We were so lucky to have the lively, knowledgeable, effervescent Jana Krekic – Founder and CEO of YLT Translations – here to talk about the importance of expertly translated listings on international Amazon marketplaces. Or, to put it more plainly, the importance of having listings and listing strategies that make sense. At the end of the day, your listings are all you really have to communicate the value and specialness of your products, right? So what possible sense does it make to throw a listing up in a language you don’t speak without having a native speaker look at it for you? You’d be surprised.
In fact, Jana told us she was often surprised at the fact that many brands lack attention or care into the right keywords to use in their listings. Isn’t it just as important for shoppers to be able to FIND your listing as it is for your listing to make them want to buy your products? And, when you’re dealing with multiple Amazon marketplaces and many different languages…well, you need a strategy that works.
Here are some key Teika-ways from the webinar, followed by the replay and the transcript.
Key Teika-Ways
- Amazon’s own FREE translation (part of Launchpad) is…less than good. Think Google Translate on your first international vacation
- If Amazon translates, you end up with translated keywords. If those keywords are off-the-mark, and you use them for advertising…
- Localization is so important. What works in a .com listing likely won’t work in a listing on .de. German shoppers have different values and expectations. What are they? You probably should talk to someone in Germany to find out.
- Non-localized listings can cause a lack of understanding, possible offense to your intended audience – watch the replay or read the transcript for details, because Jana has very specific examples
- The opportunity available in international marketplaces is still phenomenal. Lower competition and different rules can mean a big win for your brand
- Certain products and categories of products are better for certain marketplaces. Guess what category is doing best on .uae right now? Watch the replay or read the transcript to find out!
- You may be able to reset your “Honeymoon period” on a marketplace. For this hack, check out the video
- Jana did a DEEP DIVE into keyword strategy, across the board. Check it out because it’s very helpful to hear how her team looks at keywords for .com, and how they dive into the right keyword strategies for each international marketplace. Tools and tips are mentioned!
- Jana talks about the hottest marketplaces right now – where should you go first? If you’re already all over Europe, what’s next?
We will be talking to Jana, Pearl from First Choice Shipping, TJ from Payoneer, and Tom from AVASK on June 15th for a roundtable discussion on advanced strategies for global success on Amazon. Stay tuned to our webinars page for that special event!
Watch The Replay
Read the Transcript
Liz Downing: Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another Tuesday webinar. I am Liz Downing with Teikametrics and the eCommerce marketing manager here. I’ve got my friend Jana with me. She’s the founder and CEO of YLT Translations. Say hi.
Jana Krekic: Hi, guys. It’s nice to be here.
Liz Downing: It’s been a really long day for her. She was just telling me about a podcast she did three hours ago. So it’s just been a long day of having to be on camera for her. So I’m pleased that she was able to join us. A couple of housekeeping things before we get to talking about, talking to your Amazon customers in their own language. We are recording this session. So if you registered for this webinar, you will be receiving the replay, a short recap and the transcript. So if you’re not a watcher, you can be a reader, or if you’re not a reader, you can be a watcher. We try to fill all of your learning styles as best we can.
Liz Downing: If you’ve got questions, please submit them in the question section of the go-to webinar panel. It’s right in there and we’ll try to address these as we go along. We realized that we’re getting kind of like slide heavy, little bit of webinar exhaustion going on. COVID still not over. And so we’re trying to have frank, open and informative conversations that involve you. So we’re not going to put a bunch of slides in your face. We’re just going to talk to you about what you ought to know about having listings in international marketplaces, because that’s what Jana and her team do best.
Liz Downing: So let’s talk a little bit about if you don’t use professional translation services, how does it work when you’re creating your listings in international marketplaces on Amazon?
Jana Krekic: Basically if you don’t want to use a professional service like ours or some other service, usually Amazon is going to offer you their own translation service as a part of the launchpad program. So that’s basically how it works. They offer that for free. And a lot of people say like, “Woo, I’m going to save a lot of time and money because Amazon is going to do this for me.” But then when you think about it a little bit more, having the word free and Amazon doing it for me, one sentence is not going to sound good at the end. It’s going to cost you the most. That’s my experience.
Liz Downing: So that’s why you formed your company?
Jana Krekic: Yeah.
Liz Downing: You’ve got a background in languages, also background in music. You can learn more about that when we post our cool kids of eCommerce episode with Jana, which was one of the most fun ones I’ve ever done, but it’s not live yet. But so you’ve got a background in languages. You understand the importance of not only property inflation, but talking to someone in a way that they understand in terms of the way the culture is in that country. Which is obviously not an advantage, an automated translation service would have like Google Translate, for instance. It just goes off of like, textbooky kind of translation. And I think the probably Amazon’s is similar.
Liz Downing: So that’s like why YLT came into being, and why you’ve been so successful, because I think people have realized that doing it your way works better than doing it the free Amazon way.
Jana Krekic: Yes. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And it’s just because we do the service. I just think that Amazon is overall doing a horrible job with the translations because it’s a machine translation, it’s basically like you’re using Google Translate. And if you’ve ever used Google Translate on your holiday, you know that it did much harm than good. And just imagine applying that to your listings and just, Google Translate would not do the keyword research. Neither would regular translator from Fiber or anywhere else would understand why they are translating the texts. Like what is the purpose of this text?
