Expanding to the U.S.: Strategies for Success on Amazon and Competing at Scale

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to another one of our Toucan Talks webinars that we're really excited to host for you today. We've just kicked it off and I can see a few people are still joining here, so we'll give everyone a minute or so to get connected and then we'll start today's session, which we're really looking forward to.

Have you been to the pile of that? Oh, good Curtis, thank you. It's still early for me, so it's a little dark, but happy to be here talking about the US. Nice.

I guess we can get started now. So if anyone doesn't know, I'm Curtis Ritchie, Marketing Manager here at Toucan, and we're really excited that you've all joined us today and we're really looking forward to running the session for you. If you want to learn how your brand can expand to the US and compete at scale, then you're in the right place. We have Paula here today, who's Toucan's North and South America Client Director and an expert when it comes to launching and helping brands grow globally, especially in the US. The session today will run for around 40 to 55 minutes and we will have a live Q&A at the end. In terms of questions, please feel free to submit them by typing into the Q&A section at any point during the webinar. I will collect all of these while Paula is presenting and we will then answer as many as we can at the end. So I will hand over to Paula now to take you through today's session.

Thanks, Curtis. Thanks everyone for joining today. So as Curtis mentioned, there's going to be a Q&A at the end, but what I'm going to take you through today is why and when to expand to the USA, a couple of common challenges that we've seen previous clients have when thinking about expanding, account management essentials, and building high performing advertising campaigns.

So first up, why would you expand to the US? The clear cut version is the US is 2.2 times bigger than all other Amazon marketplaces combined. So what that translates to is about 200 million unique visitors a month. That's huge potential you could tap into. It's highly consumer driven and it offers access to millions of ready to buy customers. This is true across the board, but the US predominantly has a much higher consumer focus versus, let's say, UK, Italy, Spain and so on. In the US particularly, there is a significantly higher AOV per order, so that means that consumers are willing to spend more for products. Mind you, this can be combined with, for example, virtual bundles, which is an offer that is available for vendor central, but seller central in the US only. So that is really, really great to help up your AOV. This is also a really great way to springboard into other retail or wholesale channels. So if you're thinking about expanding to the US and this is the first touch point that you have in the US, Amazon is a really great way to start expanding your business throughout the US, both online and offline.

Now that you have a why, when would you expand? There's a couple of bits that I would recommend thinking about prior to actually expanding. So you want to be thinking about your operational capacity. Because Amazon US is much bigger, you will have increased volume, so that means that you need to be very well aware of how you're going to manage your inventory. That would include thinking about whether you're shipping directly to a fulfilment centre or using a 3PL. In our experience, we highly recommend using a 3PL because 3PLs usually have a great grasp of tariffs and the documentation that you might need for importing goods, and they can store your inventory and then ship when ready. That way you can also reduce your storage cost in the fulfilment centre. So that is something that I would suggest looking into prior to actually expanding.

In terms of regulations, US regulations are slightly different, so just make sure that you have the right documentation for your category. In terms of media and marketing, Amazon of course has PPC, you also have promotions and listing optimisation. For PPC, particularly cost per clicks are higher in the US just because the competition is a lot more aggressive and you have categories that are more saturated. So I definitely would recommend looking into your marketing budgets to make sure that you have the capacity to remain visible and push visibility in the first months of launching.

And finally, you have strategic timing opportunities. So when is the right time in terms of time of year to launch? Our suggestion would be to do it around Q2 and Q3, so you're prepping your momentum for Q4, when really you see a massive boost in sales just because it's the gifting period, people are more likely to convert, to shop and to spend more during that time. So we're actually at about the right time to start looking into expanding if you're interested. Now it's the right time to organise and get started.

So let's look at the common challenges that clients usually have or brands have when they're looking to expand. So competition and market saturation, yes, we discussed Amazon US is massive. That does mean that it is highly saturated with both domestic and international sellers. You also have legacy brands that are very prominent in the US. That doesn't mean that you can't stay competitive, it just means you have to think about this and have the right strategy to tackle those competitors in the US.

Then you have price wars. Across the board in all Amazon marketplaces, you want to have the lowest price due to the buy box, but in the US particularly it needs to be revised more granularly because there will be third party sellers or counterfeit products that arise. It's more common in the US than in other marketplaces, so that's definitely something that you need to look at, doing a P&L and a price analysis prior to actually setting your price points.

And finally, brand differentiation. So if you have a smaller brand that's looking to launch and you're competing against legacy brands, it's really important to look at how you're going to stand out. That could include your brand story, your brand voice, and making sure that your content is retail ready. It's highly important in the US to be retail ready.

