“RIGHT MOVE, WRONG NUMBER”
Coming out of a great month of June & July Sales, we thought why not work towards the target of maximizing the profit. In late July we raised the price of one Fernway Organics SKU, the Herb & Veg Blend two-pack, from $29.99 to $34.99.
Three weeks later units were down 38% and conversion had dropped five points.
August is normally a slow month for this category. As soon as we saw the results for three weeks a simple human mind gave back the blame to price rise and yes a quick easy fix was just to revert it back to earlier levels. As an Amazon AD Consultant our problem is always the unknowns and when we have a reason to blame the known we will just do that.
Question: Is there more to this than just the price.
Our reasoning engine (SellerBridge) answered by doing the thing nobody does by hand: it held the change up against the rest of the account. Three products in the same catalogue, same category, same three weeks, prices untouched. Those three grew 11%. The season wasn't the problem. The control group was already there in the data; it just needed someone to look at it before the ad spend got cut.
One of the things we have really worked hard to define as a Playbook at YourSeller is to always try to make sure we collect enough evidence before we make any actions.
“It’s not always what it seems.”
Something that would have been hours for us the evidence layer showed was working in seconds. Not "reduce price" as a verdict on a dashboard, but the arithmetic a shopper does on the shelf: two single bags cost $39.98, so at $34.99 the two-pack saved 12.5%. That isn't enough to make anyone buy double. Revenue per visitor moved 0.4%. The price rise earned nothing, and we could see exactly why, in a form we could argue with.
We moved it to $32.99 and put the ad spend back and now we are back to fixing other problems and thinking how to grow and not defending our actions.
Learnings: two other SKUs went up in the same fortnight and both worked, +14% and +9% on revenue per session. Without a control group all three would have been written off as a slow month, and two good decisions would have been undone along with the bad one. Our Sellerbridge Playbooks defined with years of experience is what made that control group automatic rather than something someone had to remember to build.