Jana Krekic: And unless you explain this to them, they’ll have to create a sales copy that will make the potential buyer buy this product. They will not understand why are they doing this for. And the problem is that without keywords, so Google Translate or other regular translator, they don’t give you keywords. And you’re not going to be able to be found for that specific keyword. So you might end-
Liz Downing: Sorry, but the scary thing about Amazon is that it will translate your listing and it will pick your keywords for you, but it won’t be an intuitive way that it picks your keywords. So there are keywords involved because that’s how they say, “Oh, we’re able to advertise for you too.” But it’s based on the keywords they pick out of your listing that they translated with a machine and it might be the completely wrong word, or it might not be exactly the right word. And in Amazon’s case, it has to be the exact right word in order for you to be successful.
Jana Krekic: Yeah, absolutely. But as I mentioned, if you let Google Translate, translate that for you, of course, there’s going to be perhaps by accident some of the keyword. And also I think like Amazon, they just do, because we’ve seen like so many translations and people come to us and they ask feedback about underperforming listings. And then when you take a look at a listing, it can have like one or two keywords put there literally like by accident and it will not make any sense. Okay, for like, let’s say title is fine.
Jana Krekic: Sometimes you have the title, which has like two or three keywords and some like minor details. But then when you have the bullet or the product description or something, which would be like storytelling or emphasizing the benefits of a product, people will not going to understand that because it’s done by a robot who doesn’t understand your brand and doesn’t understand your product.
Jana Krekic: So you’re not going to convey the right message. And the problem is, and a lot of studies have shown this, that people who don’t understand what they’re buying are highly unlikely to buy a product. And this is 100% the same. And even if you like a better pricing and I’ve had this example from the French marketplace, there was like this, diaper bag, it’s like a carry on diaper bag. And like all of the listings were priced around like the $35 and this particular listing was priced $25. But the listing, when you click on it, it was completely confusing. I wouldn’t understand like how do I open this bag? And how do I change the diapers for my baby?
Jana Krekic: And people were also like very puzzled by this let’s say, and with the reviews and everything. You would see that this product was not like top sellers of let’s say like the top 100 products on the baby diapers and that category, even though the price was $10 less than all other products, and this product looked pretty much the same and it had professional pictures and everything, okay, this was done, but the listing didn’t make any sense. And people didn’t buy it because they didn’t understand it. And especially if you’re speaking to an unknown market, like well, you don’t speak the language and you actually don’t know how this sounds like, you really have to put your listing in a trust to someone who is a native speaker, who knows how to localize a product.
Jana Krekic: A lot of people will just translate the product as it is even with like native translators, but they would not localize that in terms of like, you need to change something like some part of the listings, you need to do like a little bit of rewriting in order to help the customer understand your brand or your product better. US tile is like very salesly and fluffy. And it’s very different than German style. Like if you were to take like a US listing and translate it as it is to Germans, they’ll be just like, “No, man, I don’t want to buy your product.”
Jana Krekic: Because like in the US listing, people are pushed into buying product, like by this amazing product. And I love this example of this glass espresso cup that we did a couple of years ago. So the original US listing was the first bullet says cool, cooler, coolest. And then the German bullet translated to elegant and stylish. So it’s like, will this fit my kitchen? Will this fit my lifestyle? Oh, yes it will, all of them solid short and all I’m like, it’s dry. I don’t want this. And then like the third bullet said, their bullet says like, “Own the enigma, just like your grandma used to have bottles in front of your fireplace.”
Jana Krekic: And then Germans say, “Thermal isolated glass.” Which basically means they’re not going to burn your fingers. So they’re like really focused on being very straightforward, like show me the benefits of their products. How do you solve my problems? Why should I buy a product through your example? Not because you’re going to tell me like, “Buy my product or buy my amazing product.” So you should really avoid this tile when addressing the German audience. And people make a lot of mistakes with that because, if you just translate that the bullet that says like, “Buy this amazing product now for the season.” Or like for the Mother’s Day or something like that, and you just translate that to the Germans, it would not make any sense.
Jana Krekic: They might be also like quite been offended by your listing as well. And I don’t know if you guys know this, but like from all of the worldwide marketplaces, German marketplace is the one that gives out the most refunds. So if people don’t understand the listing and maybe they think that they’re buying something else or not, they’re just going to return the product. And obviously that happens a lot. So you should be really careful with the Germans. It is the biggest marketplace. I always recommend going to Germany because it has so much potential. And I like to call it a five-star marketplace because people from other countries that don’t have their own Amazon marketplace, they get redirected and they buy from German Amazon.
Jana Krekic: Like now we have Amazon Sweden, we have Amazon Netherlands, but they were all ones, all redirected and everybody purchase from Germany. So this is really interesting because you get the access to much more, a wider crowd than the German crowd. But it’s all like German mentality and like the Northern Europe. So you really have to pay attention that you do not reflect the US style, let’s say in Germany. And this can be also applied for a lot of other marketplaces, but I just always like to talk about like the US and Germany, because it is the biggest difference in style. And you should never ever translate that word by word, because you’re just not going to get the same effect.
Liz Downing: So US listings might try to be clever, or they might try to do a play on words or a pun or something like that to catch the eye. And I know that a lot of listing optimization are US-based for.com recommend, really spicing up your listing, making your bullet points super interesting. You’re supposed to get the functionality in the use of your product across, but the more clever you can be with your language, the more it stands out. And for Germany that would be considered frivolous and stupid.
Liz Downing: And if it was translated wrong then it would be like double stupid, but even if it was translated correctly, to get the idea across, that’s not a market that would appreciate that style of listing.
Jana Krekic: No, definitely not. It’s really different. And I can’t emphasize this enough, but you do a product research for each market separately, and this is how your shows would do your keyword research. And this is also how you should approach your listing. And raises a good interesting fact. Like what I’ve noticed is that for instance, toys category this sells in Germany like crazy. And it does well all across Europe. It does even better than it does in the States. We’ve had so many clients that they’re US-based, and the revenue outgrew the revenue… the revenue in Germany and Europe outgrew the revenue in the States, just because they sold toys.
