FBM or Amazon FBA, which is better for my business?

For third party sellers on Amazon there are a handful of choices as to how you can sell and fulfill your products on the marketplace. Amazon FBA, Merchant Fulfilled or a hybrid of the two. Each has its own set of challenges as well as benefits. The goal of this article is to help you better understand each method and know what will be best for your business and bottom line.

Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM) 

This is usually the most turn-key opportunity for any ecommerce business to quickly get get products on Amazon and start generating some revenue. Through this model, a product can be added to the Amazon catalog and offered to consumers just like any other item. The catch is that the item is stored and fulfilled in your own warehouse. This requires you to cover the pick, pack and shipment of each item as it comes in. Very similar to any website order. It is a quick and easy way to get access to millions of shoppers on Amazon while eliminating many of the added fees and costs to some of the other models.

What’s the downside?

The biggest downside to this model is that your products do not qualify for the coveted Prime badge or shipping. Because Amazon is not in control of the fulfillment process, they can not and will not allow their Prime badge to be on your products. This leads to significantly less traffic and in turn fewer sales. Consumers will always go for the Prime eligible products first so you are at a disadvantage in both search result placement as well as consumer preference

What is Seller Fulfilled Prime?

This is similar to the merchant fulfilled strategy but with the added bonus of getting the Prime badge on your products. In order to qualify, you have to prove to Amazon that you can fulfill orders fast enough and within the guidelines they set. Specifically, Amazon requires you to fulfill 50 trial orders with an on-time shipment rate of 99% and a cancellation rate no higher than 0.5%. Once that trial is over, you are automatically enrolled in the program.

So what’s the downside?

As a seller you are responsible for storing the items in your own warehouse or a 3 rd party fulfillment center that is not Amazon. These storage costs and overhead can be difficult for many smaller sellers to absorb. The guidelines and rules to maintain your spot in the program are stringent and you can easily lose the Prime badge with just a few bad orders. Most sellers struggle to profitably offer 2-day shipping anywhere in the US and therefore never make it past the trial orders.

What is Amazon FBA?

This is what makes Amazon famous with sellers and consumers. Studies show that customers prefer a product with the Prime badge significantly more. 2-day free shipping and access to millions of customers every day. Fulfillment by Amazon is a program in which sellers send their inventory into an Amazon fulfillment center to be stored, picked, packed and shipped to the end user. Amazon also provides customer service for all the orders and handles returns or replacements. As a member of the FBA program you qualify for optional services and tools that help you expand your reach and grow your business. This is ideal for any size business but has become more and more popular in recent years with small to mid size businesses. This is due to the fact that a company can get by without needing their own warehouse, fulfillment team or even customer support.

So what’s the catch?

Fulfillment by Amazon or FBA has its own set of fees that sellers need to be prepared for. With Amazon handling all the storage, packing and shipping of your goods, they charge an FBA fee that varies based on weight and dimensions of your item. Some sellers find it difficult to fund enough inventory to have products sitting in an Amazon warehouse. Others struggle to understand the complexity of navigating the ever changing rules, regulations and nuances of the marketplace.

In the end it comes down to weighing all the factors and making the right choice for your business and products. In our experience, most everyone is best suited for Amazon FBA simply due to the fact that you will not see as much traffic and revenue without it. Consumers have been programmed to look for and buy items with that Prime badge. If you want to learn more about any of these programs or how you can launch a profitable campaign on Amazon, feel free to reach out to us

“Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.” -Michael Gerber

The role of business intelligence in Amazon marketing is to help executives make better, more informed decisions to benefit the overall performance. Said another way, business intelligence allows executives to work ON the business and not just IN the business. This is never more applicable than in marketing on Amazon.

Amazon does a great job at providing you with all the tools you need to have a successful store within its platform. The only problem is that there are so many tasks to manage that one can quickly become overwhelmed with the endless daily tasks needed to grow its sales, increase it’s traffic, fulfill orders, manage inventory, etc. At Evolved Commerce, we track a specific set of KPIs for our customer’s accounts. These KPIs have proven to lead to success yet tracking them effectively can require more time and effort than many people can afford to input without sacrificing other critical areas of the business! So, unless you pay someone to do this full time, you simply will run out of time trying to manage inventory, SEO, customer feedback, etc. and won’t be able to properly work ON your store because you’re too busy working IN you store.

