Is AMZ Tracker Still a Leader in Amazon Software?

Back in 2015 and 2016, AMZ Tracker was a game changing suite of software in many ways. It was the trailblazer in the Amazon software market and the first to introduce many features that are now commonplace with other tools, that greatly helped Amazon sellers become successful.

The product was a bit difficult to use but their Amazon “Review Club”, a marketplace that allowed sellers to offer discounts to Amazon shoppers directly in exchange for a review, was by far the best way to launch a new Amazon product and get reviews. It had hundreds of thousands of shoppers from all over the world that would buy products at a discount and leave quality reviews every time.

Frankly, back then using AMZ Tracker was a requirement in order to launch a successful Amazon product.

However, things changed in 2016 when Amazon introduced strict new rules about incentivised reviews. The “Review Club” was no longer within Amazon’s Terms of Service and so, almost overnight, AMZ tracker was no longer essential and was now just difficult to use.

Other companies such as “I Love to Review” completely disappeared overnight because as much as buyers might love to review, they were no longer allowed to by Amazon in exchange for discounted products.

AMZ Tracker, however, is of course still around and they always did have features beyond their Review Club. So how did they adjust to the change? Is it still an essential tool for Amazon sellers today? And how does it compare to competing services?

All these questions will be answered in this deep-dive overview on the current state of AMZ Tracker.

Let’s get to it:

AMZ Tracker Review

We’ll be taking a closer look at the specific features of the tool as well as the usability, pricing, customer support and overall user experience that you can expect.

Features

AMZ Tracker has 11 main features targeted at existing Amazon sellers that already have a product.

Jungle scout, of which we’ve covered in-depth, originally targeted Amazon sellers that were new to Amazon and looking to find a product to sell. Jungle Scout’s original features were product research and discovery features.

AMZ Tracker, on the other hand, targets existing Amazon sellers with features to help them improve their sales. There are no features to help you find a product in AMZ Tracker. It is designed for existing Amazon sellers.

We’ll cover the features below and their usefulness:

Product Promotion 

The first option you’ll see listed in the menu of the tool is “promote on vipon.com”. This is the product promotion section that allows you to offer discounts for your Amazon product on their deals website vipon.com, the successor to the previously mentioned “Review Club”.

This service is similar to the Jump Send marketplace run by Jungle Scout that we’ve reviewed extensively here, where you can set up discount codes in your Amazon account and then distribute them to an audience of Amazon shoppers to help boost your sales. There’s just no direct incentive or obligation for users to leave a review.

This feature is very useful, however, Vipon is really terrible to use. It has actually become worse over time to the point that in 2018, you now need to manually contact customer service to run a product promotion almost every time.

The product promotion section should pull the data from your Amazon listing automatically, however, it doesn’t work correctly. This section never populates the correct fields to run a promotion.

If you try to adjust one of the fields such as the original price, it will pop up a warning stating that the price can’t be changed manually and the promotion will be paused until customer service reviews the request.

You then need to chat with customer service to get them to adjust the prices. This happens almost every time you run a promotion.

While a product promotion feature was the flagship feature of AMZ tracker when it was created, it has become a horrible feature to use now.

That said, despite how bad it is to use, is it effective at increasing Amazon sales?

For the European marketplaces such as Germany, it is still effective at increasing sales. However, for the U.S.A and U.K marketplaces it doesn’t work as well as Jump Send.

There are a lot of “shoppers” in the marketplaces, however, they generally don’t follow through with purchases. There are less requirements required of a shopper to set up an account with Vipon compared to Jump Send, which seems to result in shoppers with multiple accounts or fake robot accounts.

In 2015 if you sent out 10 vouchers with AMZ tracker, you could expect almost all of those shoppers to purchase the item and leave a review. In 2018, that is no longer the case. If you send out 10 vouchers, you would be lucky to get a few purchases.

That’s not such an issue if the other shoppers don’t use the vouchers and they expire, however, this results in sending out a significant number of vouchers to boost sales. AMZ Tracker limits voucher sends in its pricing plans which means you need to pay for the more expensive plans in order to get that boost and traction you need.