Jana Krekic: And you’re like, why is this? Because marketplaces are different. And don’t think that if you have best seller of one marketplace, then you will be super successful in another one. Usually like the rule of thumb is like, if you started in the States and usually take your best sellers to Europe, for instance, but you really have to do the market research, like go to Brand Analytics, just check it out. Or if you don’t want to go to Brand Analytics, you can always have the Vox populi, and you can go to like a Facebook group of experts. And as I’m like, “Hey, so would you buy my product?”
Jana Krekic: We also recently had some, there was a seller, he had problems. He was like, “I’m doing everything. I have like premium pictures, everything is great, keywords, all blah, blah, everything is terrific. And this is also our feedback calls from your listing.” He was like, he was from the UK and he was like, “My t-shirts are just not selling in Germany.” And we’re like, “Well yeah, lets have a look.” And so he was selling a t-shirt, which says Mr. with like the smiley face and Mrs. also with a smiley face. It was all like together was like a couple t-shirts.
Jana Krekic: And then I went to my whole German team and they said like, “I would never buy that, ever.” Like every single person, I have 15 team members in my German team. They’re like, “This is something that Germans would never buy. This is not going to be a bestseller on the German marketplace.”
Liz Downing: Did they say why?
Jana Krekic: No, there’s just like this isn’t like something that Germans would like, this is what they said. It’s just like, not… It’s also like when you have also translations and then we did this like for Payoneer the payment service provider and they wanted to have like these like big billboards, like some conference in Germany. And one of their sentences said, “Customer care, we live to care for you.” Or something like that. And that in Germany, you have to say like, “Customer care, we live up to what we promise.” Or like, we live up to deliver professional, whatever, because like the care and having like we are a humble service at your service. They had set those like that is like in Germany, you cannot translate like, we are very humble, because like humble and care connect to like physical care and hospital stuff.
Jana Krekic: And it doesn’t sell, like this service can help you or do anything professional for you. So, this is absolutely the same. It’s like, if I ask like the German person like, “Would you hire a humble service? Or like exquisitely professional service?” They would be like, “Exquisitely professional service,” just because they didn’t use that workplace. And they don’t like this kind of metaphors and stuff, but this is something that you really have to, as I said, you don’t have to pay money. You don’t have to pay someone to do product research for you.
Jana Krekic: If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can ask people and they will give you a pretty good guidelines, you know which is very important for let’s say like Japanese marketplace, which is like a completely different world and not all products will be successful there. And if you have like an amazing product for Japanese marketplace, then you should go all in because PPC is cheaper. There’s very little competition over there and it’s just like a unique marketplace. But a lot of products that are best sellers in the States or in Europe will not be successful over there.
Jana Krekic: We had like tons of products that were doing great, but those are products that are… you know you wouldn’t say like, “Oh, I understand this is good for the Asian marketplace.” Like some like crazy like flow, like what was it like? Yeah, there was some sort of shield that you put on yourself and you also put on your testicles and it’s in pink and green and floral colors. And you do like some martial art with that, which is like a no joke martial art. It’s not like something from the cartoons and stuff was. And you’re like, why would anybody in this world put this on themselves? And this was a top best seller in Japan.
Liz Downing: We did have a question about localization, but I think you’re giving lots of great examples of localization and understanding a marketplace so that you can place your product correctly. And then there are some cases where you might have like that product you just talked about. I doubt anybody in Germany would want to buy that.
Jana Krekic: No, I doubt anybody, like maybe like in the States, because it’s such a big, big market and you have like so many international people and the cultures combined and living together, then maybe. Yes. But like for Japan that was insane. It went through the roof, like I’m going to find the link and I’m going to send it to you because I was just like, it was so weird. I’ve never seen anything like that before. And we were just like, “Accept our Japanese tea,” Which were like, “Oh, this is cool.” And did they see anything weird? We were like strange with that. It’s just like, Oh, it’s like a regular, like equipment you put on yourself to protect yourself from the other people’s punches. So that was really interesting.
Jana Krekic: And when talking about localization, there are like so many examples of what goes wrong if you present it differently. And I remember there was an example of an Italian listing and it was a bikini for… it was a plus size bikini. There was a plus size model, but the mistake they did because they use Google Translate or maybe somebody else who didn’t do a good job. So the title said a blue bikini for a donna grossa. Donna grossa means “fat women.” So you definitely don’t want to be like, “This is a product for fat women.” And then there were like a lot of bad comments in Italian saying “This is disrespectful and blah, blah, blah.”
Jana Krekic: And the only tons of mistakes like that, they’re like all over Amazon. And I have like 20 products to name. I think I did a podcast last year just with like mistakes that people have from Google translate. And some of those are actually bestsellers and some of them are, of course Chinese sellers which is crazy with the translations and stuff, but like half of their listings are completely wrong and that don’t make a lot of sense. And there was like this bullet journal and the bullet journal was translated to Spanish with “balls” which means like a gun bullets, not the bullet format, but it was like a notebook where you keep your bullets, like from your gun.
Jana Krekic: And it was a beautiful, it was a beautiful notebook with like some deer on it, like a leather notebook. But there was this crazy or there was also like, one of my favorite examples is like a brown shaver. So they did a good job with everything except the title with a keyword. So they chose completely wrong keywords. So a shaver it’s called rasieren, to shave in German. And one of the keywords is rasenmäher, so rasenmäher means a lawnmower. It doesn’t mean a shave or like to shave your hair or something. It’s a lawnmower. So when you type like rasenmäher, you going to get a lawn mower.
