Case Study: Dorman E-Commerce Content Strategy
The Challenge
As I describe on my About Me page, within weeks of joining Dorman Products, an internal initiative to increase e-commerce sales started gaining steam. Dorman had been selling products on Amazon for years, many of which were actually setup for sale initially by our wholesale distributors. But, we did virtually nothing to support them, and there were tens of thousands of other products we didn’t sell there.
There was a lot that needed to go into ramping up our presence on Amazon, including establishing fulfillment relationships and navigating channel conflicts. From my team’s perspective, we needed to make sure we had the content needed for our products to surface highly in search results and convert shoppers. That meant high-quality photos, detailed marketing copy and bullets, explanatory videos, and additional rich media for product description pages that Amazon calls A+ Content.
This was a monumental request when you considered the size, complexity, and current state of our product content. We had close to 100,000 products, many of which were uniquely sophisticated pieces of machinery and electronics, and the content for these products had simply not been a major priority before. Honestly, no one had any idea how bad it was, since no one had thoroughly audited it before.
But that was only looking at our current catalog that needed to be updated and syndicated. Layer on the fact that we were releasing between 100 and 1,000 new auto parts every single month, and it became a massive one-time clean-up combined with the implementation of an entirely new cross-functional creation and distribution process.
In other words, the challenge was to overhaul an entire back catalog of unknown size and difficulty, and develop a new process that would completely change the way we went to market.
The Strategy
I first sought out to learn everything I could about what led to success on Amazon, including how the A9 algorithm works, what tools we could leverage through Amazon Vendor Central, and what other manufacturers were doing that worked well. After a couple weeks of research and conversation, I developed a list of best practices that would help demonstrate to the business what good looked like.
The more difficult part was figuring out how to execute on these lessons with the people and systems that were in place. It was immediately obvious that the backlog of product content that needed to be updated was enormous and somehow had to be prioritized. I worked with our Product and Sales experts to put together a ranked list of product categories that factored in a mix of dollar sales, product complexity, and competition. We first focused on those products that would benefit the most from increased attention, while setting into motion a years-long project to overhaul our back catalog of product descriptions, photos, videos, documentation and more.
From there, we also had to make sure we had an efficient, sustainable process to create the necessary content on a consistent basis for new products moving forward. That required reevaluating various milestones in our product development process and identifying new steps in the workflow that would allow us to create the necessary content without slowing down the product pipeline. I took a lead role in a three-day working session to rewrite process mapping and develop a to-do list for future improvements so we could set up products with fully optimized content at launch.
Lastly, the bulk of that data that would need to be uploaded to Amazon came from our product information management system (PIM), which had its own set of rules and limitations, much of which was customized to accommodate the needs of our other major retailers as well as industry standards. As much as possible, we had to make sure that whatever edits or additions we made to product descriptions, photos, attributes, and other data wouldn’t disrupt serving other customers. We accomplished this by carefully analyzing the system limitations and industry standards, and implementing new best practices that would improve our content for all our partners and customers.
The Results
With these first steps and new processes identified, we went from not supporting Amazon content at all to having best-in-class content across six of our highest-growth categories - encompassing thousands of products like air suspension components and window regulators - in only three months. This initial launch saw immediate returns in the form of increased sales, higher search rankings and increased product page views (“glance views” in Amazon terminology).
Over time, these new standards and processes played a very important role in making Amazon the company’s fastest growing customer by far. When I started in 2018, we were doing $20 million in business at Amazon; when I left six years later, it had grown to $128 million, making it our fifth largest customer.
The effects were felt far beyond Amazon as well. The content strategy I developed led to improvements in quality and consistency that benefited all of our customers, earning multiple awards for best catalog content from the leading automotive aftermarket trade group, the Auto Care Association.
To see some of this work in action, below are just a few of the different products my team optimized through this strategy, where you can see the diverse mix of rich content we applied to win in the marketplace. You can also visit Amazon.com/Dorman to see the brand store we built with even more product highlights.