If you are a German or European seller, then AMZ Tracker’s product promotion marketplace can be effective at boosting your sales. However, if you are selling in the U.K and U.S.A markets then there are other options available such as Jump Send that may offer a better return on investment.

Rank Tracking

AMZ Tracker was the first software in the Amazon seller space that allowed you to track your Best Seller Ranking along with your rankings on Amazon for various keywords.

When you launch a product on Amazon, keyword research is important. You want to ensure there is sufficient searches for your keywords and low competition that allows you to rank on the first page and get sales.

As you run promotions, run Amazon ads, change your listing description or other strategies, these will all impact your sales. Changes to your sales will then have a direct impact on your rankings for keywords customers are searching for.

AMZ Tracker allows you to track changes to BSR, along with keywords you are targeting for your product.

An example BSR chart from AMZ Tracker is below:

An example showing keyword ranking and change in rankings is below:

This feature works great and when AMZ Tracker launched it was another feature that made the tool essential.

Being able to track how your product ranking changes after you make changes to your product or try different strategies is invaluable to an Amazon seller.

Unfortunately, this feature hasn’t changed in years on AMZ Tracker and it’s no longer unique to this tool. There are now lots of other Amazon software solutions that offer keyword rank tracking with a better user interface and charts, such as Sellics.

Email Reports 

The email reports feature allows you to receive a daily or weekly email update of product rankings for selected keywords.

When you set up keyword ranking in AMZ Tracker or any tool, it can be annoying to log in every day and go through all the products to see the rankings, but with email reports, you can select the products and keywords you want to show on the report and those rankings will be emailed directly to your inbox.

There is also a CSV file included in the email that allows you to import the data into a spreadsheet or other software.

The email reports are incredibly annoying to set up if you have a lot of products and keywords in your account but once they’re set up it is useful to get these into your email inbox each day or week.

Competitor Sales Tracking

The competitor sales tracking feature provides a very accurate estimate of daily and monthly sales figures for any given product.

It works by checking the inventory levels for a product each day and from that, determining the number sold and the remaining inventory for that product.

This feature is definitely useful for getting an idea of how many units a competitor is actually selling instead of relying on broad estimates, however, this feature now appears outdated in AMZ Tracker and is not as effective as the sales tracking in other software such as Jungle Scout.

When you add a product in AMZ tracker, it starts from no sales tracking so you have to wait several days before you start to get sales data. After you have tracked it for a month, you will get a chart that shows the inventory and sales for each day as shown below:

It will also provide an average of those sales as shown below:

You can then break the sales down into variations, to know what variations of the product are the most popular:

This information and data is incredibly valuable when trying to get an idea of what products to sell on Amazon and how many daily sales you need to rank above that product. This helps determine how much inventory you need to order yourself and how many units to give away at a discount to maintain sales and rankings, if necessary.

This feature is useful but is no longer unique to AMZ Tracker and the Jungle Scout sales tracking is much more impressive and user friendly. Jungle Scout stores data about tracked products, so if another user is also tracking that product, you will get instant sales data for the last 30 and 60 days – no need to wait. The data in Jungle Scout also has better looking charts with BSR and daily price shown as well.

So while this feature is useful in AMZ Tracker, Jungle Scout offers a much better version.

Find New Keywords

When a customer types in a keyword search in Amazon, the search bar will automatically complete their words as they type. These keyword suggestions are based on the most common phrases that customers search for.

The “Find New Keywords” tool in AMZ Tracker provides you a list of the words and phrases from this auto-suggestion list on Amazon.

For example, when you type in “Yoga mat”, it provides a list of the below results that have been taken directly from Amazon.

This feature is very useful for finding long tail keywords to target. It also allows you to add these keywords to products you are tracking, which makes it easy to add new keywords to track.

However, this feature doesn’t show search volume, so there’s no way to determine how popular or profitable these keywords might be.

Deepwords (Keyword Tool)

Deepwords is another keyword suggestion tool that basically works the same as the above tool, except it provides estimated search volume and the related category.