Jana Krekic: So they were ranking for something completely wrong. They were doing well in spite of that, but just imagine like how much more these brands would do if they had somebody to just read through their listings. I’m pretty sure nobody has ever gone through these listings and be like, why is a lawn mower in your title? You know? So it’s just so weird.
Liz Downing: Well, and it can go crazy, right? Because if that’s the keyword you’re using in your title, and then that’s the keyword that you’d use to advertise on in that particular marketplace, then all the traffic you’re wasting, throwing money away on a keyword that is not relevant to your product at all.
Jana Krekic: No. And that’s like, the worst thing is that you will use, as you said, like everything in the PPC campaigns is going to be going to waste their money, especially like during the famous honeymoon period. So, for those of you out there who are going to check your listings and be like, “Oh my God, this is wrong.” If you don’t have any bad reviews, there is a way how to restart your honeymoon period by deleting absolutely everything which you had in your listing and shortening your title to as a few characters Amazon lets you, and believing absolutely everything and saving that, and leaving that for 36 hours.
Jana Krekic: And after that, once you upload everything back, everything bad gets re-indexed. So it’s not the end of the world if you don’t have any bad reviews because this method doesn’t really any better reviews. For that, you have to go link to some hackers, which I would not recommend. But I bought from this, like this thing that I know that it works 100%. You can restart your honeymoon period, but if you had better reviews, then unfortunately there’s not much that could be of use to you.
Liz Downing: So we’ll still reset the content. And will you still get re-indexed, it’s just that you’ve got that bad review and you can’t get rid of that. So it might still be worth to do it because you could get more positive reviews if your listing was actually correct.
Jana Krekic: Absolutely. Absolutely. And especially if you are selling in Europe, now that like all reviews are combined and put together, earlier, like I don’t know like a year and a half ago, it was really difficult when you’re starting off in a new marketplace because you have like zero reviews and you have to build out everything from the start. But now, if you’re selling across Europe already and you want to add other marketplace, you’re going to accumulate all of these beautiful reviews that you have. So it doesn’t really matter. I don’t think people have only bad reviews on the listings. I don’t think that’s possible if they’re doing a good job than other marketplaces.
Liz Downing: Let’s talk a little bit, we talked about localization. I think we can go back to that if we have questions, but let’s talk a little bit about some examples you’ve seen where you have gone in and tweaked the keyword strategy specificlly, and then let’s talk about marketplace to marketplace. So let’s like have a Germany example. Let’s have a Japan example. We haven’t talked about France at all. So it feels left out.
Jana Krekic: Right. Sure. No FOMO. Everybody going to get their time. So yeah, so above the keyword, I have to like address the problem with the search volume. So a lot of sellers also like big ones, and I’m constantly surprised by how people lack the knowledge about the keywords. And they’re also using the same strategy on their home marketplace. So a lot of sellers would come in and be like, “Well, this is like a 15,000 search volume. And this one should go to the title and this is like the search volume, like 7,000, maybe like isn’t the first bullet and blah blah.
Jana Krekic: And this is all they take into consideration like search volume. So this is absolutely wrong because search volume, it’s fine. Like people search for those keywords, but how many of those keywords are going to convert? And how many of those keywords are actually relevant for your product? So this is something that everybody should have in mind. So be sure to combine Brand Analytics, for sure, with some other tools that you have like, for instance, like we use Helium10 and for some marketplaces that Helium10 doesn’t have like Japan and UAE, we use SellerApp.
Jana Krekic: So we want to combine like all of that together and to see what is the relevancy? What are the conversion rates? And what is the search volume? So like, let’s say if the relevancy goes like under like 20, you’re not going to use it, even though it has like really high search volume. You’re not gonna use that, but you should like combine everything, which is like depending of course of the competitors, not all categories and products have going to have the same ratio, but usually would like a competitive category such as like, I don’t know, the kids toys, for instance, in Europe, you’re going to use relevancy, like more than 30 is good.
Jana Krekic: And then you combine it with the search volume. And then you also combine that. So you have the relevancy, you have the conversion rate, which you can see in sales, and then you can have the search volume. So you have to combine all those three to get something which is going to be good. So this is something important. And people just look for search volume, that’s it, which is wrong because it doesn’t mean that they are going to convert. So this is number one mistake that I’ve seen, and I cannot stress enough how this is important.
Jana Krekic: And also what we like is this little tool it’s called AMZ Suggestion Expander. It’s absolutely free. And it’s an add on for Chrome and it doesn’t give you like a search volume information or anything, but it’s really cool. Like if you’re entering a new marketplace and you don’t have that many competitors, because you don’t have like old tools, they extract information, the keywords from the competitors. So what do you do if you’re like maybe the first presence selling that product, or like maybe have three competitors that are not that good, basically, you’re just going to type your main keyword. Let’s say bonsai, you want to say bonsai, tweak it.
Jana Krekic: And then you’re going to get a dropdown menu with all of the combinations which come before and after the main keyword. And those are pretty awesome. And sometimes we get some really cool solutions for that, that we don’t get in other tools. As I said, it doesn’t give you a search volume. So you would not be knowing how highly converting will search one this has, but these have been really good keyword combination that Amazon itself is going to pull out for you. So this is good to use in combination with other tools, I would save the AMZ Suggestion Expander results for maybe like the fourth and fifth bullet or product description or backend, because I think it’s really important.
Jana Krekic: And also what’s very important when it comes to all languages, is that you have to know that languages don’t work the same. Like usually long tail words or keywords are the ones that consists of two or more keywords. And in all of the tools that you’re using, it says word count is set by default as number two, it means you’re going to get two results, like two words results in the results. And there’ll be your long tail keywords. And that’s fine for English. It’s fine for French. It’s fine for Spain, but it’s not okay for Germany. Because German language has like these big, chunky compound keywords. And you can literally express like a full sentence with like one word in German.
