Amazon Inventory (also known as Amazon Shopping Products) is now available in MarinOne, giving you the ability to see all of the products you sell in MarinOne's Shopping Products grid.
With this feature, you can now link your Amazon Seller Central account to MarinOne alongside your Amazon Advertising account in order to gain a more holistic view of your ecommerce efforts, spanning both organic and sponsored listings.
Marin Support
MarinOne offers support for downloading or syncing your Amazon Shopping Product listings from your Seller Central account. Currently, this support is for Amazon Sellers only, not Amazon Vendors.
As this feature is a stepping stone to broader support, MarinOne does not currently offer metrics for your Amazon Shopping Product listings, however, we plan to support this in the near future, so please check back for future updates. Please see the Future Enhancements section of this article for additional planned upgrades.
MarinOne Grids
Within MarinOne, you'll find your shopping products available in the following grids:
- Products with ads are available in the Ads grid and the Shopping Products grid
- All of the products you sell, including products without ads, are available in the Shopping Products grid
You'll find that, in addition to displaying your shopping product quantities in the Shopping grid, quantity information for products is also accessible and visible from the Ads grid. Product quantities are preserved across different grids in order to facilitate your decision-making and make it easier to manage your ads effectively.
Supported Columns
We've now introduced support for the following new columns (applicable only to Amazon product listings as of now) in Shopping Products grid:
- ASIN
- SKU
- Price
- Quantity
- Status
- Image
Linking Your Seller Central Account
To link your Seller Central account into MarinOne, simply follow the steps below.
- The first step, as always, is to log into MarinOne.
- In the left-hand navigation, click on either the Ecommerce module ('shopping cart' icon) or the Search module ('magnifying glass' icon).
- From the top navigation, click on Publishers.
- Click Manage Accounts to launch the Linking Wizard.
- Click the Add Publisher Account button at the bottom of the Linking Wizard pane.
- Select Amazon.
- Give your account a nickname. This is the field you will use to identify your account within the grids.
- Select your account type from the drop-down.
Within this drop-down, you'll see four options:- Amazon Advertising (Vendor or Seller) account
- Seller Central account - Europe
- Seller Central account - Far East
- Seller Central account - North America
For the purposes of linking entire product listing (Shopping Products) including the ones without ads, you'll want to select one of the Seller Central account options. Select the location which fits best, based on the region of your Seller Central account: (North America or Europe or Far East).
- Click Add Account.
- From here, you will be taken to the Amazon site, where you can enter your credentials and grant permission for MarinOne to connect with your Seller Central account. Once this process is complete, you will be redirected back to MarinOne's Linking Wizard.
- Once your Seller Central account has been linked, you'll find Shopping Products in the Shopping Products grid.
Note: Your sync will take place overnight.
Object Structure
Given that MarinOne was initially conceived for your digital marketing efforts, we've had to adapt the tool in a few ways in order to suit Amazon's organic Shopping Products.
Similar to other publishers, your object structure will follow a hierarchy of:
Publisher Client Account > Campaign > Group > Shopping Products
However, given that not all of these objects exist within Amazon's Seller Central accounts, we've had to make a few adjustments, which we'll outline below.
- Your Publisher Client Account (PCA), campaign, and group are dummy objects created in MarinOne, that do not exist on the Amazon side. These are simply a repository for your inventory.
- Given that these are dummy objects, they do not have an external ID that corresponds with Amazon's ID because they don't exist in Amazon. These dummy objects serve only to align with the standard account structure we use in MarinOne.
- The name of your PCA in MarinOne will be Amazon Seller Central - [country code] - [unique account id]. So, for example, this might be Amazon Seller Central - US - A123BCD4E5FGHIJ. Your campaigns will have "Inventory Campaign" appended onto this same structure. Similarly, groups will have "Inventory Group" appended.
Shopping Products are the only level of the hierarchy that exists within Amazon Seller Central and therefore have external IDs (Pub IDs) that correspond with those used in Amazon.
Organic Revenue
Amazon Organic Revenue is a metric (available from the Column Selector) that reports your sales on Amazon resulting from customers discovering and purchasing products without direct advertising. It includes sales from organic search results, browsing, recommendations, and customer reviews. It differs from revenue generated through paid advertising campaigns where budgets are allocated for sponsored placements and targeted ads.
This helps you understand the full impact of your strength as a business by seeing your ability to generate sales without relying solely on paid advertising or promotional activities. It helps you to understand customer loyalty, brand equity, and the quality of products or services offered. While advertising and marketing efforts play a crucial role in driving growth, organic revenue demonstrates the natural demand for your company’s offerings and the effectiveness of its core operations in generating sales.
Future Enhancements
As this feature is initially a stepping stone to broader support, we have plenty of enhancements planned for the future, including:
- Metrics, including revenue.
- Cost and conversion data copied from the Ads grid, where applicable
- For products with ads, your total revenue will be your organic revenue plus your ad-based revenue.
- For products without ads, your total revenue will be the same as your organic revenue.
- Please note that shopping products, on their own, don't have cost or conversions associated. For products that are being advertised, you can see their cost metrics along with conversions and revenue in the Ads grid.
- Report across publishers on the same product using SKU or similar ID
- Support for Amazon Vendors.
- Pending API availability from Amazon.
- Ability to analyze organic revenue for Amazon Shopping Products, alongside ad-based revenue (when available) in order to suggest when to create new ads.
- Recommendations for bidding and budgets based on organic performance