1. You NEED to know and track your process.

At Evolved Commerce, we have a set of Key performance indicators (KPIs) that we track to ensure our store’s progress toward preset goals. While there are several methods of affecting the progress of those KPIs, they constantly need to be tracked. If you’re not doing this and only looking at your store’s bottom line then you likely are NOT realizing your store’s full potential! Even if you are tracking those KPIs, you might not be able to connect one KPI’s progress with other necessary KPIs in order to make clear discussions. For example, in order to see both your traffic data (sessions, conversions, and sales) along with your keyword performance data you are required to download separate reports (spreadsheets) both from Seller Central AND a third party keyword performance website. Not only is this time consuming, it still doesn’t guarantee that clear insights will be obtained! Holding both spreadsheets up side by side will make it difficult to see how well your company is doing without some ways of aggregating the data on both sheets.

2. Macro insights from your store are HARD to gain from a spreadsheet. 

This might be controversial but hear me out. I’m not saying that you can’t gain insight from a spreadsheet. What I am saying is that it is difficult to gain a clear (macro level) understanding of how your store is doing just from viewing a spreadsheet of data. Let’s try a test of this theory. Below are three images. The first is a spreadsheet of traffic data from a seller central account. The second and third images are using the same data but have been aggregated and visualized. Try the following tests and see which allows you to find the health status of the store.

Test 1: Take three seconds of looking at IMAGE 1 and identify the store’s total number of sessions, the average conversion rate, and the total sales during this time period. Now do the same with IMAGE2. Notice that you not only see the all three values but also see how you are doing compared to the previous period–indicated by the green and red text values at the bottom of each image.

Test 2. How about we try a slightly easier test? Look at IMAGE 1 for three seconds and try to identify the top three performing SKUs in the before mentioned key performance indicators. Now do the same with IMAGE 3. Now, try to imagine these reports dynamically updating every day without you having to go in and locate and download this report. Now image not having to follow the aforementioned process for ANY of your reports?! This brings us to the final reason why business intelligence will help your Seller Central store.

3. It’s a competitive advantage! Quicker insights leads to quicker decisions in a fast changing market.

Data has a way of telling a story. For example, in the unprecedented times we’re in now, we majorly underestimated the effect that this contagious virus had had on the world ALL because we didn’t have adequate ways to test and collect data. If world leaders and healthcare providers had access to good data sooner, we could have responded and potentially slowed the rapid growth of the virus. Most business intelligence tools are developed in a way that dynamically collects and stores data that’s relevant to the business. Having access to data as quickly as possible provides you with insights and trends that your competitors aren’t getting unless they too are investing in business intelligence. In short, this might be the best time to have a case of #FOMO. Here at Evolved Commerce, we have decades of experience in selling on Amazon’s platform and a unique, proven path to success. Our clients deserve to see and understand how our methods work. For this reason, each Evolved Commerce customer is provided a complimentary business intelligence dashboard for their store. We invest in business intelligence because it provides us and our customers with the competitive edge!

Conclusion:

“Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives.” -Michael Gerber

Business intelligence provides easy-to-process, dynamic, and actionable insight into a business and its market that can lead to better decisions; and could be the difference between success and failure in an ever changing market. Let us follow Michael Gerber’s admonition, and avoid getting too caught up working IN our business instead of working ON our business.

As you are probably aware, a lot has been happening over the last few weeks on Amazon due to the ongoing pandemic caused by the coronavirus. Many sellers, both large and small, are questioning what will happen next and what options they have to keep sales going and prevent their business from being affected by the health pandemic.

What are some of the most recent changes and updates from Amazon?

Temporarily Prioritizing Products Coming into Fulfillment Centers

Amazon announced that they were limiting shipments into their fulfillment centers to products that were classified as household staples, medical supplies and high demand products. The goal was to mirror what was being done in brick and mortar retail locations. Most of those products fell into one of the following categories:

1. Baby Products
2. Health & Household 
3. Beauty & Personal Care (including personal care appliances)
4. Grocery 
5. Industrial & Scientific 
6. Pet Supplies

This change led to a lot of sellers panicking and not sure what to do. They couldn’t replenish inventory for several weeks even though sales were not slowing so they had to make a change. Many sellers started to shift from using Amazon to fulfill their orders and instead went back to fulfilling their own orders. This allowed them to maintain inventory in stock and prevent any potential lost sales and revenue.