Jana Krekic: And the mistake people are making is like, you go to this tool and you click, you put your magnets or Ebro everything, but the word count stays as number two, it means you’re going to get only two word long tail keywords in your results. And you’re not going to get compound words at all. And these compound keywords, which are long tail keywords, they usually rank very, very, very high. And so usually like from the top 30 results, without any compound words, you’re going to probably miss out on like three, four or five, very, very important keywords for you, which your competitor is probably ranked when you’re not.
Jana Krekic: So that’s super important. So whatever you do, whatever tool you use, whenever you see the word count is set as number two, go back and set it to number one and then do the search once again. And you’ll see how many more words are going to do. And then combine the first and the second result in this keyword database. And you’ll see how many new keywords you’re going to get this way.
Liz Downing: And did you say that the name of that Chrome extension was AMZ Expander? Or AMZ Suggestion Expander?
Jana Krekic: Yes. AMZ Suggestion Expander.
Liz Downing: Okay. I’m going to link to that in the chat because people seem interested in that. So here you go. Y’all. Hey, guys.
Jana Krekic: It’s a super cool tool, very simple to use. You just need to restart your Chrome. And once you go to Amazon and you type something in the search field, you’re going to see this drop down menu with so many cool ideas for the keywords that you can use in your front-end listing.
Liz Downing: Awesome. What if somebody sells name brand products, but they’re not the brand owner who actually created the ASIN, what’s your experience of updating high ranking items that might have titles and descriptions that could use keyword optimization across international marketplaces? Like, do you have any clients that are resellers rather than the brand owner themselves and how does that usually work?
Jana Krekic: Yeah, for instance, we had somebody reselling Disney, frozen backpacks for kids, and there were official resellers. And in that case, you can use brand keywords because you have the right to use the brand keywords. That’s like talking about like big, big brands that you are reselling. But when it comes to like you being a brand owner, unless you are a well-known brand, it doesn’t make much sense to use your own brand like as a keyword, I would always recommend to use that if you are a reseller of a very, very big brand, which in that case makes absolute sense.
Liz Downing: Well, so if the person who’s selling the item actually didn’t create the listing. How can they help make it better?
Jana Krekic: How you can make it better? First of all, I would always give it to someone who’s going to tell like, this is what could be improved. I definitely think that in 90% of the listings, keywords can be definitely better. So I would start with a listing that you have, let’s say they have like a UK listing. It’s doing fine. You’re indexing for some of the things it’s not performing amazingly. If it’s doing good, I would not touch it because you should not change your listing at all costs. Like if your thing is ranking, if it’s fine, if it’s doing sales, if it’s like going up, don’t change it, especially don’t change it like three weeks before Christmas, don’t do that.
Jana Krekic: So whatever you did, like you do, like you change your listings. Let’s say like, in the end of October, maybe beginning of November, but that said, you never touch listings after that. So whatever they are doing like, let’s keep them going like that, but don’t change anything because that’s going to cost you a lot. So I would definitely, let’s talk about like a semi-ruined listing. I would definitely do keyword research again, and I would change the keywords. I would put two or three, the most relevant and a very highly ranked in the converting keywords in your title.
Jana Krekic: I would never use keywords which are singular and plural. So you would just use one version of your keyword is going to rank for both singular and plural. I would never repeat keywords. I see a lot of keywords being repeated and that’s absolutely not necessary. I’m sure you can rank for so many more keywords than that three that you’ve been repeating throughout your whole listing, that as well. And I would definitely work on showing benefits of the products in your bullets for sure. And that would leave the storytelling and branding for like a plus, like product description. If you have A-plus, I would always leave product description backend because it gets indexed.
Jana Krekic: And if you don’t have A-plus, like if you’re using like your cellphone, you’ll see on the app that after the title, the description comes first, not the bullets. So you really have to put something good in that first 100 characters over like your product description. And also, it’s really interesting, like in A-plus content, when you have the pictures you can name the pictures and then you have like the keywords for meta tags, for pictures and all of those keywords, top 100 words in those keywords, they also get indexed.
Jana Krekic: So we can maximize on the keywords everywhere, literally the list they get, we can put it over there. And definitely I will use something in backend, which is relevant for my product, but I would also use some of the search related products. Sometimes it’s a good idea because like, if you sound like flip-flops and you ride like the sun umbrella your product might show up in that frequently bought together option. If you put on the right umbrella, they be like buy in flip-flops because it’s like very suggestive like, “Oh right. I need some flip-flops.” That might be also something that would have worked for your product.
Jana Krekic: This is what we sometimes do. And definitely whatever you do, I would never repeat keywords that you have from the listing in backends. And I would not write, let’s say we have like the bonsai tree kit, this is one keyword, but I would not use like in backend. I would not put bonsai tree kit and then big bonsai tree. I would just do like big and I would just do like kit. I would not repeat the bonsai tree, bonsai tree, bonsai tree. You have only 249 characters to use and you better use it well. And of course I think that even more important from a backend is a subject matter, which is now removed like on the US marketplace from the listings, but it’s still there in European marketplaces.
Jana Krekic: So I think that’s also very important. You can really do so many different types of research, like for instance, like one of the really cool things that we like to do. And it’s for all marketplaces, like in helium 10 we go to Frankenstein. And then what we do is, depending on how many competitors you have, we take like five, six, seven competitors. We pay their titles, you find the top selling competitors, of course. So we put like seven titles and then you literally like check the thing, which says, like remove duplicates, and like one word for line. And I don’t know what, and just click.
