6 essential Amazon Seller tools for your FBA marketing strategy

Surviving in an Amazon marketplace that boasts as many as almost two million SMB Sellers worldwide isn’t easy. The increasing competition and a focus on affordability over brand specifics mean that coming out on top can feel like a delicate balancing act that you’ll struggle to manage alone.

Seller tools offer much-needed solutions but — with your options for software often as varied as the marketplace itself — looking down the barrel of tools without a clue what each can do can get more confusing than managing your Amazon business in the first place. 

In this article, we’re going to highlight the six essential types of Amazon Seller tools and consider how each uniquely stands to fuel your Amazon business.

Suggested reading: For more helpful guidance on Amazon tools to look out for, check out our article 4 Types of Amazon Analytics Tools and Are They Worth It?

1. PPC tools

While you can manage Amazon PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns using built-in tools in both Amazon’s Seller Central (for Sellers) and Amazon Advertising (for vendors), manual handling could see you missing the bigger sales picture. That’s why third-party tools that offer a holistic and preferably automated oversight of your entire PPC profile are helpful in enabling you to master your Amazon marketing.

By tapping into crucial insights through keyword research and other focuses, these tools are especially helpful for highlighting both the right PPC keywords and your optimization options with those in mind, as well as any negative keywords to further narrow down ad relevance. Some tools can even use this information to automatically create advertisements that pretty much remove the risk of PPC bidding for generally better, finally reliable, Amazon marketing outcomes. 

Pro tip: Use our PPC Amazon audit checklist to get a headstart on optimizing your Amazon campaigns.

Tools to try

• Nozzle: Fully trained PPC and DPC experts work behind the scenes of Nozzle’s Amazon Ad Management Service to offer 40% performance improvements with granular dayparting control, bid automation, and search term automation among other benefits. AI-led insights deliver significant PPC advantage that, when paired with data, provide holistic, expert-led PPC results you can easily track, understand, and utilize.
• Sellics: Sellics’ Amazon PPC evaluations focus on product analysis, account structure, ad formats, and more to provide extensive PPC oversight alongside monthly advertising KPI results. 
• PPC Entourage: PPC Entourage’s done-for-you PPC management includes ongoing listing audits, the design of complete Amazon ad strategies, and detailed progress reports.

2. Competitor analysis tools

With thousands joining Amazon daily, you need to understand what other Sellers (particularly the successful ones) are doing, how they’re doing it, and what that means for their sales, as well as yours. Third-party Seller tools can achieve that by sifting through the competition for you.

For the most part, competitive analysis tools pull data from the Alternative Purchase Item and Comparison Reports already available on Amazon Brand Analytics. Where they add value, however, is when they augment this existing data with additional data from direct searches and product listings that you’d never be able to bring together manually. This information then clearly reveals what other Sellers are doing, and where and how you can improve on those tactics to come out on top. 

Tools to try

• Helium 10: Helium 10’s Market Tracker provides a birds-eye view of your market, including insights into your current standing and oversight of your targeted markets.
• Seller App: Seller App’s competition tracker makes it possible to watch selected products and sellers for in-the-moment updates and competitor understanding.
• DataHawk: DataHawk maximizes seller success using all-in-one software that includes in-depth Amazon competitor landscapes.

3. Listing tools

Managing product listings manually is an impossible task for a growing Amazon business. Automated listing tools that do the job for you take the pain out of inventory management by ensuring speed, consistency, and listing optimization every time, without all of the grunt work. 

Sellers with extensive product listings on more than just Amazon can especially benefit from third-party tools that simplify cross-platform listing synchronizations, ensuring that these same product optimizations are prevalent across entire online infrastructures, rather than taking things platform-by-platform.

Tools to try

• Jungle Scout: Jungle Scout’s Listing Builder offers listing optimization with proven keyword strategies, instant ratings, and easily-synchronized data.
• Seller Dynamics: Seller Dynamics’ Bulk Listing Tool provides global reach with bulk stock lists, automated updates, and manual adjustments where necessary.
• Listtee: Listtee’s simple listing tool makes it possible to list, replenish, and add items, as well as creating custom SKUs where necessary.