Fulfillment Times by Amazon Slowed Down Significantly

With the increased focus on essential items, fulfillment times for non-essential and high demand items started to slow down significantly. The normal 1-2 day fulfillment time we have all been accustomed to started to creep out as far as 30 days on many items. This led even more sellers to shift their strategy from using Amazon FBA to merchant fulfilled options or 3 rd party logistic companies. The goal was to get more products to consumers, as fast as possible, while still using the increased traffic on Amazon.

Removal order delays and long-term storage fee waiver

To ensure the capacity to receive, restock, and ship high-priority products like household staples and medical supplies, Amazon temporarily paused removal orders in some of their fulfillment centers.

Sellers can continue to create removal orders, but there will be delays in completing the requests. These delays are not only hitting the US but also UK, EU and the Czech Republic markets. This means inventory that many sellers were hoping to remove and fulfill on their own is now becoming more difficult to access and could be weeks away from returning. Sellers again had to adjust and focus on new ways to get those orders delivered to customers. Many sellers adjusted their strategy to have Amazon act as the 3rd party and fulfill their own website orders from an Amazon fulfillment center. This allowed for faster delivery without the delays of Amazon ordered products.

Should We Anticipate More Changes?

As we continue to adapt and change to what the economy and pandemic provides, we anticipate more changes. Amazon has started to slow down their own promotion and advertising of products to allow for more time to catch up on orders. They also announced the hiring and training of over 100k new employees to meet the demands on their system. As health concerns grow and more areas of the country become quarantined, traffic and sales will continue to fluctuate.

Maintaining inventory available for sale, whether on Amazon, through Amazon fulfillment or via your own website is going to be crucial to sustaining your business. Making sure you have a plan for fulfillment, SEO, PPC, and all other channels in place for the next few weeks, months and even into Q4 will be critical but we can all get through this together!

We often get asked what is the best Amazon PPC strategy or structure. Over the years advertising on Amazon has gotten more and more competitive. The result is more and more sellers competing for prime ad placement which has in turn increased bids. This increase in bids has made the goal of maintaining profitability more difficult. This begs the question. Is it possible to use Amazon PPC to grow sales and not lose your shirt in the process? The answer is yes.

In an effort to map out the ideal PPC structure I will outline a few high-level numbers and then I will give more explanation around the numbers.

Organic vs Paid Sales

Over the years we have managed hundreds of Amazon accounts. The accounts that perform the best have close to a 70/30 organic sales to paid sales ratio. This means that if your account is running correctly you would have 30% of sales come from your PPC campaigns. Of course, when creating new listings or launching a new account you would have trouble hitting 30% depending on the product category and niche you are selling in. This is meant to be a goal to work toward not necessarily a hard and fast rule.

Ad Campaign Structure

Amazon allows us to build two different types of PPC campaigns. They are Manual targeted and Automatic targeted campaigns. Both have their place and provide different results.

Automatically targeted campaigns are campaigns where Amazon will crawl your listing content and automatically generate keywords for you. Auto campaigns are meant to help in generating keywords. These campaigns are lower bids and are less precise.

While Manual campaigns are campaigns where the seller/agency selects the keywords and then can adjust bids at the keyword level. These campaigns are higher bids and are precise.

The goal is to use these two campaign types to complement each other. The ideal structure here is again a 70/30 ratio. (70% manual and 30% auto). I have seen campaigns closer to 90/10 (90% manual vs 10% auto) and this can work very well. In order to operate in these types of ratios, you need to have a very close eye on performance and spend.

Optimal Ad Efficiency

The most efficient way to run your ad campaigns is to use what is called “keyword harvesting”. Keyword Harvesting is the process of moving keywords into specific targeting campaigns.
Say that you have an automatic campaign already running in your account. The first step would be to add two new manual campaigns in your account. I would name them something like this.

Manual Broad Harvested.
Manual Exact Harvested

Step two would be to download the keyword reports within your account. Then open that file in excel or google sheets. From there you want to filter the sheet by orders. Now you want to copy any keyword that has had at least 1 order and move into the Manual Broad Harvested campaign. The benefit of this campaign structure is that you now have far more control of the keyword bids once now that they are nested in a Manual campaign. You will also want to filter the sheet and copy any keywords that have had more than 5 orders and paste those into the Manual Exact Harvested campaign. These keywords are the cream of the crop because they have had 5 conversions and we can be the most aggressive with our bids in this campaign.