Jana Krekic: And then on the right side, you’re going to get like one line or literally like one word, and this would be the most relevant keywords and converted ones that your competitors are using. So what you can do is you can use all of that and put into scribble, and you can use that to write your listing in any language, because you can just need to have the basics, the keywords should be in your listing, and then you can add on from other researches, but this is something that works 100%. And also what’s very important is that because it’s like a one-liner sometimes you will not know what’s the long tail keyword from that, but that really it doesn’t matter that much because if you put like a bonsai tree and then you have like a plant kits bonsai tree, etc.
Jana Krekic: So we’re going to hit like a bonsai tree, and then you can see like, for your toddler’s I don’t know, plant kids, for instance, that plant kid would be combined with bonsai tree, especially if it’s in the title. So sometimes you don’t have to have like a bonsai tree kid, bonsai tree kit for adults, bonsai tree kit, I would avoid is using the bonsai tree, like also in the title, if you can just add adults. And I would just use the dashes for instance. And also if you have bullets, I would not use drop function, I would put the dashes and I would avoid emojis. I hate emojis listings, I don’t like that.
Jana Krekic: And a lot of times people had trouble with emoji and there’ve been taken down. There is a list of emojis that are allowed somewhere. There’s a website that does that, but I would not use emojis. I know it’s cute, but it has caused a lot of trouble in the past
Liz Downing: For a while at listing.com. It was really, really helping. People were swearing by it, but then Amazon was like, “Hey, no more all caps.” And then, okay. Maybe a couple of emojis, maybe a couple of all caps that it’s-
Jana Krekic: You can get away in the European marketplace. You can still have caps lock in bullets. They’re not going to take down listing for that, but the ones they will. So good thing with like European market place is that, a lot of things that are restricted in the US, might probably never even go live in Europe. So, Europe is like far behind, so that’s cool. And this will help you to maybe do some like maneuvers that you will want to do in the US but you can’t, but you can do it like in Europe. So that’s also a cool thing to do. And yeah, I would just focus on like really good pictures. I would also check one very important thing. And this is like a lot of sellers don’t even see this.
Jana Krekic: So if you go to your product page, like on Amazon, 70% of the sellers have a competitor advertising on their own listing. So pay attention to that because if that’s happening, you can take care of that. You can take care of that. If you have like somebody who is like doing their PPC, I’m pretty sure they will know, I’m going to talk about that. But if somebody knows how to like dealing with PPC, they know how to blog that they know how to do it, but people as sellers, don’t pay attention to that. And this is going to steal your sales. And this is something which is very important because in the business report, you can also see like how many sales you have, like for when you change the title, when you change the bullet and all that.
Jana Krekic: And then if something goes wrong, then you might want to check your page and see maybe your competitor is advertising on your page. And I also recommend that when you change something in your listing, you do a one variable at a time. So if you do a title, then you just change the title and just wait for it to see the changes, check the sales. And then if that’s why as well, then you go to the first bullet, then you go to the second bullet and so on. So don’t do like a title first bullet and plot description all at once. It’s not going to do any good because you’re not going to know what works and what doesn’t work.
Liz Downing: And how long should they wait in between?
Jana Krekic: Well, I guess I would say like probably a month or two months. I would not go under a month. If you immediately see like good results, then you can move on to the next one. But sometimes we will have full results. I think like, two months should be like a good guideline for that.
Liz Downing: Well, and this applies to any marketplace. These tips that you’re giving now, they apply to any marketplace. If you’ve got a listing that you had translated, you either use Google Translate or used Amazon’s native translation and it’s like, so, so wrong. Then you can do the trick that you talked about before, which is where you take everything down, use the minimal amount of characters in the title, and then wait 36 hours and then upload it again with the right translation, as long as you don’t have negative reviews. But you should do it, even if you do have a negative reviews, because you’re just going to keep getting negative reviews.
Jana Krekic: Yeah. It’s going to get better. So yeah. So yeah, I would definitely recommend that, and this is what people have been doing. It’s still working. I don’t know how long this is going to work for.
Liz Downing: Once you find something that works once you start talking about, then it stops working. Because Amazon’s like, “Oh, hey, we didn’t know that you could do that.” I don’t think they would have a problem with that. Amazon is customer first, no matter what marketplace we’re talking about. And they want listings to be accurate so that people have happy buying experiences. I’m sure that the return rate on dot ZE is a concern to Amazon as a global organization because they’re like, “Look, get your listings, right people, otherwise these people are going to return the items because it’s not what they expected.”
Liz Downing: So absolutely your commitment to your customers has to be right on par with that customer obsession of Amazon’s no matter what marketplace you’re selling in. So knowing that marketplace, being able to understand how to communicate is one piece of the puzzle. But then if you don’t speak that language, then you can’t be sure that you’re getting your well-intentioned, well researched well worded listing across to that marketplace in that language because you don’t speak that language. So that’s why I think it’s a translation. I would not, I would not use a translation service. I would absolutely want a native speaker to take a look at my listing. It’s just like, it’s like a really bad thing if you don’t. Because you don’t know, because you don’t speak that language.
Jana Krekic: No, you don’t know. And I’m really disappointed by how little, like just a small sample of sellers actually understand how important your listing is. Of course this is not the whole thing. You can expect wonders if you’re not doing a good job in your PPC campaigns or like your pictures are lousy or whatever. But I would say that we have noticed such an improved, like revenue in sales just after people using the right keywords in their listings, in their front end listings. So you can do everything else right. But if we’re not having your listing your content the right way, you’re going to get like the accepted results. And it’s really so easy basically. And we do like more than 3000 listings every month and we’ve seen like tons of stuff.