Then we have customer expectations. Customer expectations in the US are a little bit more intense, I would say, compared to other marketplaces. So just make sure that you are FBA, or if you have products that, for example, are easily damaged or a hazard, or something that might have issues with FBA, make sure that you can fulfil Prime. So just do merchant fulfilled Prime, but you need to make sure that is highly important. If you are that brand, make sure that you have a 3PL that can fulfil that prior to signing any contract.

Language and communication, make sure everything is localised. So if you're expanding from the UK to the US, make sure your spelling is US spelling, and of course language translations would be applicable if you're expanding from a different marketplace.

In terms of product reviews, of course reviews and ratings are really important, particularly in the US the average review count is much higher than other marketplaces, so I would suggest aiming for reviews around 1000. That is definitely something that needs to be strategised to make sure that you get continuous reviews on a monthly basis.

In terms of account listing and management, there's a lot of areas that need to be managed, especially during launch, because there's a lot going on. Your strategy needs to be quite agile to make sure that you are not wasting spend, because cost per clicks are much higher. You can support your strategy and your ranking with SEO as well. And of course, there's a lot of account suspensions if your documents aren't in check, so definitely, as I said before, just before you launch, you need to make sure that all your documentation is up to date and correct.

Great, so I'm going to take you through account management, the essentials. I'm going to show you an example of how we structured our strategy for one of our clients that recently launched in the US. They just launched in January in the chewing and bubble gum category. So how would we go about this? Really what we're looking at here is the chewing and bubble gum category. We're seeing that in 2024 the category value for this category was $185.7 million and it's growing 23% year on year. If we're comparing this to the UK, which our client was expanding from, this is 20 times larger than the UK market. So there's massive opportunity. However, of course it's extremely saturated and there's legacy brands, for example Trident, Orbit and so on, brands that you see on your right hand side. But what we saw with our client is that they had particular USPs that made them stand out in the natural chewing gum category.

So what we did here is extracted the one to one competitors, just to make sure that we're competing against the right brands rather than the category as a whole, because if we were to look at it as a category as a whole there would be a lot of wasted spend that we wouldn't be able to convert. For example, Trident had CPCs that were about $10. That is not profitable initially. So just making sure that you're ticking the boxes in terms of understanding who your main competitors are, in the table here you'll see their market share and our main competitors with their revenue ranks, just to see who we were going to tackle first.

Then we move on to look at how the category looks in terms of best sellers. These two products are the number one bestseller on your left hand side, the number two bestseller on your right hand side. We went through these products just to see how optimised our main competitors are. We're seeing here the price points, and we've reviewed price points across the category just to get an idea of whether our pricing strategy would be above market price or at a competitive market price. We also had a look at content review and retail readiness, that includes titles, bullets, descriptions, listing imagery, video, A+ and brand story. I will say, however, in the US, across all categories, brands are using the full scope of the product detail page. This includes brand stories, this includes A+, this includes premium A+ as well. It's very, very well optimised, so definitely invest in your content, make sure that you're standing out and differentiating your brand from your competitors.

Then we had a look at our search terms, just to have an idea of which keyword phrases would help us convert and make us more visible in the organic space. So we see here our category trends and when they peak, just to make sure that we're up-weighting our budgets whenever we see those peaks and fluctuations through the year.

In terms of results, our category results for this particular client, we actually achieved a 0.50% 3P market share. That translates into surpassing 2025 year to date market share versus one of our main competitors, and it actually became the seventh highest revenue driver compared to our direct competitors, which is a really massive win because it is an extremely saturated space. In terms of how we're ranking on organic keywords, we ranked number one for our main USP, number 3 for our secondary product USP, and number 4 for our third product USP. So this is really great because it means that we have had a really powerful SEO strategy, supported by our advertising strategy, that has helped us boost our listings higher up the search page.

So this is how we would go about looking into the category, making sure that you're competing against the right products, looking at price points, looking at content, and looking at the area of opportunity within that category. And then once you have that, you're looking at building effective advertising campaigns.

So how would we go about building this? We would identify where your competitors are placed on the organic side, so we'll pull information on how they're ranking organically and also through search. This is what we're looking at in terms of the type of keywords that we would use. We wouldn't use the full scope of keywords, but this is just indicative of how one would start looking for keywords that might be applicable to your products.

Once we built our strategy, there's a couple of areas that we focused on. Firstly, we focused on increasing product visibility and brand awareness. Our main goal here was to grow awareness within a new marketplace. Our objective here was to increase product visibility through upper funnel advertising campaigns. The way that we approached this was through testing generic and category campaigns to find the right audience, because this brand's USPs were quite niche, so making sure that we were reaching the right people was highly important. And finally, we launched across category and generic in all ad types, just to make sure that we're visible in all areas of the shopping journey.

