at a loss, to drive continuous sales and A/B test sales copy and images to try and increase conversions, which is exactly what I’m going to do with my next product 😀
Please feel free to ask any questions or get me to expand on any details!
Nice article Rus—agreed that the better play is blowing out your Amazon Adverts and work toward a long-tail strategy of perfecting your copy and listing.
Hi Rus, thanks for sharing your experience with us. I’d like to add a little to the discussion here.
First, unfortunately every single major promotion service has a tiny minority of individuals who will buy a unit or two and resell it on your listing. This is an unfortunate consequence of offering product at discount, and these bottom feeders tend to find ways around our methods of preventing this. The easiest solution is to simply buy them out. That said, the unbeatable solution for preventing this in the future is to simply not offer deep discounted product. That means not being able to conduct deep discount promotions and taking significantly longer in achieving your goals with your product, however that saves you the trouble of buying a couple units at full price.
Second, as you pointed out but I think is worth emphasizing, you are in a massively competitive space (as are your other products). This is the most-blasted product at this point, having passed garcinia in sheer quantity. Hugely saturated, hugely competitive…which means aggression is not just suggested, but is in fact required. Unfortunately a single Wave4 will not get you to where you want to be. This isn’t unique to ZonBlast; if the goal is to get in shooting distance of the top players in this space very quickly, then for better or worse, you need to be able to invest a large number of units across multiple promotions. We serve some of your top competitors, our first zero to hero subject (https://www.zonblast.com/results/zero-to-hero/), and one of our current Z2H1 subjects are in this space. So we are super familiar with this niche.
Third, your ranking graphs illustrate something I discussed on Ryan Moran’s podcast in April (https://freedomfastlane.com/joe-junfola-manipulating-amazons-search-rankings/). There are three outcomes on a blast. 1: We pop you up and you stick the landing. 2: We pop you up and you do not stick the landing; that is, you drop back a good bit in search results. 3: you move minimally or not at all.
#2 means you have an optimized listing but aren’t converting well
#3 means you do not have an optimized listing, regardless of how well you’re converting
Given the ranking charts you posted, #2 is at play. My guess based on those charts as well as the number of reviews you have – again, in what is an incredibly competitive space – you’re likely converting mid to low teens at best, which isn’t enough to stick the landing on future promotions. I would encourage you to optimize conversion rate until you’re at 25%+ otherwise promotional efforts, regardless of who they’re done with or how they’re done will result in subpar results.
Also, I’d be curious as to what keywords are represented in each graph. As you know, your partner gave us 5 keywords, however I can only match a few to our own internal tracking data. Our results on the keywords you gave us indicate:
kw5: 4 -> 2 -> 3…you moved to 2, dropped back to 4 (conversion rate issues), and are currently 3
kw2: 21 -> 5…excellent movement here and you’re sticking the landing which means conversion rate is at least competitive enough with other listings surrounding you where you “landed”
kw4: 13 -> 9
kw3: 240ish -> 36 -> 70ish….this is the most competitive term and the drop indicates case #2 above
kw1: 300 -> 44 -> 150ish….same as kw3
So, I would suggest to you that given you are in the single most-blasted, and probably top 2 or top 3 competitive spaces on Amazon, before embarking on additional promotions, it would be wise to optimize your listing to convert for 25% or better. PPC, deep discount promos, whatever you throw at it without converting well will likely not result in the results you’re looking for.
Finally, I would encourage you to drop price by about $10. I think you’ll find that conversion rate will improve.
Hi Joe, thanks for the reply! I absolutely agree with you on all points.
Due to the nature of the game, the reselling is an unfortunate consequence and is actually inline with some of the other Amazon selling strategies. Rather than a criticism it was just meant to raise awareness of the possibility as I wasn’t expecting it.
Our conversion rate for this product is 13% so you’re spot on there and I completely agree with your conclusion!
All said and done I think the results of the Zonblast were pretty amazing and we’ll be using you again later I’m sure 😉
If you like, drop my business partner and email or hit me up via the contact form at the top of this site and I’ll get back to you with uncensored data!
How many reviews did you have before you ran the blast? Its best to run a blast after you have established an optimized listing. Can you tell the before and the after of each keyword ranking? It seems like in the chart, a few keywords fell even lower.
Hey Wally, this product had about 85 reviews when we did the Zonblast and now has roughly 95. The Zonblast didn’t bring in many reviews despite having an auto responder.
The ranking for *all* the keywords improved, the 2 graphs that show quick drop offs also show that the product wasn’t ranking for those keywords before the blast anyway.
Your theory that Amazon cares more about the amount of money spent on each product than the number of products, is right. The Amazing Seller interviewed a guy that had a list that was willing to pay full price for his product, through the use of the super url. He shot up to page one within days.
How are the sales now after your zonblast?
Hello, Rus. We have heard those Amazon business service websites like amztracker.com and zonblast.com for a period of time, but we are still searching for it, cause we could only get little information about them, especially for the zonblast. Definitely, we are interested in their service and we are going to buy those service, but we just want to get more details about them, we are just some kinda confused. You started 4 times Zonwave? That’s really expensive, but from your words, it is worth it. Have you ever used the Pulse service from them ? We are in a extremely saturated niche, so personally I think Pulse would be better than Soloblast. I have read about the requirements on zonblast.com, what need I do except those information they need us to provide and the tips they give us? I hope you could write more articles about zonblast, to be honest, it is still a mysterious but attractive service for lots of sellers on Amazon, thank you in advance. And I will write an email to zonblast.com.
I just ran a promo through zonblast and got very disappointly similar results. The seller by the name of iwentprime also starting selling my product shortly after the promo. Thanks for this post. Proves that I made the right decision to cancel my subscription.