Jana Krekic: And what we always see is like, after you tweak your listing with a proper keywords that make sense, your revenue starts also making sense and it’s pretty easy. Just people that are afraid of doing that because they don’t understand the language. And I understand that. I fully understand. Especially like when it comes to Japanese where you don’t have a regular alphabet, when you’re like, what the hell is this? So I totally understand that, but I just think that international marketplaces like worldwide have been trending so much ever since sort of COVID. And I think the trend is going to be like super, super, it’s here to stay literally.
Jana Krekic: And last year we got 40% more translations requests for other European marketplaces than ever before, which is insane. So I would say a lot of people have seen the possibility to increase their revenue even more. We’ve seen brands that have never thought of going international, like a very, very big US furniture brand that we’ve been working with. They were like, “Why would we go there?” And now they’re like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
Jana Krekic: And people are changing their mindset and that makes me really happy, but I really think that they could triple the revenue, like easy just with having the listings and the keywords and PPC campaigns done the proper way on every marketplace. I know it’s a hassle like with VAT and stuff, but once you get that saddle really, there’s nothing is stopping your way.
Liz Downing: Well, and that’s why I like to have discussions like this about global selling, because I don’t think that a lot of brands understand how much it could impact positively impact their business, but how negative an experience it can be if you do it wrong. So just to tease it out a little on the 15th of June, Jana is coming back with me. I am having Pearl from First Choice shipping next week. She’s coming back with me. We’re going to have TJ from Payoneer, Tom Meeks from AVASK to tackle the whole picture.
Liz Downing: So if you are looking toward a global approach to Amazon, what do you need to know? What are some advanced strategies? So I want to invite everybody who’s here today. If you’ve got questions that are beyond the, okay, how do I get started? But now it’s, how do I actually succeed? I’m going to pop my email address into the chat. As you’re thinking over the next month or so, email me any question you want that panel to tackle, and we will tackle it live during that webinar on the 15th of June, that registration link should be available pretty soon.
Liz Downing: In the meantime, if you are selling… I have just a couple of questions that are just like pure curiosity. You said that the first marketplace you recommend, if someone’s like, “Okay, where should I go?” First one you say is Germany. And that’s for a couple of reasons, because it goes to countries other than Germany that don’t have their own marketplace yet. I imagine Brexit has had something to do with a little bit of increase in Germany, just because there were a lot of people that were based in the UK, that were selling into Germany and they can’t do that so much anymore. And it’s kind of crazy. And we’ll talk about Brexit during that June 15th webinars too. We don’t have to tackle it today.
Jana Krekic: Also Germany has been the biggest marketplace even before Brexit. It was like the safe Germany, and then UK, then Japan. So this is just like, it’s sky rocketed Germany even higher because a lot of people now have the problem because of Brexit and what else, we’re going to cover on hundreds of teams, but it should be a really, really good webinar with tons of information. If you don’t know how to get started and what can get in your way. So you should definitely tune in for the webinar.
Liz Downing: And we’re going to have some absolutely really fun, really interesting tips for you on very specific advertising tactics for different marketplaces. Jason Magee, of course, is going to be helping out with that while I moderate, because I can’t multitask all that. Well, although I have heard that you can’t actually multitask the human brain is not actually capable of multitasking, that you never give anything 100%. If you’re not giving it all of your attention, I don’t know. Feel free to weigh on that. Y’all too, if you want to email me about multitasking, you can do that. But so if somebody is like, “Okay, great. Now I’m in Germany. Where should I go next?” Then you say UK, then you say Japan, or does it just depend on their products?
Jana Krekic: I say like, you can go to UK. Depending on where you’re based, like let’s say you’re based in the US, of course, you should go to the UK, but it’s a good market place. It’s a big market, but you’ll have to understand that you are limited by the UK. You cannot register for the pan-European program and then ship your inventory to Europe, if you decide to go to Europe. You’ll have to have inventory in the UK and you’ll have to have inventory in Europe. So when talking about Europe, I would definitely recommend the pan-European program because you get registered for basically all the countries, and then you can ship like everywhere.
Jana Krekic: So before pandemic, Spain and Italy have been a little bit off the map when it comes to like countries that are interesting for selling. But during the pandemic, like eCommerce is like increased like 14%, like in-state and we’ve seen like more and more people want to go to Spain in Italy now, like early, it was maybe like Germany, like UK and maybe France. That was it. But now people just really go to Spain nearly as well. And when it comes to new marketplaces, we have the Netherlands and we have Sweden. But somebody that’s just like completely on the fire is Poland. This is the newest marketplace. And literally we’ve had with returning clients that would go and be like [inaudible 00:47:01] entire catalog.
Jana Krekic: I’m talking about like four or 500 ACEs saying like, “I want to go to Poland.” They didn’t go to Sweden. They didn’t go to the Netherlands, but they want to go to Poland. So some reasons sellers see a good opportunity in Poland. It’s a little bit country, I think it has like 30 million people. And Allegro is a very famous marketplace in Poland. And it’s actually in the top 10 worldwide marketplaces right after Tmall and Shopee, which are like the leading ones. And Poland has 12,000 online stores. So I think it could be potentially very, very good marketplace. We’ll see how that goes. But the inquiry is a bit like going through the roof, honestly. So if I could pick like an additional marketplace in Europe where I would go to and it’s new and fresh, I’d say Poland. For sure.
Liz Downing: Okay. All right.
Jana Krekic: Yeah. I’ve learned from Europe.
Liz Downing: What are you saying about like Turkey and UAE? Are those, need to get a lot of requests for those too?