The front page of the search results that load every time you click on the Deepwords tab appears to have pulled all its words from Google and not Amazon. The most commonly searched for websites and words on Google appear such as airlines, television channels and websites of an, umm… adult variety.

This tool is more useful at getting an idea of how popular a keyword or search term is in general, however, it’s hard to determine how accurate it is.

No tool will have search volume from Amazon, so these estimates are probably based on Google search volume. The keywords shown on the first page when Deepwords loads indicate this. Also, when comparing Deepwords to other Amazon search volume estimator tools, there are significant differences between the search volume for similar words and the most popular words listed.

I’d be more inclined to trust other Amazon search volume tools over Deepwords search volume, as they focus specifically on search volume and have been around for many years.

Deepwords also only seems to provide numbers for the Amazon U.S.A market, with all other markets showing very few or no results.

Deepwords is useful for getting an idea of popularity of search terms across the internet, however, I wouldn’t rely on these numbers as accurate Amazon search figures.

Overall, it’s a useful tool for a rough idea of popularity for a search term in the U.S.A market which the other AMZ Tracker keyword tool doesn’t provide.

Negative Review Alerts

This is another useful feature. Maintaining a 4 star or above rating on Amazon is important in order to maintain a successful product.

This feature will alert you anytime you receive a rating that is less than 5 stars. This allows you to respond to the review quickly and if you can determine who the buyer is that left the review, you can contact them to resolve any issues with the product or order.

Being able to quickly respond to negative reviews can help improve your star rating and disgruntled customers may even remove their negative review if they receive a positive resolution to their issue.

Reviewer Hunter

This feature is still in beta so at the time of writing this review, couldn’t be tested fully. But the idea is that it searches through your Amazon order history to find email addresses from customers.

It requires you connect your Amazon account to AMZ Tracker so they can view your order history and detect email addresses.

It’s not clear exactly how this feature works, however if it does work, it could help you build a mailing list or better communicate with customers that have purchased your product.

Listing Hijack Alerts

This is also a new feature and an accurate review can’t be written yet as there were no listings hijacked while testing this feature.

A hijacked Amazon listing is when another seller takes over the Buy Box and starts selling on your product listing. They may have either bought your product at a discount and are attempting to resell your product, they may be selling fake versions of your product on your listing, or you may simply be selling a product with multiple legitimate sellers on the listing and you lost the Buy Box.

When you lose the Buy Box, you will lose sales as customers clicking the “Add to Cart” button on the listing will automatically add the products from whichever seller has control of it.

The product listing page is for all sellers on that product listing, so if another seller hijacks your listing and sends their products to customers, those customers might leave negative reviews on your product listing.

The quicker you can respond to a hijacked listing and get back the Buy Box, the less sales you will lose.

While no listings being tracked were hijacked during testing, if this feature works correctly it is useful for Amazon sellers.

Optimize Your Listings

This feature is called “Optimize Your Listings”, however, it can also be used to check competitor’s for flaws in their listings.

When you enter a product into the tool, you can check targeted keywords and see if the listing is optimized for those keywords.

It checks whether the keyword is in the title, description and bullet points, and also provides an evaluation on a range of other criteria that contributes to a successful product listing. The criteria and an example of results for a product are below.

This is a useful feature but there are other software and websites online that do the same thing, with some of them being free. Overall, it’s a useful tool, but I wouldn’t consider it an essential tool or unique to AMZ tracker anymore.

Super URLs

This was a really awesome, pioneering feature of AMZ Tracker back in the day.

To understand how it works, you first need to understand that when a customer types a keyword into Amazon and searches for it, Amazon includes that keyword along with other data in the website address (URL) of the website browser.

When a customer purchases an item on Amazon, the algorithm will connect the search term to the item purchased and increase the product ranking for that specific keyword.

AMZ Tracker Super URLs allow you to manipulate this part of Amazon’s algorithm by making it appear as though the customer searched for a keyword before purchasing your item.

If you have a yoga mat on Amazon that is currently ranking on the 50^th page of results, you will not get any sales from someone typing in “yoga mat”.