4. FBA sourcing tools

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), including solutions like retail arbitrage, dropshipping, and private label sales, provides a seemingly simple path to Amazon success. But the rise of this competitive landscape, and the emergence of lucrative FBA aggregators, highlights the importance of informed product purchases within even this largely out-of-house process.

Third-party FBA sourcing tools that make it easier to perfect fundamentals like product sourcing, pricing optimization, and FBA marketing ensure that Sellers can maintain control even from the sidelines. This offsets potentially costly FBA approaches with increased profitability, and an automated market oversight to help you see clearly where your FBA approach is working, and where you could still improve.

Tools to try

• Tactical Arbitrage: Tactical Abritrage’s Amazon arbitrage software enables FBA sellers to easily search thousands of algorithm-led product sources, as well as adding price modifications.
• Source Mogul: By scanning over 80 million products monthly, Source Mogul helps FBA sellers to source the best products using powerful inbuilt search engines, intuitive product searches, and wish lists.

5. Feedback and review tools

Amazon customers typically check reviews before they even consider a purchase. So overwhelmingly negative feedback, or reviews that have clearly gone unanswered, are immediately going to leave a poor impression. By comparison, ensuring that reviews are well-organized and clearly addressed with the help of a feedback and review tool can lead to optimizing your reception over time and incite customer lifetime value (CLV).

Third-party feedback and review tools help cut the noise by providing professional and satisfactory responses, no matter what reception comes from customers. They also make great use of collating review-based data that often goes overlooked and can be utilized in bettering Amazon strategies.

Tools to try

• AMZ Finder: AMZ Finder automatically manages reviews and orders with a real-time store overview, as well as automatically sending buyer-Seller messages, and even feedback and review request emails.
• SageMailer: SageMailer integrates all Amazon buyer-Seller messages from a single source, as well as automating simplified review requests via its new Amazon Request a Review button.

6. Customer analytics tools

Different kinds of insights inform your Amazon strategy, but the information you collect is unlikely to be actionable without the added context of customer analytics. While Amazon Brand Registry (ABR) does, in theory, offer this for free, limitations like manual handling and standalone datasets can still prevent a true understanding of your customer data. That’s why third-party customer analytics tools that contextualize and compare consumer insights across data sets are one of the most telling signs of success.

Simplified and sometimes automated handling of advanced metrics like CLV and product sales help to more accurately determine consumer success and brand points of difference. That makes increased retention rates, improved listings performance, and more efficient advertising campaigns possible, and can significantly increase the profitability of Amazon strategies in general.

Suggested reading: Getting customer analytics is one thing — knowing how to use them is another. Check out our article How to Use Amazon Customer Analytics to Drive Growth to find out how.

Tools to try

• Nozzle: By presenting all of your decision-making data in one dashboard, Nozzle provides a detailed overview of everything from customer acquisition costs to CLV predictions, and beyond. Geo hotspot analysis and an overview of Amazon sales run directly alongside these focuses to provide a complete consumer oversight, all while making it easier than ever to attach these findings to your actionable Amazon KPIs. 
• Amazon Brand Analytics (ABA): Available free to all members of Amazon’s Brand Registry, ABA provides a first step towards consumer insight across Amazon’s extensive, and otherwise inaccessible, data sets.

It all comes down to the insights

The amount of data available across Amazon activities means that every tool mentioned here can help with your sales efforts. However, as effective growth and optimization comes about when you take into account your customers’ journeys and relationships with your business, customer analytics tools are the ones to look out for. By utilizing the insights derived from these tools, Sellers can ensure that every decision they make is reliably supported and well-informed. Customer analytics tools are perhaps more important than most for helping you guarantee that your Amazon strategy decisions are well-informed by customer data and well-equipped for growth.

Using AI capabilities and one-source, in-depth consumer insights, our tool Nozzle can help you benefit from contextualized Amazon sales with the highest possible ROI. Get started with our free 14-day trial – it is the best way to see for yourself how and why our insights are essential to your Amazon strategies.