Keyword Harvesting is part of every ad campaign that we manage for our clients here at Evolved Commerce because it works! Remember the purpose of this campaign structure is to gain more control of the keyword bids. Control, if managed correctly, will lead to very efficient ad campaigns. Best of luck!

One of the questions our Amazon consultants get asked frequently is: How do I improve my organic rankings?

This really is a great question and it boils down to two things: Traffic and Conversions. The brands that perform the best year over year are focused and deliberate in their strategy to improve rankings and Amazon SEO.

Traffic: Increasing traffic to product detail pages requires a concerted effort. The days of simply creating a listing and sending product into FBA and leaving the rest on “Auto Pilot” have passed us by. This mentality will end with high storage fees and very few sales.

Over the past 8 years while working with brands of all shapes and sizes we have seen all kinds of tactics to increase traffic. Unfortunately, there isn’t a one size fits all strategy to accomplish this goal. There are simply too many variables from things like competition and category.. In an effort to help answer this question I will list out several options and explain the pros and cons of each. Keep in mind the tactics below are only to be used once your listing is fully optimized or “retail-ready”.

1. Amazon Sponsored Products – I think it goes without saying that Amazon’s Sponsored Products can be an effective way to drive relevant traffic to your product detail pages when the campaigns are managed correctly. However, all campaigns are not created equal. You will only want to use pay per click (PPC) ads once you have at least 5-10 product reviews. Campaigns pointing traffic to listings with zero reviews will garner some clicks but the conversions will be low.

2. Social Media – One very simple tactic to drive traffic to your listings is using social media advertising. This is separate from a standard Facebook page with regular posts in the timeline. I prefer to use Facebook Business Manager and market both on Facebook and Instagram. Driving outside sources of traffic via targeted audiences will convert into rankings and revenue.

3. Promotions – There are several product promotions available to Amazon sellers and they can be a good way to generate some traffic. Two of my favorites are creating coupons and using Prime Exclusive Discounts. When you create these promotions your listing will show on the coupons pages or the Prime Exclusive Discount page. Having your listings shown on these pages will provide more exposure to potential customers looking for a deal.

Conversions: Keep in mind the products have already been optimized. Meaning that the listings are built out with proper product titles, bullet points, and product descriptions.

1. Product Imagery – The listing should already have beautiful imagery with clean and crisp representations of your products. Consumers shop with their eyes. Use the secondary image spots to highlight product features and show the product in use. With the increase of sales on mobile devices, your product images HAVE to be on point. Spend some time analyzing your top-performing competitor’s listings and pay close attention to the imagery they are using.

2. Product Sales Copy – Make sure your listing copy is compliant with Amazon’s guidelines. Do not exceed the byte sizes for each area of copy. For example, it used to be common for sellers to cram as many keywords into the product title as possible. This results in a title that is difficult to read and is cut off on mobile.

3. Coupons – Coupons can be a great way to help increase your conversion rate. This is because the coupon is shown in the search results and can help influence clicks that convert into sales. Everyone on Amazon is looking for a deal!

4. Stack and Save Promotions – This type of promotion is shown on the product detail page and can help customers purchase using tiered discount structure. For example buy 2 get 5% off, buy 3 get 10% off and so on.

5. Price – Lowering your price temporarily can be helpful in boosting conversions. I recommend making price changes very slowly when trying to increase the price of a product. Start with 5% or 10% increments at a time.

The best way to evaluate your traffic numbers and conversion rates is by utilizing several reports in the business reports in Seller Central.

If you want to see how your account is performing in regards to these two metrics, use the Sales and Traffic By Date report. Here is the path: Reports – Business Reports – Sale and Traffic. Then use the slider to select the desired date range. From there you will want to edit the columns that are shown. On the right side of the page, you will see a grey box that says Columns. If you select that then you can turn on Date, Ordered Product Sales, Page Views, Sessions, and Unit Session Percentage. The last three can be a little confusing so I will provide a definition for each column.

Page View – Hits in your Amazon.com presence for the selected time period.

Sessions – Sessions are visits to your Amazon.com pages by a user. All activity within a 24-hour period is considered a session

Unit Session Percentage – Percentage conversion metric indicating how many units were purchased relative to the number of people who viewed the products.

