Amazon Australia is not a smaller copy of Amazon US. The catalogue is thinner, many categories are still under-served, review counts are lower across the board, and the logistics are Australian: long distances, FBA capacity that fills up before Christmas, and a customer who is more likely than an American one to check the brand’s own site before buying. Those differences are an advantage for a brand that works with them, and a slow leak for one that copies a US playbook. Here is the order we run, and why the order matters more than any single tactic.
Foundation: account health and Brand Registry
Nothing else is worth doing on an account with policy warnings, unresolved suppressed listings or no Brand Registry. Registry unlocks A+ content, Sponsored Brands, the Brand Store and the tools that stop other sellers riding your listing. We get the foundation clean first, and we treat account health as a weekly check for the life of the engagement, because a suspended account has a growth rate of zero.
Listings that do the selling
Title, bullets, back-end search terms, images and A+ content, written for how Australians actually search and shop. That means Australian spelling and units, the use cases that matter here, and images that answer the question before the shopper scrolls. A listing is a salesperson that works while you sleep; most of the ones we inherit are reading from a US brochure.
Reviews, the way Amazon allows
Australian listings are review-poor, which means a modest, genuine review count moves rank further here than it would in the US. We use the tools Amazon provides: the Vine program for new products, the Request a Review button on every eligible order, and insert cards that comply with policy. We never buy, incentivise or manufacture reviews. It is against Amazon’s terms, it gets accounts suspended, and it is not the kind of business we run.
PPC: structure first, then bids
We start with automatic campaigns to harvest what customers actually type, then move winners into exact and phrase campaigns with proper negatives, so you stop paying for searches that were never going to convert. Sponsored Products carry the load early; Sponsored Brands and the Brand Store come once the listings and reviews can convert the extra attention. We report two numbers side by side: ACoS, which is what the ad spend costs against the sales it drives, and TACoS, which is ad spend against your total Amazon sales. The gap between them is the organic rank the advertising has bought you. When TACoS falls while sales rise, the flywheel is working.
Inventory is a ranking factor
A stock-out on Amazon does not just cost the sales you missed. It resets the ranking momentum you paid to build. We forecast against your sales velocity and Amazon’s FBA restock limits, plan around the Q4 capacity crunch, and decide with you which SKUs justify FBA and which are better fulfilled from your own warehouse. Inventory planning is not glamorous, and it is where most Australian Amazon accounts quietly lose their year.
Amazon and your own store, one ledger
The brands that win run Amazon and Shopify as one business. Amazon catches the shopper who was never going to visit your site; your store owns the email list, the repeat rate and the margin. We report blended numbers, so you know what a new customer costs across both, and we never let the marketplace cannibalise the channel you actually own.
The honest limits
Some products should not be on Amazon: low price points that fees eat alive, heavy or bulky goods where FBA costs erase the margin, categories where a dominant brand owns every search. We will tell you that in the audit, with the numbers, rather than take a retainer to prove it slowly.
Australian-owned, Australian-run. Sellevate is headquartered in Geelong, Victoria and owned by the people who do the work. Several of the agencies ranking for this search are UK or US companies with an Australian landing page. Ask any agency where the decisions get made, and in which time zone.
What this costs
A flat monthly fee scoped to your revenue band (see our programs) and stated plainly on the audit call. Not a percentage of your Amazon sales, which is the model most marketplace agencies use and the reason their incentives drift toward revenue at any margin. Everything in your build plan is live within 90 days or you stop paying us until it is.
