Work Sharp Protects Branding with Amazon Transparency and BarTender Software
By automating their labels and integrating BarTender directly with the Amazon Transparency Database, the Work Sharp team realized a 98% transparency code buy-box success rate.
“With BarTender, we have the confidence to know that everything we ship out is going to meet the requirements from Amazon and other partners so that nothing is rejected, and we can rely on the inventory getting to where it needs to be and the revenue that we forecasted. I don’t have to second guess that everything is being labeled correctly and ends up where it needs to be.”
- Anthony Gibson, Amazon Global Account Manager, Work Sharp
challenges:
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90% transparency code success rate
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Counterfeit products entering market place
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Loss of revenue from fake sellers
- Transparency Code lists required manual efforts
solutions:
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98% transparency code success rate
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Protecting customers by ensuring product authenticity
- Direct Amazon API
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Work Sharp, based in Ashland, Oregon, specializes in creating sharpening products that are user-friendly, effective, and reliable for maintaining the sharpness of cutting tools. Work Sharp designs, engineers, and calibrates all sharpening machines within their manufacturing plant and they take pride in providing products sourced from the highest caliber manufacturers. Work Sharp strives for the highest quality control metrics and shares in the practice of creating a great workplace for employees. Repeatedly voted one of the top businesses in Southern Oregon to work for, the Work Sharp team uses their mission and values as the central drivers of their business.
Challenge: Protecting brand, revenue, and customer trust
Jayde Callahan, Document Controller, creates product labels using BarTender and adds Amazon Transparency serialization
Customers eager to purchase Work Sharp products on Amazon.com found multiple sellers to purchase from, however, Work Sharp was the only authentic seller, and the rest were illegitimate sellers selling fake products or pretending to sell Work Sharp products.
“One of the reasons we enrolled in Transparency is we had sellers who either didn’t have products and were pretending to, or they were selling counterfeit products, and so they would go on our listings, and sell these products," says Work Sharp's Amazon Global Account Manager, Anthony Gibson. "Our customers weren’t getting what they were looking for, and then they would call our customer service complaining, kind of confused, about why they didn’t get what they paid for.”
The presence of illegitimate sellers meant that customers were accidentally purchasing fake products and this meant that Work Sharp was losing revenue to these copycat sellers. To combat this, Work Sharp enrolled in the Amazon Transparency Program, but found that there was a lot of manual work to retrieve the Transparency codes and connect the codes with their product SKUs. Since the Transparency codes were serialized and were provided in batches, this meant that there was a fair amount of manual work required to ensure that the products were all registered with the appropriate codes and labels. In order for products to be accepted and sold on Amazon while enrolled in the Transparency Program, the buy box needed to have a 90% pass success rate.
Work Sharp employee placing labels with Amazon Transparency Codes onto product boxes
Solution: Integrating BarTender with Amazon Transparency
“We can hook up to Amazon’s API, and as the demand for a label’s created, the system will go out and get the label and bring it back to your production team without you having to print everything in advance. This will save us significant money in lost sales this coming year and it’ll eliminate unauthorized sellers. It will also eliminate the disruptions caused by authorized sellers, which prevents us from selling in the Amazon marketplace as well,” says John Griffin, Work Sharp's Director of Operations.
This allowed for less errors to occur and the team realized a 98% transparency code buy-box success rate which was above the industry standard of 94%. By automating their labels and integrating directly with the Amazon Transparency Database, the Work Sharp team was able to remove the redundant manual work and provide their Amazon customers confidence when purchasing products online by validating through the Transparency code. The serialized Transparency codes provided customers proof of authenticity and helped ensure that customers were purchasing legitimate products.
By integrating BarTender into their Amazon Transparency efforts, the team has estimated significant savings for the year by protecting their revenue, increasing customer satisfaction, and increasing workforce efficiency.
“With BarTender, it’s been super easy. I create the template, create the fields needed, and they can print immediately.”
– Jayde Callahan, Document Control