I usually will look at this information by month. However, you can view it by day or by week if you would prefer. Viewing the information in this way can help you understand what is happening in your account in terms of traffic and conversions.

In the event that you want to see this same information at the individual product level, you will want to go to Reports – Business Reports – Detail Sales and Traffic by Child Item. Here you can edit the columns shown and view the same information but at a much more detailed level.

Hopefully, these tips can help increase your revenue and help you run a sustainable business on Amazon.

If you have been a seller on Amazon for more than 10 minutes, you know that there are a TON of acronyms! It can be a little daunting at first, and even to the seasoned veteran seller, trying to understand and keep track of all the letters, numbers and symbols involved with running an effective Amazon account. We did our best to compile as many as we could so you have a 1-stop spot for anything AMZ:

Amazon Acronyms Glossary

A+ – A detail page where the product description has enhanced content and branding, which includes graphics and images embedded into the page. A+ content is specifically for vendors.

AAP – Amazon Advertising Platform (now known as Amazon DSP). The program advertisers use to buy and create display and video ads.

ACOS – Average cost of sales – Related to Amazon sponsored product ads and is a metric of how well your ads are performing relative to their cost.

ARA – Amazon Retail Analytics. A selection of reports for vendors, sometimes referred to as ARA Basic. These are available to all vendors and look at topics like sales and inventory.

ARAP – Amazon Retail Analytics Premium. An add-on option with more detailed and varied reports that look at a vendor’s traffic and customer behavior for vendors. Vendors must pay a fee to access these.

ASIN – Amazon standard identification number – Amazon’s internal tracking identifier for each listing in their catalog. It’s similar to a UPC but is exclusive to Amazon.

ASN – Advanced Shipment Notification. Used to communicate a shipment’s tracking number and information to Amazon in advance of delivery.

ASP – Average Selling Price – Refers to the average price that a seller on Amazon sellers sell their items for. Calculated by taking the total sales for a time period divided by the number of items for the time period.

AMS – Amazon Marketing Services. This is now known as Amazon Advertising.

AMZ – Amazon

B2B – Business to Business. E-commerce between two businesses, rather than a business and consumer.

B2C – Business to Customer. E-commerce between a business and a customer.

BB – Buy Box – Refers to the seller associated with the add to cart button on any Amazon product detail page.

BSR – Best Seller Rank – often used interchangeably with sales rank, gives an idea of how well an item is selling in relation to others.

CCC – camelcamelcamel.com – this is a website that tracks price and sales rank history of products on Amazon.

COGs – Cost of Goods Sold

CPC – Cost Per Click. This relates to sponsored ads and the amount Amazon charges the seller or vendors when a customer clicks on their ad. The calculation is total ad cost / clicks.

CTR – Click Through Rate. A metric that measures the number of clicks per impressions of an advertisement. The calculation for this is # of clicks / # impressions = CTR.

DEA – Dynamic eCommerce Ads. A component of Amazon DSP, these ads will have eCommerce features built within the display ad, such as retail price and review ratings.

DOTD – Deal of the Day. On Amazon’s Gold Box or Deals page, a single item or small set of closely related items discounted for a period of one day only.

DP – Detail Page. A product page for an ASIN on Amazon. This displays important info such as price, title, bullets, description, customer reviews, etc.

DPV – Detail Page Views. A metric showing the number of impressions of a single detail page.

DS – Drop Shipping – The act of shipping a product direct from a supplier to the end customer.

DSP – Demand Side Platform. Amazon’s display advertising program.

EAN – European Article Number – 13-digit number system for identifying retail products.

EBC – A detail page where the product description has enhanced content and branding, which includes graphics and images embedded into the page. EBC is now A+ Content.

EDI – Electronic Data Interchange. A way for companies and businesses to send digital information to one another.

FBA – Fulfillment by Amazon

FBM – Fulfilled by Merchant – Also known as MF (Merchant fulfilled), this refers to shipping products directly to the end customer yourself.

FC – Fulfillment Center – Refers to one of Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses / centers.

FNSKU – Fulfillment Network Stock Keeping Unit – Per Amazon these are: The FNSKU is the way that Amazon identifies a product as unique to the seller that the seller has sent it to an FBA warehouse. Every product that is processed through an FBA warehouse is given this unique identifier.

