Managing Large Catalogs & Variations on Amazon with Zlatana Pejovic - Episode 278
INTERVIEW WITH ZLATANA PEJOVIC
DESCRIPTION
In today’s episode, Kiri speaks with Zlatana Pejovic, a Senior Account Specialist at Acadia. Zlatana shares her experience of working at Acadia, and her takeaways from working with numerous apparel and footwear brands, reorganizing large catalogs on Amazon, etc.
Make sure you tune in to find out more!
Zlatana loves working on Amazon and helping Acadia’s clients improve their sales and visibility on the platform. When not assisting sellers to become more visible, she’s also helping customers find the most convenient product.
Amazon is an ever-changing platform that allows discovering new opportunities constantly and frequently developing new processes, which makes her job very dynamic and creative, especially in terms of large catalogs.
“Whenever I work on reorganizing a catalog and P/C groups, I always try to think from a perspective of an Amazon shopper. If I were a shopper looking for a particular product, I’d love to have this choice, to be able to choose between colors and find particular sizes.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
In today’s episode, Kiri and Zlatana discuss:
Zlatana’s position at Acadia and what she likes about it. She gained a lot of knowledge for all things Amazon ops.
Zlatana has worked with a number of apparel and footwear brands on Amazon including SAXX, Tommy John, and Vionic. She talks about the challenges that apparel brands have on Amazon. Since apparel catalogs are large, this means implementing a process or update on a large number of listings which takes a lot of planning and time. The situation gets a bit more complicated when it comes to P/C groups.
She also has a lot of experience in re-organizing large catalogs on Amazon. She talks about some of the principles she has around catalog setup and management, that apparel brands might not understand.
Uploading any new listings and organizing old/new listings into parent-child groups in a way that would provide:
Gathering all variations of a product style/type in one detail page: instead of looking for different variations on separate product detail pages, it is more useful to have them all gathered on one page (e.g. different colors and sizes of a certain product type)
More product visibility to Amazon shoppers
Customer reviews for a certain product type/style under one roof, and bring more customer reviews/potential for higher product rating if more customer reviews are placed than scattered around amongst standalone listings.
Generate more sales by exposing all variations of an apparel item in one parent group and providing more choice, than leaving these variations standalone, -harder for a customer to find and pick from.
Amazon’s AVS (Automatic Variations System) will reorganize the catalog into proper parent groups in 24-48h only by recognizing the same style/model/product type.
If these attributes, however, are not stated OR if stated differently across the listings of the same type, Amazon will place them as standalone listings in a VC catalog, making the process of reorganizing the listings somewhat longer, though not impossible.
In that case, in order to update the parent/child groups, we will lean on Variation Templates. With these templates, a note is sent to the Amazon VC team to group the listed ASINs under the same parent based on the chosen variation theme: color, size, color-size, style, style-size, etc. There are approx 1400 different variation themes you could choose from, offered by Amazon in the Apparel category. Unlike Amazon AVS which usually takes 24-48h after listings’ submission, the Variation Templates can take anywhere from one day to a few weeks.
Some of the big decisions that brands have to make when selling in this category:
Plan ahead, think of grouping styles/products as they plan production;
Assets (A+ content, Storefront)
Kiri and Zlatana talk about the craziest thing that happened while working with an apparel client.
What's one thing Zlatana knows about Amazon, that apparel/footwear clients usually don't:
Importance of grouping listings properly
The butterfly effect of change of 1 variation/attribute to all the others in the group;
To learn more, listen to the full episode!
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Connect with Kiri Masters
Learn more about Acadia
Connect with Zlatana Pejovic
