The project started in late 2019, says Arto Ant-Wuorinen, Plastex’s Marketing Director. “We were in the exploration phase with Amazon when we chose Germany as the marketplace to start with. A lot has happened, and a lot has been learned. That’s what this is all about – learning, in addition to trading.” -Ant-Wuorinen states.
What were the most difficult decisions to start selling on Amazon?
– In the beginning, everything was new and learning something new is a big thing at the organization level. We wondered whether the products are in the right packages and whether there will be extra costs related to packaging and freight. Keeping costs at the right level was really important to us.
What skills does Amazon Marketplace Management require?
– In the beginning, Retime opened an account for us and made product listings. We just had to fill in the Excels files, which were quite similar to our domestic customers’ Excel files. From the customer’s perspective – we didn’t have to do much, because Retime took care of things for us.
To Retime, it was important to understand your business when we started cooperation with you. How important is it to Plastex that the Amazon Agency you work with is interested in your company?
– It was really important that both have similar goals and values! I wouldn’t think we could work with Retime if we didn’t get along well with each other and share similar values. It is nice to hear at the beginning of the meeting that there are memories of our products and it makes cooperation feel great.
Sales on the Amazon.de marketplace have outperformed expectations. Do you intend to open other marketplaces in the near future?
– The current goal is to open three or four new marketplaces in Europe next year.
On Amazon, your products are clearly liked, and you constantly receive more positive reviews. How important is it to you and your product sales?
– We do not want to sell the cheapest, we want to sell the best! We are constantly developing our products to make them as good and functional as possible for our customers. That is vital for us to make quality products for our customers!
Without marketing, sales would actually be much lower. It is absolutely essential in this distribution channel!
What kind of misfortunes have you had? When we last discussed, there were challenges with logistics, how did it go?
– In the beginning, we sent water containers to Amazon with taps in a small bag and in the Amazon warehouse those small bags had been thrown in the trash, so customers got water containers without taps! It was a small disaster. Then we sent the taps to the customers from Finland. In addition, our transport company has not been able to take the products to Amazon’s warehouse due to Covid19, but they have gone to their terminal and later delivered from there to the right place. This, of course, will incur additional costs for us, but we negotiated on them with the freight company.
As is well known, advertising plays an important role in Amazon. How much sales come through advertising and how organically?
– Without marketing, sales would actually be much lower. It is absolutely essential in this distribution channel!
Advertising also includes a possibility for Amazon Enhanced Brand Content (EBC) that helps buyers make decisions. How important to you is that you have additional information about your product on your product page? Not everyone uses this opportunity.
– Yes, you have to be able to tell about your product in 5 bullet points and our advantage is that we have enough brand content and images of our products, because the shopper can’t twiddle and experience the product in the same way online. Images and texts need to do that sales job.
Plastex is a Finnish family company founded in 1936 that manufactures and markets consumer goods and technical products in Lohja. Plastex aims to be the leading manufacturer of circular economy products in Scandinavia. The goal is that 40% of the products are made from circular economy material (ECO products) and bio-based material (BIO products) by 2023.