Jana Krekic: Yeah. Turkey, none. Literally none. We’ve been in business for like two and a half years now. We’ve had like maybe one party for Turkey. UAE that’s talking about like outside of Europe. Of course. So UAE could potentially be a very good market place because a, you don’t have to do translations because you could target ex-pats. If I could recommend a category for UAE, they’ll definitely be home decor because a lot of accents that are come and go like people get their jobs, they get assigned to work in Dubai. Is like now a world center for business and oil and everything. And people usually rent apartments that are non-furnished. So we will have to buy some furnishings. You have buy home decor and stuff. And if you change the category, it’s still has like three, 4,000 products maybe.
Jana Krekic: When you compare that to the US one, which has like 50,000, that’s like nothing. And Dubai is like an expensive place to live. And if you have competitive pricing, you can totally beat your competitors. And I think that home decor can definitely be one of the best categories that you can use on UAE. And as I said, you target expats and you don’t need any translations. I would use US keyword research because of the English that’s spoken there and people that are mostly there, compared to like Singapore, where you would use UK English and UK keywords, but for the UAE, I would use US keywords.
Jana Krekic: Definitely Japan is good because, if you have the product. If you don’t have the product, then don’t go there. And a lot of people like from the States, they go to either to Canada, that’s like choice number one, because you don’t have to translate the listings, even though I would always recommend, if you don’t want to… you have to do the keyword research. So you use the Canadian one. Even if you compare like the US, the UK and Canada you’ll have different keyword results, they’re not going to be 100% safe, even though it’s all English. But like what I would recommend for the Canadian listing is that, you put French keywords in backend, because there are a lot of French speakers in Canada, they type in a lot of stuff and we had some good results when you put French keywords in your backend.
Jana Krekic: And Mexico, of course, like a lot of US always go to Mexico where you just doing all Mexican keyword research and the listing, and you find a Mexican to translate that for you. And that’s it from all the market places I will definitely, it will be for me, I’m also seller by the way, if somebody wants to ask me if I’m a seller, so I don’t know what I’m talking about. I do. I got into selling a couple of months ago, but I’m applying all the strategies that I know, and we’ve seen some really good results. And we are in not supplements, but it’s like a food you add to your food. So we don’t get into supplements, but like in a different category.
Jana Krekic: So basically I will do like the US of course, number one, that I will do Germany and the UK, depending on what you want to do, maybe what you want to go UK. And maybe you want to do Germany because if you want to do Germany, you want to cover all VAT use, which is going to be a couple of months of like problems for you. But you’re going to take care of that. Like in six, seven months, if you hire a proper agency. And then if you want to do UAE, that’s also fine. If you have the home decor, I’m not sure about other categories, but I know the home decor is super often category.
Jana Krekic: And then if you have this specific product for Japan, I will definitely like do Japan. For sure. Like if you’re saying from the US, I would definitely go to Japan. If you have the Japanese product, if not, I will do Canada first. I would not go to Europe. I would do like Canada, and then maybe I would go to Germany, but I will definitely expand to Europe because earlier, like you would have to register for the Pan-European program for Europe, for Germany, France, Spain and Italy, but then you would have to register for VAT in Poland and Czech Republic. And one of my country I’ve forgotten, which means that, Amazon was going to expand to these countries as well.
Jana Krekic: So now we have seven countries instead of four, and we have additional one, the Czech Republic who is probably going to be rolled out, maybe even the end of this year. But I’m just saying that I think the European program is going to be huge. And I know sellers are getting emails from Amazon and Amazon is pushing these people into selling or international selling in Europe because I really think it’s a good idea.
Liz Downing: If you’re not doing it, now is the time. So if people want to get in touch with your team, how do they do that? And I’ll put that in the chat.
Jana Krekic: Sure. So if you guys need any advice or you don’t know how to get the stuff done, or maybe you would just want us to take a look at your listing and tell us what’s wrong when you do like this cool, like audit of your listings. And you can drop me an email at J-A-N-A that’s jana@ylt-translations.com. And you can book a call with me, or you can just ask my team to help you figure out what’s underperforming your listing. If your listing is doing good, as I said, I would not touch that all the time. So if you’re listing is good, we’re going to tell you it’s good. And also I am not recommending people to use seasonal keywords too often.
Jana Krekic: This is also something that a lot of people make mistakes with. So I would not use it if you know that the product is going to do well or not. So maybe you’re going to maybe use a seasonal keyword in your fifth bullet, just to get to try it out. But I would not overuse that at all, because then you don’t have to change that back, which sets back your listing as well. So don’t overuse the seasonal keywords.
Liz Downing: That’s a great tip. I also put a link to the free listing analysis for the people that are left and listen, if you all need help with your advertising in different countries, we’ve got teams that can do that. So I encourage you to talk to us about that. So all you have to do is follow this link that I’m going to send you right now. It’s our let’s talk link, but yeah, if you need help with that, let’s talk about it. Cool. Well, we’re almost at the top of the hour. I know everybody’s got a meeting after this. Hopefully you don’t have a meeting after this and you can like take a deep breath and be done for the day.
Jana Krekic: I’m done. I’m done with my day. I’m like preparing my dinner and I’m just going to relax and watch Netflix. That’s it.
Liz Downing: Awesome. We were talking about my octopus teacher before, because I always have my octopus in the bag. So maybe you’ll watch that and you can let me know how it is. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Thanks everybody for joining us. We’ll see you next week with Pearl from FirstWave shipping. This has been Jana from YLT Translations. Thank you so much Jana. And we’ll see you next month.
Jana Krekic: Thank you so much for having me. Cheers guys.