However, you can create a “Super URL” with the search term “yoga mat” incorporated into it, and then send direct traffic to this URL

If a visitor makes a purchase after clicking through this Super URL, it will appear to Amazon’s algorithm as though the customer that purchased your product went through all the results on Amazon and decided that your yoga mat on the 50^th page was the most relevant to them for that search result.

Amazon’s algorithm will then think that that your product should be ranked higher as customers searching for “yoga mat” are looking for products just like yours.

This feature worked tremendously when AMZ Tracker first launched, however, Amazon has one of the most advanced shopping algorithms in the world and, much like they reduced review manipulation, they have seemingly reduced the effectiveness of Super URLs too.

Even if they do still work, Super URLs are considered dangerous to use these days simply because they are against Amazon’s rules. There is no direct mention of Super URLs in their Prohibited Activities Terms of Service but they would simply fall under “Any attempt to manipulate the Search and Browse experience is prohibited”.

We’ll just say to use this Super URL feature at your own risk.

The AMZ Tracker Chrome Extension

The service also provides a standalone Chrome Extension for market research called Unicorn Smasher, which is free to use. We’ve talked about that separately and shown how it to compares to Jungle Scout’s paid alternatives in this post.

Now, let’s discuss AMZ Tracker beyond it’s features.

Customer Service

Customer service is terrible.

In my interactions with their support, they have just sent me to a help centre article that relates to one of the words you type in. They typically don’t bother to answer your question at all.

And when they do, they don’t have any native English-speaking customer service staff which results in constantly poor answers to questions. Their staff are either in China or India and have no experience with the software or selling on Amazon.

In fact, if you Google “AMZ Tracker customer service”, you can find a range of their job ads hiring staff in India offering $300 to $500 a month to work 8 to 9 hours a day, 6 days a week. This works out to paying their customer service staff between $2 to $3 an hour.

($300 to $500 USD).

Their job ads in China are not as easy to find but we can only assume their Chinese staff are being worked the same long hours for low wages.

The point is there is no focus on customer service and it appears that AMZ Tracker has just tried to hire the lowest wage employees from around the world to save money, rather than actually providing quality customer service.

User Interface

When using AMZ Tracker, you can’t help but notice that it looks very outdated; the user interface is terrible.

While it was great when it was first created, the fact that it hasn’t had an update in years now makes it look old compared to the competition.

And along with the old, outdated design, the buttons, drop down menu and text always seem to cover each other making it difficult to use…

Ease of Use

The outdated user interface and issues with using the features mentioned earlier, such as having to contact customer service to set up promotions on Vipon, make AMZ Tracker a difficult and frustrating piece of software to use.

It becomes unusable after adding too many products as there is no easy way to filter by country or product. There is the ability to add tags, however, this system is limited and it’s not easy to use or manage a large range of tags.

The flagship product promotion tool takes a long time to use and set up a promotion and most of the time it requires a conversation with customer service and manual approval. Running a product promotion previously was faster and easier.

AMZ Tracker has made this feature and other features slower and more difficult to use over time while companies such as Jump Send have made their software faster and better to use.

Marketing, Content and Resources

Another thing you will notice when using AMZ Tracker and reading the content they publish is the poor English all over the website and marketing materials.

I can’t help but be amused by this as there’s always a new instance of this each week.

At the time of writing, when logging in to the site, there are two discount pricing deals being offered.

The first pricing deal is bad English but probably means free upgrade to larger plan limits.

Then the second pricing deal is a great example of the bad English I’m referring to, offering “Amazing drainage for your listings”.

I have no idea what “drainage” would be on your Amazon listings or why AMZ Tracker is claiming to offer an amazing system of drains for your listings. 😀

It appears there are no native English speakers working at the company these days, or any quality checking of the words or sentences used on their website or in their advertising, taking place.

A lot of the marketing for the company and sentences used on the website seem to have been translated by computer translation.

I’ll forgive the bad English translations as it brings me a good laugh when using the service.

AMZ Tracker Pricing

AMZ Tracker offers 4 pricing plans.

The main difference between the pricing plans is:

• Number of tracked keywords
• Number of tracked products
• Number of voucher sends on promotions

All other product limits and features are the same between the plans.

