January 12, 2023

What's inside:

• A Message from our CEO

• Announcing: Cartograph Dashboards Beta

• Key Amazon Dates

• Tracking Search Terms

• Our Favorite December Amazon Tidbits

• Cartograph Austin Holiday Party

A Message from our CEO

Hi everyone,Happy New Year! Hope your Jan is off to a big start like most of our Better-For-You brands. You heard from me just a couple days ago with our year-end updates (click here if you missed them). This newsletter will recap our learnings from December and outlook for Jan. Last Month - DecemberDecember was a strong holiday month, with our total sales up 5% vs. November. Of course, composition was different: December featured large spikes from products well suited for gifts. A couple of our gift-oriented clients had their best months ever with sales 7-10x monthly sales for the bulk of the year. Interestingly, ad spend was down about 5% vs. November, as large healthy brands took their foot off the gas, and holiday brands turned down ads to manage inventory near Christmas.Our holiday learnings were all about riding the momentum of uplift. It was important to know exactly when your category started to trend, and ensure you had strong velocity going into that period. Then, we monitored ads daily to ensure we were capturing our fair share of traffic. As the month wore on, managing inventory becomes a balancing act: you want inventory to last until the end of the shopping season, typically the 21st or 22nd. This can mean raising prices, turning down ads, or even pushing sales to FBM offers (with price differentiation) so your fast ship inventory lasts until the final day. This year we saw some momentum slow down as early as the 19th and 20th. We think weather worries cut shopping season a bit late. Healthy and Better-For-You brands picked up quickly on the 26th this year - perhaps it being an observed holiday allowed more people to shop before returning to work. After taking a brief slowdown on the 30th and 31st (like most holidays), sales jumped on the 1st and have continued climbing.  The categories you'd expect are trending up big: protein, healthy pantry staples, nutrition products. Functional beverage is looking very strong as well, indicating a bump from people (like myself) observing Dry January. This is the first year we have a sizable beauty, skin, and personal care portfolio, and we're observing a January sale increase smaller than what we see in Food and Beverage. Looking AheadAnother big confection holiday is coming up soon - Valentine's Day. Last year the New Year's healthy food demand bump lasted well into March. We'll be watching closely to see how much people keep up their healthy habits. In Cartograph news, we have an exciting analytics release pipeline ahead. We'll soon have individual ASIN repeat purchase (to see where folks go from variety or intro packs), and are breaking down our sales mix reports to weekly. We still have a few spots open in our dashboard beta - message me if you'd like to join! 

Happy new year,Chris MoeCo-Founder, CEO, Cartograph

Cartograph Dashboards Beta - now open to non-clients! 

Our P&L, Repeat Purchase, and Sales Mix Dashboards are now open to non-clients in a Beta, and we just onboarded our first couple clients. They're connected to a direct API data feed, which has more data than you can get from Amazon's dashboards. Reply to this email to learn more and join our Beta!  

Join our Team! Cartograph is hiring for our Business Development team

[email protected]

Q1 2022 Dates

➞ Jan 17  -  FBA Fee Increase➞ Jan 22  -  Chinese New Year Begins

➞ Feb 14  -  Valentine's Day - big confections holiday➞ March 7-11  -  Natural Products Expo West

Amazon releases data that ranks the most frequently searched terms on Amazon. We follow these to get a sense of what people are interested by week, and time seasonality and trends. The lower the Search Frequency Rank, the more popular the term is.Most interesting this year is the diet mega term keto: first week of Jan it is the 818th most searched term on Amazon. Last year it was 464. While the trend is cooling, it's still the most popular diet term by far.

  Terms with an Improving Search Frequency Rank in January: 

Collagen, Fiber, Keto, Low Carb, Protein Powder, Gluten Free, Whey Protein Powder - Diet and healthy terms are on the rise as expected.Eye Cream, Face Wash, Shampoo, Sunscreen  - Beauty is now on the rise. Last year the peak for beauty was in February.

  Terms with a Declining Search Frequency Rank in January: 

Gifts, Christmas Gifts - Gift terms started declining immediately after Christmas as epected.Mushroom - Mushrooms WERE a huge gift item for the holidays, and now that those days are over, it's dropped down. Still is a strong trend, just is not spiking as a food product

2023 Increases to FBA Fees and Storage FeesAmazon has announced the following fee increases for 2023. This is in line with other logistics companies as UPS and FedEx who just announced rate increases around 7%. 

• FBA Fees will increase approximately $0.22 starting on January 17, 2023.

• The Fuel and Inflation Surcharge will not be temporary as Amazon had hoped, so the standard FBA Fees will be updated to reflect these fees.

• Additionally, storage fees, aged inventory fees, and removal and disposal fees will increase.

• There will be lower fees for for US FBA New Selection program.

• Amazon is reducing fees by expanding the Small and Light Program and increasing the item price for eligible products from $10-or-less to $12-or-less.

Spur POs by Scheduling PromotionsIf you’re low on inventory and having trouble getting purchase orders placed on Vendor Central, create a Lightning Deal or Vendor-Powered Coupon. Amazon should place POs to stock up for the future demand spike. Note that Amazon considers prior year periods in their ordering algorithm, so if you ran a promo last year and aren’t running the same this year, they will likely order less this year. 

Access to Subscribe and Save Dashboard and Brand Analytics ReportsTo allow secondary sellers to access Subscribe and Save and Brand Analytics, the primary user on the account needs to delegate permissions via Settings > User Permissions > Manage Global Permissions > Select the user.

In December, our Austin team had a Holiday Party inside an "igloo" at the Otopia Hotel. We had a great time connecting and enjoying some holiday cheer together.

Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn to see our weekly Amazon tidbits and company updates.