Our results here, we reached 3,000,000 impressions in the first four months. We grew our revenue in the awareness stage by 70% every single month. And in terms of total sales, we surpassed the client's total revenue month in the UK by 41%. This is a big win, and this is a big area of opportunity for brands, because for this client, their peak revenue month, and they've been active on Amazon UK for a couple of years now, their highest revenue month was surpassed by 41% in the US in the first initial months, which is crazy. It's insane.

Our second area that we looked at was to win market share and category growth. There's two main areas that you want to focus on here. So yes, of course you want to steal market share, but you also want to grow market share, because you're a new brand and you want to make sure that you are not only stealing but growing the category. So the main goal here was to capture consumers in the consideration stage to help them make a purchase decision. Our objective here was to steal market share from competitors when we're looking at, for example, ASIN targeting within our campaigns. So that was our approach. We took our main competitors that were one to one, we looked at how relevant they are and how likely our shoppers are to convert to our products instead of the competitor product, by conducting a competitor analysis, and this is how we find our one to one competitors. We use ASIN targeting competitor campaigns to make sure that we are directly targeting those in their PDPs. Our main KPIs that we're looking at here for these types of campaigns are revenue and conversion rates.

In terms of the results, our revenue continues to grow month on month, accounting for 36% of ad sales. So we're looking only at these types of campaigns that are competitor targeting. Competitor ASIN targeting accounts for 36% of our ad sales, which is a really great way to leverage your profitability from the start, because these types of campaigns are more likely to convert. There's a higher purchase intent because someone is already in market for a product like yours, and so this is a really good way to have a foundation that you can rely on in terms of your returns, so you can reinvest and grow in the upper funnel as well. In terms of our conversion rate, we saw that it improved by 90% to 11.6%. As a new brand, a conversion rate of 11.6% is really healthy. Initially, of course, we didn't have that strong a conversion rate because we were brand new in the first month, but then as we scaled we definitely started to refine who our audience is, so we can increase that conversion rate.

And finally, we wanted to make sure that we capture lost conversions. So our main goal here was to increase brand loyalty through branded keywords and remarketing campaigns. Our objective here was to increase new to brand sales through views remarketing and branded keywords. Our approach here was launching views remarketing campaigns to target shoppers who clicked on the product, however did not convert. This could be either a look back window, this one particularly was 60 days, but you have the option to do 30, 60 or 90 days depending on the type of product that you have. There's different look back windows that may be more applicable to your products. And then we also have views, view similar products remarketing campaigns, so these are people who have seen not just your product but similar products to yours in the last, let's say, 60 days.

A result here, new to brand percentage significantly increased to 25% in April due to more granular optimisation through refined bidding and targeting rules. The refined bidding and targeting is highly important for these types of campaigns because it allows you to streamline your investment. So when we have brands that are new to the US marketplace, perhaps you don't have the ability to invest really large budgets from the get go. Having refined bidding and targeting rules in your campaigns is going to be a game changer, because it really does help you conserve your budget and helps you find the right spaces where you're more likely to convert. As we grew more relevant in the competitor branded space, we did see that view similar product remarketing campaigns drove 30% of new to brand revenue. So views remarketing, as we move through the year, becomes more efficient because there is more data. This is something you should launch at the beginning expecting that you might not have the best results in the first or second month of launching, but as you move forward through the year that is going to be pivotal in your strategy, because you do have more data that you can use to be able to remarket or retarget your products.

Perfect. I sped through that, but that leaves us a little bit more time for any questions that you might have.

Thanks so much for sharing there, Paula. That was super insightful on what brands should consider if they're thinking about expanding to the US, and how new brands can really grow a lot within the first year, looking at some of those results there. So we can move into the Q&A session now.

We've had a few questions come in here, so one to get us started. Someone has asked, you had mentioned earlier about a preference for sending products into a 3PL rather than FBA, would you be able to say why you believe a 3PL would be a better option? FBA seems to be a well oiled machine that's been leading this charge for over 15 years.

Yeah, definitely. I have worked with both, people sending directly to FBA from external, as in outside the US, but just to clarify what I mean using a 3PL is, for example, you export into the US, your 3PL receives it, it stores your inventory, and then you create shipping plans to be sent to FBA. What I mean by that is just so the 3PL is not fulfilling directly to the customer, just to clear that up. But I definitely recommend using a 3PL, especially depending on your type of product. So right now, if you're looking to expand, it's a little bit tricky in terms of logistics because of raising tariffs. It's an ongoing situation, one day there's higher tariffs, one day there isn't, depending on where your products are manufactured. However, 3PLs are very well versed in any import legislation, and we have had experiences with a couple of products that needed external investigation, or they're stuck in customs. This is really where your 3PL comes into play. It also is really great if you're thinking of expanding into the US not solely for Amazon, and a 3PL would be the way to go because a 3PL will be able to fulfil to any retailers that are not Amazon.