GLN – Global Location Number. Unique identification code of a physical location.

GTIN – Global Trade Item Number. Globally unique 14-digit number to identify items, products, and services.

IDQ – Item Data Quality. Refers to the condition of an item’s information, for example, if the product has bullet points and images.

ISBN – International Standard Book Number – An ISBN is a 13-digit number assigned by

standard book numbering agencies to identify individual books. ISBNs used to be 10 digits until the end of 2006

MAP – Minimum advertised price – This most often comes into play with wholesale sourcing. This is a price that you agree not to list below when you purchase a product from a wholesaler / distributor.

MF – Merchant Fulfilled – Items that you ship directly to the customer yourself, rather than using FBA.

MOQ- Minimum Order Quantity – The minimum amount you are able order. This typically applies to orders from a wholesaler or distributer.

MSRP – Manufacturer’s suggested retail price

MTD – Month to Date – Often seen when sharing sales or a certain metric since the beginning of the month.

NTB – New to Brand. Launched in 2019, Amazon’s advertising metric that determines whether an ad-attributed purchase was made by an existing customer or one buying a brand’s product on Amazon for the first time over the prior year. With NTB, advertisers receive campaign performance metrics such as total new-to-brand purchases and sales, new-to-brand purchase rate, and cost per new-to-brand customer.

OA – Online Arbitrage – buying items at online retailers to resell on Amazon.

ODR – Order Defect Rate – The percentage of orders that customers report a significant issue on. Per Amazon, an ODR is: ODR is the percentage of orders that have received a negative feedback, an A-to-z Guarantee claim or a service credit card chargeback. It allows us to measure overall performance with a single metric.

OOS – Out of Stock – Refers to an item being out of stock in a retail store or Amazon themselves being out of stock on an item.

P&L – Profit & Loss Statement – Also known as the income statement.

PDA – Product Display Ads. A type of display advertising where a product’s ad appears throughout Amazon on category and product pages.

PL – Private Label – Putting your own brand name on a generic product and branding it as your own.

POD – Proof of Delivery. When Amazon has not received an item a vendor has sent and needs proof that the item was delivered by the carrier.

PPV – Product Price Variance. When a vendor raises an invoice and the item price on the invoice differs from what Amazon has in the system.

PQV – Product Quantity Variance. When a vendor sends inventory to Amazon and the amount they shipped differs from the amount Amazon received.

PPC – Pay per click advertising – This relates most often to using Amazon sponsored product ads.

Q1 – First quarter. Jan-March of any given year.

Q2 – Second quarter. April – June of any given year.

Q3 – Third quarter. July – Sept of any given year.

Q4 – Fourth quarter. Oct – Dec of any given year, also notable for containing Black Friday and the holiday shopping season.

RA – Retail Arbitrage – buying items in retail stores to resell on Amazon.

RoAS – Return on Ad Spend. Used to determine the effectiveness of an ad campaign. Should tell you how many dollars you will receive for every dollar you spend on advertising.

ROI – Return on Investment

SB – Sponsored Brands. Keyword-targeted ads that promote a specific brand and are on a cost-per-click basis.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization. A process to increase traffic and visibility to a website, brand, or product through a search engine on the web. Refers only to “organic,” or unpaid or free results, as opposed to paid placement, such as ads.

SKU – Stock Keeping Unit – This is a number and letter combination that is used to identify items in a seller’s inventory. Used to efficiently manage inventory.

SnS – Subscribe and Save. Amazon’s service that allows customers to routinely auto-order delivery on certain products at a discounted price. Bundling more of these products increases the discount level.

SP – Sponsored Products. Keyword-targeted ads that promote an individual product and are on a cost-per-click basis.

TACOS – Total Advertising Cost of Sale –

UPC – Universal Product Code – A 12-digit number displayed with the barcode on the vast majority of retail products.

VA – Virtual Assistant – Virtual assistants are generally from another country and perform various tasks, such as online sourcing or administrative tasks.

VIS – Video In Search. Offers advertisers a content-rich medium in which to make a direct connection with Amazon customers through videos in mobile search results.

WS – Wholesale – Refers to sourcing products wholesale. Generally purchased direct from the manufacturer or from a distributor.

YTD – Year to date – Often used when sharing sales numbers or a certain metric since the beginning of the calendar year.