The available plans and the difference in limits are below:

Basic: $50

• 50 tracked products
• 110 tracked keywords
• 100 voucher sends per month

Professional: $100

• 100 tracked products
• 500 tracked keywords
• 300 voucher sends per month

God Mode: $200

• 200 tracked products
• 1,500 tracked keywords
• 1,200 voucher sends per month

Legend: $400

• 400 tracked products
• 3,000 tracked keywords
• 3,000 voucher sends per month

As I mentioned earlier when covering the Vipon product promotion feature, if you’re not getting many buyers for the vouchers you’re sending out, then you’ll find yourself needing to send out more vouchers and ultimately requiring a more expensive account than you would if the service worked better.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• There are lots of features in one software package.
• Some features are definitely useful for Amazon sellers.
• Pricing starts at only $50 a month with reasonable limits on most features.
• The price of the plans for the features available is competitive. Getting all the same features in other Amazon software may be more expensive.
• Email reports of keyword rankings is useful.
• Negative review alerts with email notification are a useful feature.
• The product promotion service Vipon may still be more effective than alternatives for German and European sellers.
• The “Reviewer Finder” and “Listing Hijack Alerts” are new features; there may be new features released in the future.

Cons

• Clunky user interface that hasn’t been updated in years.
• Difficult to use and requires manual assistance from customer service to use.
• Bad customer service staff that don’t understand the software or selling on Amazon, and have poor English skills.
• It becomes almost unusable if you have lots of products.
• Product promotions are a pain to set up and require manual approval.
• Super URLs could negatively impact your Amazon account if used.
• There hasn’t been a meaningful update to the software in years, with very few useful features released or improvements to the user interface, making it more difficult to use and less useful over time.
• Pricing gets expensive if you are mainly interested in product promotions.
• Pricing becomes expensive if you want to track a large number of products.
• Other Amazon software such as Sellics, Jungle Scout and Jump Send have all the same features available but they are easier to use and work better.
• It’s simply no longer an essential tool for Amazon sellers.

The Verdict

While AMZ Tracker was definitely the leader in Amazon software and absolutely essential to Amazon sellers when it launched, it has now simply failed to keep up with the market and fallen behind the competition.

After the Amazon ToS changes that banned incentivised reviews, the watered down version of AMZ Trackers’s flagship “Review Club” feature, Vipon, is no longer essential for U.S.A and U.K Amazon sellers. It is difficult to use and most of the time requires manually contacting customer service to run a promotion.

By contrast, the Jump Send marketplace by Jungle Scout, which was previously called Review Kick, has better adapted to the industry changes and is now considered the best marketplace to promote U.S.A and U.K Amazon products at a discount.

While the AMZ Tracker product promotion feature is no longer as effective for U.S.A and U.K sellers, it is still useful for German and European sellers.

There are also some other features of AMZ Tracker that are no doubt useful, however, there is now a much greater choice of Amazon software available that offers all the same features, only better. The features are no longer unique, the software is difficult to use, and it comes with poor customer service that doesn’t offer much help. Even cancelling your subscription isn’t straight forward.

A better AMZ Tracker alternative for existing Amazon sellers would be Helium 10 (read our review here).

Yet another option would be  Sellics; you can read our review of that right here and also see how it compares specifically to AMZ Tracker in this comparison post.

A better alternative to the Vipon product promotion marketplace, for new or existing sellers, would of course be Jump Send.

And if you are just starting out and still researching for a product to sell, Jungle Scout is what you’re looking for.

The range of competing Amazon software has not only increased but it has also improved in terms of the ease of use and quality of features. AMZ Tracker, on the other hand, has failed to provide any meaningful updates in terms of features or functionality.

AMZ Tracker may be cheap when you add up all the features you get compared to alternatives, however, the features simply don’t work as well as the competition and are more difficult to use.

If AMZ Tracker does a dramatic redesign of its user interface, adds new features and improves its customer service then I’ll update this review. However, at the time of writing, AMZ Tracker is no longer an essential part of an Amazon seller’s toolkit and it seems its usefulness will only continue to decrease as other Amazon software improves.