Hopefully we've cleared that question up for you there. Another question we have, Paula, is what content would be the most important, do you think, in the US market?

Well, that's a tricky one, because all content is extremely important, especially in your product detail page. So the way that I would tackle this is stage one would be your product listing images. So making sure that you have a full set of listing imagery with clear USPs, making sure that you're looking at what competitors are lacking so you can stand out, and making sure that you have a video in your listing image set as well. Then I would move on to further below the fold, which would be your A+ content and your brand story. Please make sure that you're working towards having brand stories and premium A+, but initially I would say A+ first, then brand stories, then premium A+.

I would also say that really important content to work on is your advertising content. So this would include, for example, your custom creatives that you would use in your advertising campaigns. You have multiple options, so for example for sponsored display ads, these types of images, depending on where they land, change in dimension, so making sure that you're optimising for an image that can be cropped and still drive a powerful message. Sponsored brand video, highly important, especially at the beginning, because this is really where you're going to drive your engagement and new to brand sales as well. So advertising, please don't forget about it, advertising content is very important, along with your product detail page.

Yeah, that's great, Paula. It's really important to look at it as a whole. A few more questions we have here. How would a brand go about finding if their products would be in demand in the US?

Yeah, definitely. So if you're interested in expanding to the US, feel free to send me an e-mail here, my e-mail is on the slide. So how you would go about it, well first, you already have data in other marketplaces, I'm assuming, so that data is actually quite powerful, because what you're seeing there is how people are shopping and reacting to your products right now. So you're looking, let's say, at your top 5 to 10 products that you're looking to expand. So how do you go about translating that into the US? Well, we can actually support you in doing a category analysis to see how you would rank against your competition, whether it is a marketplace or a category space that would be valuable to your business. That definitely requires a bit more of a deep dive, but definitely happy to support if you shoot me an e-mail.

Very nice. Another question we have here would be, why would a brand focus on growth without sacrificing profit?

Yeah, so that's a really tricky question because it's always an ongoing conversation, and usually there are people that stand on let's grow in terms of velocity and volume first, and then you have the other person who's more wary about the velocity of growth because you want to stay profitable. So again, we're looking at different types of metrics when we're talking about profitability. My main suggestion would be to make sure that you're always tracking your P&L on a monthly basis to look at your overall profitability. There are ways you can increase your price points without risking not being price competitive. As an example of that, in the US particularly, is virtual bundles. You can also find different advertising strategies to help your higher ASP products. And really, the way that we would look at how to choose which products to invest in is pretty much on a profitability matrix, just to make sure that your Tier 1 ASINs are the ones that are being invested in. So definitely tracking your profits on a monthly basis is really important, because that will also inform how you're investing on a monthly basis. So yeah, it's a holistic approach to profitability and volume growth, but it's not as straightforward as one might think. It needs to be dissected depending on your company's or your brand's goals.

Thanks for that, Paula. We can move on to one last final question. How would brands go about tackling budgeting with the higher CPCs that you would see in the US market?

Yeah, so that's a really great question, because CPCs are a real struggle in the US, they're much higher, especially in the generic and category space. However, there are different ways that you could do this. I did touch on this in the presentation, that you can refine your targeting within a campaign. So for example, if you have a category campaign, you can further refine it to make sure that you're targeting only your main competitors. So for example, in the example that I shared, I don't really want to be targeting Trident, it's not exactly my one to one competitor, so I can definitely refine that targeting to make sure that I get lower CPCs. Another example of this would be, for example, your sponsored brand video, and sponsored brand video has an average of 38% lower CPCs versus your regular branded keywords. This is also because it has really high conversion rates and engagement metrics. So definitely just balancing out where you're managing your spend, AKA where you're seeing lower CPCs.

That's great, Paula, thank you. I guess we will finish up there folks for today. We're finishing up a bit early, but I want to say thank you all for coming today to our Toucan Talks webinar. If you would still like to get in touch with us, if you would like any more information regarding expansion to the US, if you have any more questions for Paula, please get in touch with her via e-mail, it's on the screen now, you can see Paula at toucanecommerce.com. We hope you really learned something today, and we hope we're able to see you at another Toucan Talks event, whether that's online or in person, in the future. So thanks and have a great rest of your day and a great rest of your week everyone. Thanks for coming.

Just a final one, Alec, I see that you have your hand raised, please feel free to send me a message with your question and I can answer that. Perfect. Thanks everyone for joining. Nice. Thanks everyone.