Efficient Era is going out of business on July 4, 2019
As sad as this is, I believe I've found a replacement that is actually EASIER to use: FeedbackWhiz
Efficient Era is a must-have in my opinion when it comes to managing your FBA business.
It offers an inexpensive suite of tools that help sellers do a number of seller tasks more efficiently (hence the word "Efficient" in "Efficient Era").
The crazy part is I haven't even unlocked its full potential yet - I use it for the following services currently:
- Alerts
- Email Automation
- Review Monitoring
- Return Rate Monitoring
Since I began using the tool, they've revamped the dashboard & expanded on the list of available features. It's on it's way to becoming a true one stop shop for everything Amazon FBA sellers need.
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You can check out the features page for up to date offerings. At the time of writing this, they offer:
- Sponsored Product Ad Automation (I was already using Teikametrics)
- Business Critical Event Alerts
- Email Automation
- Review Monitoring
- In-Depth Order Data Insights
- In-Depth Product Listing Data Insights
- Profit Analytics (I was already using Fetcher)
- Return Rate Monitoring
I seriously couldn't be happier with the tool.
I was already using it before I listened to a podcast with Bernie Thompson, the founder of Efficient Era.
After hearing his story, it made perfect sense why it's such a great FBA software solution - he's a long time Amazon seller himself, with a background in tech.
When he noticed a lack of tools for sellers, he set out to make them for himself. After a long period of using them to improve his own operations, the light bulb went off and he made it available to other sellers.
In this article, I'll share how I use it to improve my FBA business processes.
Efficient Era Tool: Alerts
The alerts are incredibly valuable if you offer more SKUs than you can afford to check on a daily basis.
Here's an alert notifying me that other sellers have joined my listing (this is so annoying...).
I'll do an in-depth writeup at some point about how to fend-off hijackers and protect your private label listings, but for now, this is a great way of staying on top of what's going on.
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Just because there's other sellers on your listing doesn't mean you'll lose the buy box. Should that happen, there's another alert for that.
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The monthly movers email will outline your best performing products month-over-month, by comparing their sales volume over that timespan.
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Want to know when a customer purchases 5+ of the same SKU in a single order (large orders)? Sure, why not! That's covered too.
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Efficient Era Tool: Email Automation
This was the initial reason why I joined Efficient Era in the first place.
Leveraging email automation to thank customers for their order and request that they leave honest feedback is a common practice amongst Amazon FBA sellers.
There are restrictions around what can be said in buyer/seller communications, and as such Amazon uses automated filtering on each email before it's sent out.
Efficient Era makes it easy to automate communications with your customers.
Confused about floor lights? Find out more by clicking here.
You can set up a single, generic catch-all campaign that can be configured to send to all customers based on criteria you specify (I use +3 days after delivery).
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I've developed a very effective email methodology, including templates and an in-depth breakdown that I share in my Amazon FBA Course.
They also provide you baseline email templates if you don't feel like signing up :)
Efficient Era Tool: Review Monitoring
For me, review monitoring relies completely on EE's review alert emails - I simply don't have the time to check each of my SKUs regularly for new feedback.
Product Review
One of my personal favorites, Efficient Era's software will monitor your product reviews and alert you when you receive a new review, whether it's negative, neutral or positive.
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This might seem excessive if you sell a lot of SKUs, but sometimes buyers leave completely incorrect/irrelevant product reviews that you can (& should) have seller support remove. your product reputation is extremely valuable and needs to be protected.
Seller Feedback
EE will also alert you via email when new negative seller feedback is received. This is important to stay on top of - it's not uncommon for buyers to drop a 1-star review because their FBA item took too long in mail (something you aren't responsible for).
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p.s. Seller support removed this feedback for me!
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Less important than your product reviews - but still important - your seller feedback should STILL be protected as much as possible. Some customers wont purchase from a seller with a poor reputation.
Efficient Era Tool: Return Rate Monitoring
Fortunately, I've only had to rely on this once, but I learned just how robust it actually is.
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Without naming the product, I sold cupS in the past that I thought my supplier said would include straws in the packaging.
Unfortunately we had a misunderstanding that resulted in many unhappy customers, and the return rate for that SKU exceeded 14% (which if I remember correctly is the % that will trigger an Amazon warning).
(I was definitely a little too comfortable launching new products at this point in time & have since learned my lesson)
After editing the listing to reflect what I was actually selling, I relied on EE's Returns page to monitor the return rate for that SKU, along with all of my other products.
Efficient Era Tools I Don't Use... Yet
Profit Analytics
I currently don't use the profit analytics tool, because it wasn't around when I first signed up for Fetcher.
I'm sure they do the same thing - you input your product costs (cost of goods, inbound shipping, + anything else) and they will download your order fees and tell you your exact margins on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
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It's imperative that you stay on top of your margins - knowing just your revenue isn't enough.
Ads
I wish the Efficient Era advertising solution was around before I spent $2,000 on Teikametrics.
I won't say it's 100% necessary that you use a third party tool to assist with your advertising campaigns... but it definitely doesn't hurt.
It's easy to burn through cash by forgetting to adjust your budgets or bids once you start scaling your FBA offerings, and Teikametrics was my initial solution to help me optimize my ad spend & kill under-performing keywords.
They send a neat weekly email that offers a quick, high-level peak into your campaign manager:
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Once my annual contract is up, I'll be switching over to EE's Ads page.
I'm pretty sure it does almost the exact same thing at a MUCH more affordable price.
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How Much Does Efficient Era Cost?
The most attractive quality of this tool is its cost. I joined early on when there was no monthly fee, and I'm grandfathered in :)
But at the time of writing this, it costs a mere $19/mo for the average seller to use, and usage bills are VERY fair:
- Number of orders: $0.02
- Number of products: $0.08
* If you sell FBM products (i.e. dropshipped print-on-demand products) make sure they are disabled.
The official pricing page can be found here.
Here's my bill for December 2018: $13.87 (!!)
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For reference:
- I pay $19/mo for Fetcher
- I pay around $165/mo for Teikametrics
Efficient Era does it all! So do yourself a favor and give it serious considering when you're looking for Amazon FBA seller analytics software & automated tools.
